Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This is a common scenario thus far however lets also say that the Big Blue Example Widgets article still ranks #1 for every combination of the term with the word "example" removed. ie: Big Blue Widgets, Blue Widgets, Big Widgets, Widgets Big and Blue etc... all still #1, the penalty is targeted to the word example.
Assuming all on page issues such as copyright and quality are in order what can be done to lift such a ban besides asking for re-inclusion? Most filters have a valid reason but how do you deal with a filter that was put in place solely to ensure the page didn't rank TOO highly and perhaps ahead of known authority sites or manufacturers.
Is waiting for the filter to expire the only solution? When even the sitelink also shows up with the filtered word removed it looks strange because the site is about that keyword.
Any suggestions?
It's a touchy thing to fix. Because the filters often seem to get dropped on a timed schedule, not when the issue is fixed, you may be tempted to keep on tweaking and tweaking long after you've done all you needed to.
So take a look at your pages with the eye of a search engine, not a site owner, and examine it for precisely that word "example" that you see triggering the problem. Where can you back down, just a bit, from using it?
The patents suggest scoring in many areas:
[0042] ...grammatical or format markers, for example by being in boldface, or underline, or as anchor text in a hyperlink, or in quotation marks."[0133] ...whether the occurrence is a title, bold, a heading, in a URL, in the body, in a sidebar, in a footer, in an advertisement, capitalized, or in some other type of HTML markup." Note that measurements are suggested here for position on the page.
So I'd suggest backing off, but with a light touch. You are probably just over the penalty threshold, or maybe the threshold was just recalulated, as the patent suggests. I'd particularly scrutnize anchor text ifrst.
If you've done any work on the site wherein you intentionally plugged in "related terms", consider whether you plugged in too many. If you have almost no related terms, perhpas you should introduuce one or two.
But whatever you do, make just some few adjustments and then wait for 6 to 8 weeks. This should be a surgical change and not heavy handed in any way.
The word in question is part of the domain name, it's the sites main topic and there is no way to write an article without mentioning it so this is particularly tough to deal with. The filter being applied site-wide doesn't make it easy to find the offending page(s).
There is no spamming of the word but when I look at analytics the site reached top 3 very early on (50 million+ competitors including manufacturers and major websites) and traffic jumped into the 10's of thousands of impressions daily for the index page. When the filter was placed traffic all but vanished not only for that keyword but for any page with the keyword used in combination with other keywords.
The sitelink was left in place but the category titles no longer had that word. looking up site:example.com returned a sitelink where even the title had the word removed (physicaly not there even though it was a word in the page title).
I'll "tone down" the use of the word where I can but it feels like a "sorry, you're site isn't established enough yet for top 3" type filter which I can only HOPE is time based and not permanent. It's now been over 16 months, the sitelink makes it easy to see the filter is still there.
It's getting a little old. I did ask for re-inclusion of the word some 6 months ago but got no response.
