can google penalize your site for certain keywords but not others I have a martial arts site, my site has dropped from all key words for things like taekwondo, kickboxing, jiu jitsu.... all of which are extremely relevant. It is still #1 in mma and a few other terms. my web company is saying google is penalizing me, but they handle my site and seo. until now they've done a great job. they are saying it's bc of my popups but if they were gonna penalize me wouldnt it be across the board? any good ways to tell if google is penalizing me
yes i've experienced this too. I seem to be penalised for things I have lot's of original unique content on, whilst some weaker pages on the same site still get good rankings. I know what pages on my site are really worth visiting and what are less so, yet google seems to have got it the wrong way round. Bing gets it right though...
Is my web company correct that its due to my popups? My popups are on my main page, and when u do the search for any term it's only the main page that is shown. Or is it due to content?
Well I have spent months trying to work it out. Google keep things secret, so anything your web company asserts is most likely guess work. My guess is that there are statistically too many links with the same anchor text (the banned anchor text) with perhaps too little use of that anchor text on the page. See you webmaster tools section for details of who links with which keywords. I feel my problem was related to someone (not me) putting hundreds of thousands of links to me using just one anchor text (maybe negative SEO, maybe not). I did't request or pay for this, but google perhaps thinks I did. I have now used the new disavow tool but have had no change so far. I also feel google are deliberately slow to update things and make changes to prevent us working out their algorithm. Like I said, you get none of these problems with Bing.
Again, thanks for the help and replies. What are forbidden sites? I don't know what my site links to. Perhaps my web co has done something wrong, but I do not have access to it. I am not allowed to do anything.