Why is our site being penalized?
-
The rankings for our transcription site (gmr transcription) fell around Jul 19. Its been an uphill task to get the rankings back particularly for the keyword 'transcription services'. As per our opinion except for one competitor the rankings of the other top 4 makes no sense to us.
We have tested our site and there seems to be no reason for it to be penalized.
After a month of trial I am reaching out to the community for advise.
-
Well that's good news...and a little bit strange too! It's possible that there is a Penguin update in the works, but there's no official word as of yet.
I'm tempted to think that there was something other than Penguin going on here. But, regardless, I'm glad to hear you are ranking again!
-
Marie, thanks for responding. No we did not get any warnings. I had no idea that a site could be "Penguinzed" so late after an update.
Greg and Maximize suggested altering the site wide link status. We had control over two of our sister websites. We corrected that and hey within an hour we were back!
Seems like magic!
-
Do you have any warnings of unnatural links in your webmaster tools? If so, the answer is to do a thorough cleanup of your links, documenting everything you do in order to try to get the self made ones removed and submit a reconsideration request.
Otherwise, you may be a victim of Penguin. I used to think you could only get "Penguinized" on the date of a Penguin update, but I've seen evidence of sites that have been affected in very similar ways to Penguin within a few weeks of launching a backlinking campaign. As others have mentioned, if your backlinks are primarily anchor text, and you're dropping in the serps for that particular anchor text, then you need to get those links changed to your url or removed.
Sometimes, if you're not sure, it's a good idea to hire a professional to look at your backlink profile and advise you which links need to go.
If this is a Penguin thing (as opposed to an unnatural links warning in WMT) then you have no chance of recovery until there is a Penguin refresh.
-
I checked the keyword transcription services position in Google Singapore and Google USA. I see it has position of Number 3 and 1 respectively.
But if you think anything wrong has happened, you must follow what has been suggested by others here. Besides, i would like to add which for me is the most striking the moment you open the page. The occurrence of keyword "transcription" is approximately 66 times on the home page.
Excessive use of keywords can negatively impact rankings and should be avoided.
-
I checked the keyword transcription services position in Google Singapore and Google USA. I see it has position of Number 3 and 1 respectively.
But if you think anything wrong has happened, you must follow what has been suggested by others here. Besides, i would like to add which for me is the most striking the moment you open the page. The occurrence of keyword "transcription" is approximately 66 times on the home page.
Excessive use of keywords can negatively impact rankings and should be avoided.
-
Thanks Maximise. I will try and rectify the link pattern. Most of the links are old and will be very difficult to moderate.
-
Thanks Greg.
Sangeeta, At the moment these are your top anchor text terms:
- transcription services - 882 links
- transcription services - 601 links
- transcribe - 402 links
- gmr transcription - 335 links
- transcription company - 177 links
- digital transcription - 173 links
- www.gmrtranscription.com - 166 links
- audio transcription - 164 links
As mentioned already though, many of these are sitewide so you should be able to address the percentages fairly easily by contacting some of these sites and asking for the links to be changed.
-
I second what Maximise has said.
Going forward, start promoting your websites brand rather than its keywords. Concentrate on obtaining quality links with the anchor "GMR transctiption Services" or simply GMR transcription services.com
Have a look at your backlink profile and remove site wide links or atleast vary the anchor text were you can.
Your back link profile Ideally should be made up of about 70% branded terms, and 30% "money terms" otherwise it looks un natural to Google. (Generally speaking, its not an exact science)
Greg
-
Is your website www.gmrtranscription.com?
If yes then it's very possible you have been hit by one of the recent updates which target over optimised backlink profiles. You have over 800 links with the exact anchor text "transcription services", which your most linked term, many of these are also sitewide. These links do not look natural to search engines and I would recommend that you try and get them changed.
A natural link profile would mostly contain your brand name or url and then have a wide variety of other terms. I think you need to try to address this balance.
-
Hi webfeat,
The website is gmrtranscription.com(I am avoiding linking) and the keyword we are having trouble with is 'transcription services'.
-
Hard to tell without a link to your site to see what is going on.
