Single Keyword Penalty?
-
Hi guys,
I recently taken over SEO for strikebowling.com.au and I'm stumped to what has happened with the keyword 'Bowling' for the home page.
Historically they have been ranking 5-6 for the year and they do come up in the local results.
Start of September, bang they drop out of the top 100 for Bowling. No other words seem to be effected. However the keyword 'Bowling Alley' did improve around the same time for an internal page.
What could have happened? A single keyword penalty?
- No messages in Webmaster tools
- No dodgy link building
Look forward to some theories.
Regards,
Corey
-
Ha, no worries, drama over.
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for the reply.
Turns out my rank checking software has been using my geolocation and obviously when I was checking I didn't change my location.
Odd however is that the website ranks for 'Bowling' ever where expect for Melbourne and a few surrounding suburbs. Definitely something else I need to get to the bottom off.
Thanks for your answers guys.
Corey
-
Hey Corey
It certainly smells like a penguin type penalty against that one keyword but you can certainly do some digging to determine if whether it is that or if it is something else or if there are more keywords that are effected and you have just not noticed. I have also seen a few sites penalised on the brand name where it was an exact match so say the URL is http://www.exact-match.com then they are getting penalised for too many 'exact match' anchors. This seems easier to fix and I have had a couple of sites bounce back from this for the brand keyword without too much effort.
First thing I would do is examine to see what date this happened and whether other keywords were effected so we can identify a list of possible problem terms and problem anchor text.
1. Filter by that keyword in google analytics and determine the date this happened and see if it is on a known penguin date or date relating to any other search algorithm update - check against this list: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
2. Once you know the date, if it looks like a penguin problem, then check to see if other keywords are affected. To do this select a two week period in analytics starting at the day you had the problem and then select the compare to past option below the date to view the two weeks before and after.
Browse to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic to get a list of all keywords and you can see the percentage that these have changed. Scroll through that list and see if there are other keywords that have lost traffic. (If you have some good rank checking you may not need to do this but it's likely you will find more here if it is a penguin issue).
Once you have done that you can get a list of terms together and attempt to determine if you have problematic links. You can import your link profile from seomoz into a free tool called Link Detective that will allow you to filter the links easily by anchor and get a new spreadsheet for each anchor text (or you could divvy it all up in a spreadsheet but link detective gives us a few more details like the type of link).
Then, you can go through the manual task or reviewing the links to see if there are any problematic ones for that term alone.
There is a few more details of how I would go about this here:
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/penguin-diagnosis-and-recovery-strategy/Without a few more details it's hard to know exactly what the issue is but this is a very broad term yet that is a huge drop but if you follow the instructions above it should let you determine if this was a penguin type issue or something else entirely.
Also, there are sometimes fluctuations, so I would not panic too much. Your link profile looks pretty well okay to me, the linking sites (from a very quick look) seem okay and generally, it does not look like you should be punished for manipulative practices.
There is a lot of talk of a reshuffeling of the deck with no specific updates around the end of september so possibly, have a look, see if you can find anything fishy but also, hold fire, this may just resolve itself. http://www.seroundtable.com/september-2012-google-report-15652.html
One last thing, is this a good keyword? Does it convert? What is the value of traffic? Do they stay? Have the results moved around at all for other people as well?
Hope this helps!
Marcus -
It could be, no way to tell. You need to diversify the anchor texts like this
best Strike Bowling Bar
most popular Strike Bowling Bar
watch out for the most popular Strike Bowling Bar etc._It would look natural. _
-
This was my original thinking. But there hasn't been any link building for the word Bowling. However "Strike Bowling Bar" the brand name is used quite often. Do you think this could impact it?
-
_Yes, I have seen numerous occasions where single keyword lost its ranking whereas other keywords continue to rank well. Now if the webmaster tools did not receive any Warning mail, it is not a manual penalty. But if you have been building links heavily with that specific keyword within a network of blogs, it might happen that sites linking to your website lose their value and thus, the ranking of that specific keyword may suffer. _
_So, diversify the keyword and hope this will get fixed. _
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
-
Should I write the keywords in the post, with ou without prepositions
Hi, I have heard from many sources about the semantic and grammatical evaluation of google, this raised a question: when I put a keyword in my text should I put it with or without the prepositions? For example "doctor in Miami" or "doctor miami".
Technical SEO | | droliverulson0 -
Single page website vs Google
Hi, I was wondering on this issue: There is a website for guesthouse. It has all information on one page (it is a valid page, with legitimate content). How google treats those pages? Would it treat it as Doorway Page? Or give some other penalties? What about a bounce rate? Because it will be pretty high, as there is no option to go somewhere else? What is your opinion on single page websites - SEO wise? Is it a shot in the foot? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LeszekNowakowski0 -
My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean?
