Is this a penalty - if so, how to fix it?

[breham]

Hi,

I own a .co.uk domain which this time last year was up in the top 10 for some fairly competitive terms.

Now most searches end up on page 4 or 5 of google serps.

If I search for bluewidgets.co.uk I am number one but if I search for "Blue Widgets" or "bluewidgets" I am on page 5,

Also I see the yo-yo affect where I can start at the bottom of page 5 in the morning and by the end of the day I can be at the bottom of page 4.

Any advice on what type of penalty this is and what I need to do to get it removed would be gratefully received.

Cheers
Brett

[stevelibby]

breham you have a penalty i have just recovered from the same thing. I you search your domain with no extention to it, you should come in first especially if its not a competetive keyword.
you will probably find that if you search for your best keywords then you may find yourself 4-5 pages down.

[edited by: tedster at 8:10 pm (utc) on Dec. 4, 2008]

[gosadmin]

@stevelibby
@SEOPTI
How long does a 40-60 penalty last?
We are under the same penalty for more than 3 months.There were some reciprocal link exchanges but we removed all of them after penalty.We filled the reconsideration form 2 times but still waiting. No 301 redirection but there was a site redirecting their domain to our site.Is 302 hijack still alive? What are other possible reasons? Please share your experiences.

[seoit]

I'd like know that as well. Please share stevelibby.

[SEOPTI]

There is a daily lottery called data refresh. You can get your ranking back if you win this lottery.

Timeframes for penalties, you should better ask Sergey or Larry, no one else at Google has probably the right to talk about this.

[Whitey]

Can we give this a name perhaps ? Is it the " 40-60 " filter ?

[tedster]

NOOOO - Please! No more numbers for penalty names. Those names never hold up over time and then we have confusion just a little bit into the future.

Let's understand what the pattern is, and in that exploration we will find out if it deserves a name and what might be a good one.

[Syzygy]

I'm afraid I have to add a "me too" as from the first of this month my tiny niche site has been slapped with some sort of penalty. Still trying to make sense of it, however I recognise many of the symptoms than have been described here and in the 'Hot Topics'.

In my case the site has been riding high for anything related to its niche. If not in the top slot, then invariably searches would show it above the fold. This has been so for at least a year. Now, traffic stats have dropped by 40-50%...

Just prior to this penalty, I did bit of a redesign. Whilst there have been marginal style changes, content is the same.

As an observation, and based on what I've been reading here about the penalty possibly relating to the over-optimisation of pages, I did in my redesign:

* Add a nav strip across the top of page, meaning that in effect there are now three nav bars (LH-side, top and bottom) where before there were two.

* Increase pt size of h1 & h2.

* Increase pt size of anchor texts for internal links other than those in the nav bars.

Is it feasible that somehow these seemingly minor elements of redesign have triggered an 'over-optimisation' penalty?

As unlikely as it sounds to me, these are the only changes made to the site and prior to these changes all was fine in my small corner of the online world.

One other aspect - about 'bad neighbourhoods' - has worried me for a while. My concern is about Wikipedia. Except, of course, it's not just Wikipedia itself. Bearing in mind the content licensing terms used by them, the various entries in which my link features have been duplicated by untold numbers of sites. I have links coming in from a good number of places, but all those places are carrying the same content.

Could it be that Google determines this to be a 'bad neighbourhood' of sorts?

Beyond the probably insignificant aspects outlined here, I'm not aware that anything else has happened to my site that would justify why such a devastating punishment should be meted out.

Syzygy

Sorry - didn't think it worth starting another 'Penalty' thread

[tedster]

Just as not every headache is a "migraine", not every drop in ranking or traffic is a "penalty". Google did make changes in how they weight various inbound links recently. This has affected come sites who were ranking well based on just a few "types" of backlinks.

Also appreciate that bad neighborhood problems come from you linking OUT, not who links in. And finally on the "not likely" side, increasing the pt size of anything is highly unlikely to cause a ranking problem.

But adding more links to every page certainly can be problematic - especially text links that contain your important keywords. How long since you first saw the traffic drop?

[Syzygy]

I agree that my minor design actions are 'not likely' to have had any major impact - one assumes they are indeed far too trivial for that. However, a 'penalty' of some description has come into effect and, quite naturally, I'm eager to ascertain what might have triggered it as far as Google is concerned.

The obvious starting point is in identifying what has actually changed; what actions, no matter how small, might have occasioned even the slightest step over the invisible thresholds laid down by Google?

As outlined, my own actions have been trivial, yet where just a few days ago the site profiled remarkably well for a good many search terms - and has done for at least a year - now in many instances it's languishing towards the back of the Serps.

A further outline of the current situation.... Firstly though, it's worth explaining that this site is about a specific organization. The most common searches are for the name of the organization itself, or for the organization's name plus the name of a member (either individual or group membership)...

