Hello, I wanted to ask about the main sources of Google penalties (white hat). After 2+ years of slow and steady improvement in SERPs, we took a fall a two weeks ago. Terms where we had #1 and #2, now return only #8 or #9. Terms where we were #5 or #6, have dropped to #30-#40. And some terms, including a handful we really care about, fell from page 1 to off the map completely. Our page views are down around 20%. This hurts. Clearly we were hit with a penalty of some type. Where would you start looking to try to uncover the penalty and reverse the downward trend? I don't think we have any bad outbound links and all of our SEO is very white hat. Page optimization, good inbound links, vBulletin forum, quality html pages, no keyword SPAM, etc. Where should I start? FB __________________
Just curious: Had you made any changes at all recently that might have caused your drop ? What is the general topic of your site/keywords?
I am always doing something to the site -- so it is hard to tell. We just upgrade from vBulletin 3.6.0 to 3.6.4 and had the old content still on the site. Duplicate information? We added PhotoPlog to the forum. Also, many months ago, we deleted a php bookstore from the site, which I now see that Google had indexed, so we have Error 404 for those pages. Should I just re-installed the php bookstore? I don't think I changed the metadata on the pages that have been downgraded. Also, we have an x-cart store -- which in some cases is now the highest ranking page on some search terms that previoius returned a static html page. I'm open to ideas. We are http://www.fornobravo.com. FB
If you are #8 or #9 in a term, I think that's not a penalty, just a change in Google's ranking algorythm. Have your site been down for a while? Have you lost any important backlinks?
Try to look at your competitors.. See who's first now, browse their source and backlinks.. See what are they doing..
We use a number of tracking tools, and we have definitely taken a hit. We use a straight forward page view tool, and traffic is off 20%. Our SERP ramk tool shows consistently worse ranking. Losing a whole series of search terms that used to be at #9 has a real impact on traffic. Practically speaking, on-line sales are down. This is not my imagination, or the ebb and flow of Google. I am trying to work out the most likely cause. FB
Dude, first error: Google is a free tool, that helps you to sell products and get visitors.. You can never rely in just one source of traffic, never, ever.. You look a bit nervous (I have been hit by a worse penalty, and I was upset just like you). At this time, you should look for your competitors and try to find what and how they are doing. There is no supreme truth, as we can't control google and it's a **free** tool. As you (and so we do) can't control Google, it DOES change its algorythm some times, and so changes rankings. Maybe your SEO and/or marketing strategy isn't as good as before. Try to browse this forum and get some tips from people. Every one sometime failed and learned from their mistakes. Good luck
Dude, Like any good business, we use many marketing tools. At this moment, I am trying to analyze one of them. Do you have anything useful to say that might help with this particulare tool? FB
One of the reasons I think there is a Google penalty is that for some of the terms we track, the competitors are tiny, with sites that have not changed or grown for a couple of years. They have not changed, and we had passed them -- only to fall back. What types of things get you in trouble with Google? Duplicate content? Error 404? Moving pages? FB
Both Duplicated content and moving pages can get you in trouble. Whenever you move a page, you should throw a 301 header, then do a location to the new URL. Google DO penalyze duplicated content... Even if that's duplicated pages in your site, or if you copy the content from another site...
from my own experiences, suddenly dropped may because of link popularity of competitors site. If they can find quality link from some authority site as one-way link then their ranking would be pumped up. You may consider to - Create unqiue article in your niche - Create another article and submit them to get one-way link. - Set budget to buy links from some authority directory/sites in your niche. - Create some blog with content and linked from them to your own sites.
this is a long shot with google if you have alot of GOOD backlinks, their technology is supposedly smart enough to know that a couple of bad backlinks ( porn, gambling sites possibly linked to you by a competitor ) isn't enoug to drop you 40 positions...this did just happened to me with yahoo....as soon as I found the bad backlinks and successfully asked them unlink via email, I popped rightback up to 1st page,1st place in some categories...not all backlink tools will reveal the nasty neighborhods...you have to dig....try the tools at webuildpages.com AND se-inspector.com
also prune your server regularly if you're routinely working on your site, uploading test pages, unlinking to pages, replacing and editing content, etc....not removing the old pages, even if they're no longer attached to the site, will count as duplicate, boring,, repetitive, low quality content...keep your server CLEAN
another thin comes to mind, run your site through a VARIETY of online xhtml/html validators and css checkers...the results vary....tools and validators are constantly upgraded and reveal differing and deprecated results, so it's possible that a page that checked clean two months ago is now showing hidden content ( as in a switch menu using display:none, or same color for text and background...)...you never know how an se is analyzing your site....start with w3c.org if you haven't already...there are hundreds of free accessibiliy / validation tools online ....every possible negative factor you find and clean up will help you regain good ranking.....
I found errors from w3c.org, so I have been inaccurate lately. The site was clean a couple of months ago. Is there a way to automatically check and report back? FB
I've heard of a penalty elsewhere in this forum, whereby if you collect too many inbound links to your website in a short space of time, your best possibly ranking is #30. If you stop collecting links, then this penalty should be removed after a few weeks. If you haven't been collecting inbound links, then this is not it, and you need to collect more links. You don't appear to be in the supplemental index, which is good. Cryo.
Glad we didn't completely get put on the sidelines. I put a lot of energy into link exchange a year ago, but have let it grow slowly and organically since then -- so that isn't "it". Though I am starting to think there might be more than one "it". I just cleaned up /index.html for w3c.org, and it was pretty messy. Some poor html. I am going to make sure our main pages are clean also, including the alt=text. That might help. Here is my next question. I installed a php bookstore, then decided it wasn't a good idea and removed it. Those pages were index (after a long time), so now I have thousands of Error 404. Our site shows about 20k pages on Google, though the static html and store about less than 1,000 and our Forum is about 8,000 page. Do I re-install the bookstore, do a 301 redirect from the book store to somewhere (like amazon.com), or let the 404 error eventually work those pages out of the system??? Check out seo-toys.com for the bookstore. FB