Can you be both penalised and uplifted in SERPS?
-
hello everyone,
We've literally had dozens of high ranking pages which are location specific, wiped out of the Google.co.uk SERPs. Can't imagine that it is anything other than a manual penalty but no message has been sent by Google.
For example "campervan hire surrey" would produce our surrey page at the top of the SERP, now this page has completely disappeared.
On the other hand, we have been promoted on national keywords like "vw campervan hire" and "campervan hire" where we are second and third.
Does anyone agree that this is a penalty?
-
Nope, no message in Webmaster tools and some very slight ranking on keywords like "vw campervan hire brighton" for east sussex but apart from that nada.
-
You've got me totally stumped and it is really bugging me.
I see what you mean about the comment spam. But the thing that gets me is that it is pointing at the home page. So, it doesn't make sense that the home page got a boost for search terms but your inner pages are suffering.
Unfortunately I can't figure this out. I'll be honest with you...the reason why I spend time on questions like yours is because I am trying to learn how to help sites recover. Your question is going to bother me all day until we know what the problem is.
You're absolutely sure you don't have a message in Webmaster Tools?
Are you getting ANY search traffic at all for the location pages?
I'll let you know if I can think of anything else.
-
Yes. Thursday it was cruising along as normal and then on Friday (27th) the Sword of Damocles fell at about 12pm GMT.
I had noticed the Surrey page disappear a few days before and was confused why but other location pages were being propelled higher and higher in the SERPs, so I let it go.
Then suddenly I got a promotion on campervan hire and vw campervan hire and virtually every location keyword disappeared.
Very weird.
-
Interesting. Are you saying your dramatic traffic drop was Friday, July 27th? As far as I know there was no algo update on that day. Or was it a different Friday?
-
Thanks Zachary. Why do you think it is not penalty?
-
Thanks for the detailed answer Marie, it's good to get such a thoughtful response on a question that is totally perplexing me!
I do have analytics, it's within a header.php file, so not visible in the HTML but I have GA stats for the site going back to November 2010. Yes the site dropped off heavily in traffic on Friday, when the algorithm/penalty hit. Before, I received many visitors by ranking highly across several hundred location and van hire related keywords daily. eg "campervan hire cumbria", "cambridge vw campervan hire " etc etc. Literally hundreds of combinations and my location pages were at the top of the SERPs for these.
Now I am ranked highly for ( national / international ) general keywords "vw campervan hire" and "campervan hire" but not for the location combinations. Google seems to only like my homepage. Weird
In answer to your statements and questions.
1&2 - I engaged an SEO co and they did some horrible blog commenting. I know, I am bad. The site suffered in May after Penguin, I had a lot of bad comments removed and then the rankings were better than ever. I thought that was all behind me but now the site has had all it's location pages removed from rankings.
3 - I use no on site trickery! We have some really nice content and pictures, link to no bad websites and have a nice little community of people regularly engaging and contributing to the site.
4 - On all the England location pages, I made changes, so rather than the same generic tags, all my titles and meta descriptions are relevant to the area. It took ages to handwrite all these. Saying that, the page does not even rank in first ten for the page title, which is "vw campervans for hire in surrey" It used to be in position 1.
5 - The page is almost two years old.
I guess it's looking more and more like a penalty?
-
Do you have analytics data for this site? If so, can you see a drop in traffic starting on a particular day? (I didn't see any analytics code on your page, so you likely don't have analytics data. I would get on this right away!)
I sleuthed out your page that I am suspecting you want to rank for the keyword you mentioned and it is definitely in the index. (I can find it if I search for the url). But, you're right, it's not ranking. If I put in the title of your page, I can't find it in the first 10 pages.
But, I'm puzzled as to why. I can think of a few possibilities, but ultimately I'm not sure:
1. Penguin could cause a drop for a particular keyword. Looking at the OSE data for this page I only see one backlink and that shouldn't be enough to give you a penalty though. But, OSE data can be over a month old. If you have been building links to this page and the links all contained keyword anchor text then, yes, this could trigger an algorithmic penalty. With that being said, the last Penguin filter rolled out May 25 and I'm pretty sure OSE would contain backlinks that were present prior to that date.
2. Have some links to this page been removed? One thing that could help this page do better is simply a link from your home page. If you had links from other sites that have since been removed this could cause a dramatic loss in rankings.
3. Are you doing anything tricky at all with this site? Hidden text? Are you aware of any tricks that you've used to try to get this page to rank? I'm doubtful about this though.
4. Have you changed the wording on this page at all? Looking at it, your keyword phrase doesn't exist in the text at all. Putting that phrase in the text a couple of times could really help.
5. Is this a relatively new page? If it was just created in the last few weeks, it's possible it had a honeymoon boost and got some top rankings for a while, but now it's not ranking simply because the lack of keywords and links.
Perhaps someone else has a more helpful answer. I'm interested in knowing what the problem is as well!
-
It's not a penalty, but rather an algorithm change.
I'd be interested in hearing about your link building / anchors. You came out on top in the end - broad keywords are better in the long run.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Bad Dates in SERPs, YouTube & Rankings (Nov. 10-18)
We've seen a lot of reports, including Q&A questions, of sites showing bad dates in Google SERPs. I've verified this bug in the wild. There are also reports of bad dates being caused by YouTube embeds, with Google taking the video date instead of the page date. I can also confirm this is happening, although I don't know if it accounts for all of the bad dates. Some people are reporting that these bad dates showing up corresponded with ranking drops. Usually, I would treat that as a coincidence (Google could easily launch an update and have a glitch on the same day), but in some of the reported cases, removing YouTube embeds led to ranking recovery soon after. I can't verify this, but I can't disregard it. There seem to be multiple reports of this recovery. I'm in communication with a Google rep, and they are unaware of any direct connection between a bad date and ranking (such as some kind of QDF effect). I've passed along some data, and they are investigating, but there may have been multiple updates in play that are making for noisy data (even for Google). There did seem to be heavy algorithm flux on November 10th and 18th, with some people speculating the latter spike was a reversal of the former. I have no evidence to support this, but MozCast data and chatter do seem to support both spikes. If you've been affected by this problem and the ranking drops are severe, it's worth temporarily removing YouTube embeds (if feasible). Replace them with direct links (or maybe a linked thumbnail) and have Google re-fetch the page. I can't guarantee it will work, but the risks are low. It's easy to restore the embed. Update (11/22) - Gary Illyes is saying on Twitter that the date problems have been fixed. If you see the proper dates cached, but have not seen rankings recover, then these may be unrelated events.