* Search for the two keywords in the domain name will bring up site at the top of the serps. No change here.

* Search for prime keyword and individual member's name. For probably 90 percent of the search possibilities here the site would show in the first three or four slots. This profile has now dropped substantially. A couple of examples:

1/ Prime kw and individual member's name. Position = 1st

Now positioned around 550th.

2/ Prime kw and name of a group membership's name. Position = 1st page

Now on 12th page.

3/ Prime kw and unusual individual surname. Position = 1st three or four results.

Now positioned around 59th (out of just 220 results).

This is 'relegation' is right across the board. In the nearly two weeks this has been in effect, visits and page views are down 48% and 70% respectively.

Perhaps it's a short term glitch that will sort itself out soon - perhaps it's not. But doesn't it just make you feel so helpless, especially when you have no idea as to why the situation is so?

Syzygy

[edited by: tedster at 6:43 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2008]

[tedster]

Syzygy - on the face of it that sounds like the -950 penalty (a poor name at this point, but we're stuck with it.) The extra nav strip could have added just enough extra anchor text to push the pages over the threshold. There's also the chance that Google just recalculated the penalty threshold - and the timing of the drop is a coincidence.

Yes, this could also be a temporary thing or even some kind of Google bug - those both seem remote to me, however. My first suspcion would be the extra navigation. And beyond that, something else may have changed that you haven't zeroed in on yet. Changing to slightly larger fonts seems extremely unlikely to cause a penalty.

[Syzygy]

...even some kind of Google bug...

Funny you should mention that. For the same time that this 'penalty' has been in effect, a search for site:mydomain.com returns results for almost twice as many pages or files as I actually have - and consistently so.

However, try to get the end of the results and the figure drops to one that is truer. A minor glitch, and presumably unconnected, but it gives hope that the 'penalty' is of the same ilk.

For the moment though, I feel like I have a migraine coming on...

Syzygy

[Lorel]

I have noticed Google getting very sensitive to over optimization so you might check out that possibility. An easy way to see how many times a word appears on a page is to search for that word in Google and when your site comes up click on the cache and all those words will be highlighted and then you can visualy see if you have repeated that word too often in the text. My site was ranking around #180 for a term I consider my most important keyword (and not likely to ever attain top 10). I reduced the density and it popped back to #45 where it had been before I "optimized" the page.

[cazzzk]

Hi,

The large UK site I work on has also suffered this 40-60 penalty (I'm sorry tedster, I know you hate the name but it's really appropriate for our penalty).

Whereas our homepage ranked #1 for its name "domain" for a year after a completely new site was released on the domain of the original and badly put-together site, on the 6th October it was kicked down to number 63. A huge number of internal pages were dropped altogether.

Now it fluctuates between 42 and 63 on a daily basis (49 when I last looked an hour ago). It's still listed #1 for "domain.com" though.

We've also been very badly hit for another couple of search terms which were pretty vital to bringing users in to the site. I haven't even found the site in the SERPs for one of these search terms, and for the other we appear on page 6, 7, 8 whereas we were #2, #3 each time.

I have read and read to try and find the reason for this. I've noticed a couple of SEO-types talking about our website amongst themselves in their blogs, but they hypothesise that the problem is due to our site being a search engine competing with Google, so Google has penalised it.

I don't believe this for a second. We're not competing with Google at all, in fact earlier this year the site expanded and the search side of things became only a part of what we do. And I don't believe Google would just penalise a site for being a competitor!

We are a charity site, give money to charity through search and enable people to donate to charities online, even those too small to have their own website, to mention only a couple of the features. We do use Adsense for advertising the homepage and do not have any paid links.

We definitely have a problem somewhere, I just cannot see what it is.

I'm going to look at our 301 redirects as there are a lot from the old site I think, although they've never caused trouble before.

We have had several new features added this year, but I don't think anything is over-SEO'd. No excessive keywords etc. We have over 115,000 incoming links and they all seem to be from respectable sites such as charity websites, blogs and news articles. They don't all link to the home page and they use a variety of keywords with our domain name only just about being the most popular.

Possibilities:
>iFrames?
>tabs within pages? (are they seen as hidden content?)
>many outgoing links have a 'nofollow' tag?
>pages from old site redirected to new? (some might redirect to the same URL).

We have a handful of sub-domains, all of which were hit. Each has its own sitemap and robots.txt file (and Google identifier). For one of the sub-domains, Google said that it did not have any pages indexed from its sitemap for about a month after Oct 6th, despite indexing over 100 previously. I cut down the number of URLs in the sitemap and they were indexed again eventually.

We used to have about 30,000 pages cached on the www.domain and up to 60,000 cached on the two sub-domains with the most pages. This didn't change for most of 2008. Now Google still crawls and caches the pages, but once a fortnight or so will dump most of them to leave between 500 and 3000 pages for each.