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
-
Free tool, and it ranks well for adult sites and checking if they are down, will that hurt us with ranking for normal sites with google?
Hi all, We rank for searches around "is youporn down" and similar because we provide a free tool to check if a website is up or down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/youporn I am worried that ranking for these adult searches is hurting us with ranking for things like "is reddit down", thoughts? I'd appreciate some input!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bwb0 -
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Suspicious external links to site have 302 redirects
Hi, I have been asked to look at a site where I suspect some questionable SEO work, particularly link building. The site does seem to be performing very poorly in Google since January 2014, although there are no messages in WMT. Using WMT, OPenSiteExplorer, Majestic & NetPeak, I have analysed inbound links and found a group of links which although are listed in WMT, etc appear to 302 redirect to a directory in China (therefore the actual linking domain is not visible). It looks like a crude type of link farm, but I cant understand why they would use 302s not 301s. The domains are not visible due to redirects. Should I request a disavow or ignore? The linking domains are listed below: http://www.basalts.cn/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | crescentdigital
http://www.chinamarbles.com.cn/
http://www.china-slate.com.cn/
http://www.granitecountertop.com.cn/
http://www.granite-exporter.com/
http://www.sandstones.biz/
http://www.stone-2.com/
http://www.stonebuild.cn/
http://www.stonecompany.com.cn/
http://www.stonecontact.cn/
http://www.stonecrate.com/
http://www.stonedesk.com/
http://www.stonedvd.com/
http://www.stonepark.cn/
http://www.stonetool.com.cn/
http://www.stonewebsite.com/ Thanks Steve0 -
Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Competitor using "unatural inbound links" not penalized??!
Since Google's latest updates, I think it would be safe to say that building links is harder. But i also read that Google applies their latest guidelines retro-actively. In other words, if you have built your ilnking profile on a lot of unnatural links, with spammy anchor text, you will get noticed and penalized. In the past, I used to use SEO friendly directories and "suggest URL's" to build back links, with keyword/phrase anchor text. But I thought that this technique was frowned upon by Google these days. So, what is safe to do? Why is Google not penalizing the competitor? And bottom line what is considered to be "unnatural link building" ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20101 -
My Site having a drop in traffic with eash passing month
Hi, I'm running a text message site mixsms.com from 2009. It was performing good till Oct 2012. In the end of Nov 2012 I noticed a drop in traffic and then with each passing month I'm getting 1500-2000 unique visitors drop. In Oct 2012 my daily unique visitors were 15000+ each day and now it is just having 2000 after Feb end. I've done several things to improve my site. I changes the template, removed all unnecessary html elements, changed seo structure (optimize with all modern seo techniques). Stop backlinking from Nov 2012 but instead of getting improvements I'm continuously having a drop in traffic. I'll highly appreciate your time if you look into site deeply to findout exact issues that are causing for this drop. I'm even ready to hire any seo consultant if he is pretty sure to get 100% results. Thanks in advance for your support
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | intelmixx0 -
Partner Site Hit with Penguin - Links hurt me
I work for a network of international websites, the site I work on is for Canada. Our partners in Australia were hit by penguin hard because they hired a black hat SEO guy and didn't know. He was creating profiles on highly authoritative sites and keyword stuffing them. Now, they've completely dropped off the SERP. This is where the issue occurs, because we are all international partners we are all linked together on the header of every page so visitors can choose their country. Now, because they were hit hard and we have reciprocal links (not for rankings but for usability) will we be affected? It seems like we have, but I just want some opinions out there. Also, should we go ahead and stop linking our sites between countries to avoid this mess?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Can good penalize a site, and stop it ranking under a keyword permanently
hi all we recently took on a new client, asking us to improve there google ranking, under the term letting agents glasgow , they told us they used to rank top 10 but now are on page 14 so it looks like google has slapped them one, my question is can google block you permanently from ranking under a keyword or disadvantage you, as we went though the customers links, and removed the ones that looked strange, and kept the links that looked ok. but then there ranking dropped to 21, is it worth gaining new links under there main keyword even tho it looks like google is punishing them for having some bad links. the site is www. fine..lets...ltd...co....uk all one word cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | willcraig0