Website "penalized" 3 times by Google
-
I have a website that I'm working with that has had the misfortune of gaining rankings/traffic on Google, then having the rankings/traffic removed...3 times! (Very little was changed on the site to gain or lose "favor" with Google, either.)
Notes:
- Site is a mixture of high quality original content and duplicate content (vacation rental listings)
- When traffic crashes, we lose nearly all rankings and traffic (90+%)
- When traffic crashes, we lose all rankings sitewide, including those gained by our high quality, unique pages
- None of the "crash" dates appear to coincide with any Panda update dates
- We are working on adding unique content to our pages with duplicate content, but it's a long process and so far doesn't seem to have made any difference
- I'm confounded why Google keeps "changing its mind" about our site
- We have an XML sitemap, and Google keeps our site indexed pretty well, even when we lose our rankings
- Due to the drastic and sitewide loss of rankings, I'm assuming we are dealing with some sort of algorithmic penalty
Timeline:
- Traffic steadily grows starting in Jan 2011
- Traffic crashes on Feb 19, 2011. We assumed it was due to a pre-panda anti-scraper update, but don't know.
- Google sends traffic to our site on March 1, then none the next day
- On June 16th, I block part of the site using robots.txt (most of the section wasn't indexed anyway)
- On June 17th, Google starts ranking our site again. I thought it might be due to the robots.txt change, but I had just made the change a few hours ago, and Google wasn't even indexing the part of the site I blocked
- Traffic/rankings crash again on July 6th. No theory why.
Site URL: http://www.floridaisbest.com
Traffic Stats: Attached
I know that we need more backlinks and less duplicate content, but I can't explain why our Google rankings are "on again, off again". I have never seen a site gain and lose all of its rankings/traffic so drastically multiple times, for no apparent reason.
Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome. Thanks!
-
Good to hear. Hope your site doesn't bounce back out of the index again.
-
Well, good news. I implemented a strategy based on the assumption that our site was just outside Google's duplicate content or quality guidelines. Our traffic rebounded yesterday!
-
I got a PM from another user who has a site with known duplicate content that was also penalized on July 6th. To my mind, that is further evidence that our site is suffering from algorithmic penalties due to duplicate content.
-
My apologies. I included a space.
site: http://www.floridaisbest.com (a space after the colon) shows this article as the first result, and the site not indexed
site:http://www.floridaisbest.com shows the site correctly indexed.
-
Site appears to be well indexed to me. You get no results for a site: search?
-
Hi Adam.
I looked at your home page and robots.txt file. All seemed ok. I confirmed the site is not indexed with Google. My next thought went to external links.
On the home page there is a "Travel Search" block. Those links don't work and cause my browser to hang. I tried a couple times and from different pc's using different browsers. I would suggest investigating the issue as it could be related.
-
-
Traffic from Yahoo/Bing is nearly non-existent.
-
Yes, nothing abnormal there.
-
No bought links.
-
No downtime that I know of.
-
-
No answers for you at the moment, but a couple of more questions.
-
Is there anything at all similar happening in Yahoo/Bing, or has their traffic been normal this whole time?
-
Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools for any notices from Google about possible penalties or hacking of your site?
-
Anyone in the company tried to "help" by buying links?
-
Any downtime with servers?
-
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
-
When Google is going to penalise webpages with autoplaying videos?
Hi, One of the most disgusting experiences while browsing web pages is the auto playing anonymous and highly non relevant ad videos at some corner of the page which buffer mostly and automatically plays. There are familiar websites which been following this activity. I don't think Google has ever rolled out an update to penalise these. Any idea why? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Anyone Notice Google's Latest Change Seems to Favor Google Books?
I've noticed a change in the search results lately. As I search around I notice a lot of results from books.google.com Seems a little (ok a lot) self serving... JMHO
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
Does having a few URLs pointing to another url via 301 "create" duplicate content?
Hello! I have a few URLs all related to the same business sector. Can I point them all at my home domain or should I point them to different relevant content within it? Ioan
Algorithm Updates | | IoanSaid1 -
Should I Wait Until the "Dust Settles" on the Algorithm Update or Get Busy Now?
We were hit hard on both of our sites yesterday and can't afford to wait for the dust to settle, as some folks are advising. We have been attempting to work off a penalty on one of our sites by undergoing a massive (and expensive) link removal project over the last four months. We are on our third reconsideration request and, hopefully, this last round of link removal will have done the job. I'm hesitant to go in and "de-optmize" the site by changing title tags and changing the anchor text until the penalty is removed, but I'm not sure if that's the right plan of action. I am, however, going to dig into the non-penalized site and change some title tags and anchor text. Any thoughts on this strategy would be greatly appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | rdreich490 -
Penalization.... please help me...
First of all, sorry for my english but i'm an Italian girl seo. Before Panda update seo was clear and easy: good quality, good natural backlink and so on... Now there is an update fast every week and it's a mess! I work as seo for a big italian e-commerce and (more or less) one month's ago in google webmaster tool I tried a message frome Google who told me the site: www.giordanoshop.com is penalty for innatural backlink. But I ve do noting against Google politicy: no pay backlink, no fam and so on.. There are some streing link but I can't delete it because I don't do it. I ask the riconsideretion of website but google still tell me it faund innatural link. What shoud I do? The pr of the site is the same but all keyword has lose ranking: from 1 page to 3 and from 1 to 6 page... What can I do? I risk to lose my work sob.
Algorithm Updates | | giordanoshop0 -
Stop google indexing CDN pages
Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
When Google crawls and indexes a new page does it show up immediately in Google search - "site;"?
We made changes to a site, including the addition of a new page and corresponding link/text changes to existing pages. The changes are not yet showing up in the Google index (“site:”/cache), but, approximately 24 hours after making the changes, The SERP's for this site jumped up. We obtained a new back link about a couple of weeks ago, but it is not yet showing up in OSE, Webmaster Tools, or other tools. Just wondering if you think the Google SERP changes run ahead of what they actually show us in site: or cache updates. Has Google made a significant SERP “adjustment” recently? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | richpalpine0 -
Were you affected by the "Farmer Update?" What are you doing about it?
I woke up on Friday morning to see that my traffic from Google on Thursday was down 30% on one of my sites. Traffic hasn't bounced back, and I'm wondering why I've been lumped in with the content farms. My site only has original, high quality content. It has a great link profile with tons of links from .edu page, and I've always played by Google's rules. I can't understand why my site has been negatively affected, which makes it hard to do something about it. Right now, the only thing that I can come up with is to work really hard at building more links. Were you affected? What are you doing about it?
Algorithm Updates | | WillyF0