And the worst thing is - everyone is talking about the same problem and Google are keeping completely shtum on it!

Some clues would be nice.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:59 am (utc) on Dec. 10, 2008]
[edit reason] fixed typo [/edit]

[drall]

First time in oh 8 years I typed in our unique company name into google this morning and showed a subpage instead of our homepage and the homepage is noplace to be found.

Comes up fine with domain.com

PR7 site with oh millions of backlinks.

When I hit refresh it rotates through 3 different sets of results and only 1 of the 3 has our homepage for our company name.

[bwnbwn]

seoit

I have no outbound links.

I don't think there is a site out there that doesn't have outbound links, and if your one of them that doesn't I am sure this is a good signal to all the SE's your a link hoard and can induce a problem.

I can't understand why any site can have no outbound links impossible and feel this is a serious issue with your site or any site that attempts to block or hoard links.

A healthy site has outbound links and unhealthy site has none. You have tripped a filter from this type of activity.

[Shaddows]

And the worst thing is - everyone is talking about the same problem and Google are keeping completely shtum on it!

What, when they're normally so forthcoming?

If you are running custom searches, you might want to noindex the results, otherwise you might look spammy (especially if you have some example searches as hyperlinks).

[cazzzk]

@Shaddows

The search results are noindexed, and blocked in robots.txt file. Google initially indexed internal SERPS ages ago but we fixed that with the noindex and robots.txt file.

[stevelibby]

ok guys here is list of things i did to get my site back other than the obvious of correct code and internal link structure:
1)Change whois details so only one record exists.
2)tighten up all db queries, make sure NO injection can happen(i believe g run runs around with there inj script, reason i think this is to make there top 10 safer for the searchers), if it does happen deal with it corretcly.
3)any backlinks that you have from the same c class range, get em gone.(as well having my own sites i have a comercial web design site to which i put some of my developed sites onto my portfolio page with an inocent link, my belief is that this was a factor), however if you can get enough of no.4 forget 3 as it will dampen the no.3 factor.
4)most of you MAY(i reckon all) have found a reduction of GOOGLE backlinks to your home pages, work and create more by whatever means and importantly get the one with trust.
5)check some of the lesser known search engines to see how your site is indexed with them, you may get some good clues here.
6)check that the wayback machine is taking snapshots of your site, you may also see some clues as to whats happend with the site is previous entries, ie hack or inj code.
7)as much as i like it here at WebmasterWorld google groups can also provide some help.
8)if you are hiding outbound links via tracking, change some so they dont have tracking or try the g analytics javacript code.
i found myself in this mess 2 years ago, i made relevant changes after doing much research and i came back on the next backlink update after making all the changes.
i hope this helps you all, remember, google is watching you!

[seoit]

I don't think there is a site out there that doesn't have outbound links, and if your one of them that doesn't I am sure this is a good signal to all the SE's your a link hoard and can induce a problem.

Bwnbwn, I do have one outbound link to verisign. Since it's an e-commerce site. What I meant was I do not sell links or have links to sites intentionally.

ok guys here is list of things i did to get my site back other than the obvious of correct code and internal link structure:"

Thanks for Sharing stevelibby.

[Syzygy]

Well, I for one have just had an early Christmas present from Google. As of today, any 'penalty' that might have existed has been lifted. Further, it would appear at first glance that my profile in the Serps has been strengthened.

Since this 'penalty' took effect, I've been monitoring three or four specific search terms. All remained in their despairing positions towards the back of the Serps and I've been dependent on the traffic coming from searches using the two key words that are the domain name.

Now, after just three weeks of having been relegated to the no-man's land of results, all seems good again. Hope this is not a glitch in itself.

Taking the advice offered here, I did 'de-optimise'. Specifically, I removed a number of repetitions of my prime keyword from the anchor texts in the main nav column. Bear in mind that this 'penalty' coincided with me having added an additional nav strip to the page layout and thus greater repetition of my main key word.

On the face of it then, anecdotal evidence shows me that 'de-optimisation' worked. However, I only did this yesterday and find it improbable that this effect could have happened, quite literally, overnight.

It remains the fact though, that having experienced these last three weeks all the symptoms of a '-950 penalty' (call it what you will), everything has now returned to normal, possibly even better.

One other piece of anecdotal evidence: over this same period I'd noticed within Google's webmaster tools that the ranking for the pages on my site was changing. Where many had 'page rank not yet assigned', and those that had any ranking were 'low', now all the pages are ranked. Certainly, I feel that this process has some bearing, but I couldn't offer any explanation as to what. Again, I offer it only as anecdotal evidence.