Algorithm Updates | | Dr-Pete2 -
Tick mark against Free Shipping text in SERP
In Google SERP I saw a tick mark before the text such as Free Shipping, Cash on Delivery, etc. These are part of the second line of the description shown in the SERP. Is this coming from micro data or from some feature within the shopping cart?
Algorithm Updates | | promodirect0 -
Google SERPs showing blog comments in Answer Box?
I was recently researching Schema markup for local businesses and I was presented with an Answer Box that used blog comments as answers (at least I feel that's what they were attempting to show). This is what is says currently when I search for "schema markup hours" (screenshot also attached): 12 thoughts on “How to Use Schema Markup for Local SEO” Lauren says: March 11, 2013 at 2:22 pm. ... souleye says: March 11, 2013 at 3:29 pm. ... Daniel Bennett says: March 11, 2013 at 8:51 pm. ... sammy. says: ... Nathan says: March 11, 2013 at 11:53 pm. ... Rishav says: March 12, 2013 at 5:51 am. ... Paul Sherland says: ... keyword removed says: Right now it shows the time and date of the comment, but is this something that's new or has it been around? Thanks in advance! tp5y1od.png
Algorithm Updates | | TomBinga11250 -
Do you think this page has been algorithmically penalised or is it just old?
Here is the page: http://www.designquotes.com.au/business-blog/top-10-australian-business-directories-in-2012/ It's fairly old, but when it was first written it hit #1 for "business directories". After a while it dropped but was receieving lots of traffic for long tail variations of "business directories Australia" As of the 4th of October (Penguin 2.1) it lost traffic and rankings entirely. I checked it's link profile and there isn't anything fishy: From Google Webmaster https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtwbT3wshHRsdEc1OWl4SFN0SDdiTkwzSmdGTFpZOFE&usp=sharing In fact, two links are entirely natural http://blog.businesszoom.com.au/2013/09/use-customer-reviews-to-improve-your-website-ranking/ http://dianajones.com.au/google-plus-local-equals-more-business-blog/ Yet when I search for a close match in title in Google AU, the article doesn't appear within even the first 4 pages. https://www.google.com.au/#q=top+10+Australian+Business+Directories&start=10 Is this simple because it's an old article? Should I re-write it, update the analysis and use a rel=canonical on the old article to the new?
Algorithm Updates | | designquotes0 -
Website Penalised | Tips On Recovery?
Hi, I think my website http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk has been penalised. There are too many over optimised anchor text links with our target keyword 'roller banners' in them. People have linked to our site using our company name 'roller banners cheap' (which also contains the keyword used in my anchor text link building) resulting in too many match links. For a couple months now I have; Added fresh content to the website on a weekly basis, alt tagging images, internal linking and generally making each post very useful. Built a few more external good quality links to try to dilute the over optimised anchor text links. Added more content to the home page. At the moment I am trying to rank for cheap roller banners because I am already on page 1 for that and it seems that keyword hasn't been penalised. Can anyone please advise or recommend what I can do to recover from being penalised or help rank the new key word? I am really stuck with this now and would really appreciate the help. Lewis
Algorithm Updates | | SO_UK0 -
SERP Drop
Hi, I have been trading online since 2006 and over the years I have built up some impressive SERP's for keywords such as "mens underwear' which I was SERP 1 for. However, over the past 6 months I have pretty much dropped off the face of Google for a large proportion of my keywords. I suspect I have been hit by the Panda/Penguin updates and do not know how to recover this. I have a mixture of what I consider to be relevant and healthy links, but there are also a few links in there that Google would no longer like. However, I believe that the majority of my links are OK. What should I do? Thanks i97zo6W.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | UnderMe0 -
Sharp Drop in SERP Ranking for Specific Keyword
I'm sure this happens to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. My pages http://www.cleanedison.com/leed and http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/leed-green-associate suddenly dropped off the map over the past 2 weeks for the keyword "LEED Certification" I tried to limit the number of times "LEED" was mentioned on the first URL (/leed) to try to combat an over-optimization penalty but I did not for the second (/leed-green-associate). Both of them have fallen precipitously and are no where to be found on Google. What can I do to troubleshoot this? Is there anyway to guard against this in the future?
Algorithm Updates | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Why if PR and DA are higher is this site lower in SERPS
Hi there Why if PR and DA are higher is this site lower in SERPS. Example: https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=samsung+SF-4200+cartridge&oq=samsung+SF-4200+cartridge&gs_l=hp.3...13009.13824.2.14464.2.2.0.0.0.0.72.143.2.2.0.eiatsh..0.0.l4idQl3RGWc&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=69f1c60047c60e0c&biw=1045&bih=580 Pos 1 www.inkfactory.com/ink-cartridges/samsung/sf4200-series PR:1 DA:48 Pos 3 www.internet-ink.co.uk › SAMSUNG INK PR:25 DA:60 I though is you had top DA and PR you should out rank those below you?
Algorithm Updates | | smashseo0