My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean? We have added some text in the pages with keywords thats related the page
Technical SEO | | AlexisWithers0 -
How to rank 1 page for multiple keywords in the new way
Hi There It has been a little while since I was involved with KW's in earnest. 1.5 years ago and beyond I did really well with SEO. I'm not in a hugely competitive market but we found our keywords, we wrote great web pages for 1,2,3 keywords and when we found more great keywords that we built a new page to rank for. For example: One big hitting keyword was "Rugged PDA", we created a category page for Rugged PDA's. Another was "Rugged Handheld" so we had a new page for that. We then long tailed "semi rugged PDA", "waterproof rugged PDA" etc etc and built sub category pages. We were legit, did lots of content marketing, ran a blog tweeted etc and we did really well to be honest. However these days it's not working, One of Rand's whiteboard sessions stated that you need to build bigger topic based pages that delivered on more keywords (The one about shoes!). This is great as we love that idea as we can have 1 big category page that offers great value to the visitor, however I am struggling to work out how we target a bigger list of keywords to the one page or to fewer pages. To underline this the MOZ page rankers also still seem to work in the same way where they expect 1 or 2 KW's per page to get A ranks to them, so I'm confused!! For example Rugged PDA is an old term, Google trends is showing that it's glory days are over and we know that the term "Rugged Smartphone" is the one to use as we all use smartphones not PDAs these days. However we also see a lot about Rugged + Phone, Mobile, Cell, Handheld, tablet, device, phablet... all relevant to one big category page. So I run these KW's through google search to see if the same pages come up as a test to see if Google thinks they all mean the same, I get a few, but not much overlap. How do we therefore have 1 page that talks about all kinds of great stuff about the "Rugged smartphone" but one that also targets rugged handheld, rugged android device etc etc? I've spent 2 days catching up, i'm none the wiser on this specific element but i'm sure I am just missing one key element of common sense here and any help is very much appreciated. Regards Dave
Technical SEO | | Raptor-crew0 -
Someone is building anchor text links with child porn keywords..help :-(
Hey Everyone; I recently found that there are tons of links to my url (30+) from several sites with the anchor text "download child porn, kiddie porn, and the likes". Although the sites linking to us where the person built the links do not have this content (thank god) it is just my url + the horrible anchor text someone is putting. [added image] Obviously I would not do that to my own site especially since I was ranked for over 15 keywords in the top 5 spots on Google and Bing. I am guessing its a competitor and I am wondering that is there any way I can remove them? Is this negative seo? Also could this be the reason my site has dropped off google page 1 last month for all my positions? I am consistently trying to rebuild but my positions are flying all over the place. Im going from ranking #12 one week to #198 the next; then to #60 and finally not even on google or bing anymore; then back to #50, etc for the past month and a half... Its very aggravating and it has hurt a few of my websites; im at a total loss on how to recover now if this is the case...It seems they have started to build these links in January from what I can find on the postings.. Thank you SEOMOZ im so happy im a member now. Any suggestions on how i can get these links off or if it is why my site has lost its original rankings.. Should I just can my website and start all over with a different URL? How can I watch out for this in the future? Any help would be so so so greatly appreciated and valued 🙂 xpVjMw8
Technical SEO | | Circa0 -
Is pointing multiple domains to a single website beneficial for SEO or not?
A client has purchased many domains with keywords in each. They want to have us point each domain to their site for better SEO. Is this a good or bad thing to do?
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup0 -
Google WMT shows sitemap.xml highest ranked for one main keyword
Hello, I am seeing my sitemap.xml show up in Google webmaster tools at the top for one of the main keywords for my site. This is in the Your Site on the Web - Keywords section. The URLs of my site contain this keyword, which is why I figure it showed up. I'm curious if this should be a concern to me? I find it odd that the sitemap would show up in this way. Thanks
Technical SEO | | nux0 -
Dramatic Decrease in Google Organic Traffic Indicates a Penalty But None Found
So we've been having some difficulty with one of our websites since we split it in half and moved one section of content to a new domain with a new name, at the end of May. http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/mobile/ was moved to http://www.somobile.co.uk And in the following 6 weeks, the google organic traffic has fallen to miniscule levels, that seem to indicate a more serious issue than just low ranking. Initially when the site was moved, the 301s transferred the authority very quickly and the new website pages ranked well. Now, some of them simply won't rank at all unless you include the name of the website "somobile". Here is one of the current rankings that indicates an issue:
Technical SEO | | purpleindigo
"somobile" - 1
"somobile mobile phones" - not in top 50 These are some of the terms we used to rank in the top 10 on Google UK, and still do on Bing UK, but don't rank in the top 50 on Google UK now:
samsung galaxy ace
apple iphone 5 deals
samsung tocco icon Our webmaster central account says that only 30% of the pages in our sitemap are in the index. It seems like a penalty has been imposed, but our reconsideration request (just submitted because it seemed like a sensible next step) came back saying there were no manual actions taken. Can you see what it is that might be causing the problem for us? I would have thought it was the new domain (with less direct links and less brand credibility), or content issues, but I would have thought that would just reduce the ranking by a few pages rather than just hide the pages altogether.0