Perhaps, I've just experienced a glitch of some kind, even if did have all the hallmarks of a penalty. Whatever, it has passed and that is the most important thing. Now I'll have to monitor what effect if any the 'de-optimisation' actually has in the weeks to come.

Syzygy

[cazzzk]

The site I work on also had a Christmas present. I put a fix in on the 19th, put in a reconsideration request, left for Christmas and when I came back the homepage was back at number 1 for the search term 'domainname', plus our Christmas page (thank you Google! You can't tell me that wasn't hand-picked by a human).

The way I solved it was to block all pages which I did not consider to contain enough unique content (with 'noindex', removed automatically when content was added to the page) - even though all pages had a unique page title, meta description, headings etc. They didn't all contain much unique content on the page.

This mean that of our well over 200,000 pages, only a few thousand are available for indexing as they contain enough user-generated content.

Either our pages were too similar or there were just too many of them for Google's liking. Either way, the fix worked and we're back in business. Once our pages are indexed, they don't seem to be being dropped again like before Christmas.

[Shaddows]

Hmmm. Anyone like the idea of DomainRank. Could work like this:

Sum of total PR of SPIDERABLE (not indexable) URLS
Distributed (more or less equeally) over INDEXABLE URLs.

Thus, by noindexing pages, you improve your rankings on pages the ARE indexed?

Or is it simply a case of applying a filter to any URLs belonging to a domain identified as spammy. (Or, if you'll allow me to bang on about partitions, folding in the partition containing the high-volume/thin-content domain low down the SERPs)

[johnnie]

I have the exact same problem. My site widgets-info.nl (netherlands TLD) is found on page 4 when performing a search for widgets-info. For a term I used to rank #1 for, I now rank ~#55. So it seems to be -50-ish penalty indeed.

[SEOPTI]

Characteristics of this -50 filter are:

- it affects your whole domain

- if you search for 8 search terms which are on your site you are -50, for 7 you are -50, for 6 terms you are -50 ..... for 2 terms you are -50, it does NOT matter how many search results there are millions or just 60 search results - your site will always be in -50 box ...

- I'm now sure it's exactly the same PR 0.x multiplicator they use to devalue the PR since I see my sites rank #51 and unrelated competition sites rank #52 or my sites rank #52 and unrelated competion sites rank #53.

- It's probably a manual review which devalues the incoming PR and your ranking for all existing and new links

- It's not possible to escape this filter with the daily data refresh

[edited by: SEOPTI at 7:04 pm (utc) on Jan. 16, 2009]

[johnnie]

I have decided to go the route of the reconsideration request. I see no reason for a negative manual review; my site is loaded with quality, original content. I fixed some glitches that might have caused some duplicate pages here or there, and have cleaned up my links-page a bit.

[SEOPTI]

johnnie, do you have a css design? I see a lot of sites land in the -50 box which don't have a css design or a poor design and a bad information structure, something a human eye can see, but not a machine.

[cazzzk]

Perhaps the -50 penalty (or I prefer to call it the minus 42-63 penalty as our homepage yo-yo'd between these positions) is Google's general penalty for sites that have done wrong, but not wrong enough to punish them into the -950 category.

Perhaps it's the penalty for mistakes which webmasters might genuinely not have noticed but it gives them a chance to repair them without knocking the site completely.

Whatever it is, I think there are lots of different reasons for this one and each site might need a different fix.

[breham]

Hi,

Sorry - after starting this thread I got ill then forgot all about it. I am getting better and funnily enough today I have seen changes to my SERP results for the first time.

Before my domain name www.bluewidgets.co.uk would rank somewhere on page 7 at the beginning of the day (english time) for the phrase "Blue Widgets" and then gradually move up to somewhere top of page 6 or maybe hit page 5 (bottom of)

Yesterday I noticed a brief period where I hit mid page 5 before moving to 2nd bottom of page 5.

Today I have started at 2nd bottom of page 5 and remained there all day with no movement at all today.

Is anyone else who's had this -50 to -70 penalty experienced similar today? I did submit a reinclusion request about 10 days ago btw.

Many thanks and fingers crossed
Brett

[idolw]

Hi breham,
I have been hit with this disease in mid November. This is definitely connected with spammy incoming links - we just got it confirmed by a Googler on a conference in Poland. He gave no info about how long the penalty will last and did not want to comment on any dates.
Funny part is he suggested using yahoo siteexplorer to check the backlinks. OK, he also suggested google link: operator buthe did not look to confident ;-)

I guess the best way to get out of there is to get some great inbound links, remove the spammy links pointing at the domain, write some nice reconsideration request and wait.

[SEOPTI]

idolw, thanks for this info, this is really interesting, are you 100% sure the Googler confirmed it is a spammy link profile penalty?

[edited by: SEOPTI at 2:19 am (utc) on Jan. 28, 2009]