Google Punished two of my URLs - for specific keywords

[atlantis76]

Hi All

"Punishment" for a specific URL for a specific keyword might have been already discussed here, if so - I'd love to see where.

My case:

Two URLs, each on mysite.ccTLD (FI, ES - in this case), used to be well ranked for certain keywords, in the corresponding local Google. One URL is the index page, and the other is an inner page.

When searching these keywords now both URLs are no longer coming up for the corresponding searches. Sometimes, other URLs from that sites do appear in lower positions for that searches.

One keyword that was punished is of high competition, the other is rarely searched for.

When searching other keywords: business as usual.

Rounding up the usual suspects, my link building strategy is based of getting not only relevant, on-topic link. Do you think this was what messed me up here?

Thanks
Assaf

[claaarky]

cangoou, I basically changed the anchor text in the menu.

The affected pages had a competitive two word term (say 'blue widgets') in the navigation anchor text. Our menu is shown in full on every page of our 2,500 page website so that means we had 2,500 internal links with anchor text of blue widgets.

It would appear that is too much if the term is competitive and it appears we were demoted further for the more competitive terms and have been unaffected for non-competitive terms.

So I changed the menu anchor text for one of the affected pages to a one word term (e.g. 'blue' instead of 'blue widgets') and within two days we've jumped from about 81st to (now) 22nd.

We were about 10th originally so I'm guessing we'll see steady improvement as the site is re-spidered.

I've suffered -something problems once before in the past, it took me months to find, seconds to fix and recovery began the next day and was complete within two weeks, with more traffic than ever before.

Hopefully this one will have the same results!

[cangoou]

Thanks a lot for your reply. I have "widget" only 3 times on my page with about 400 words, so it seems this case unfortunalty doesn't apply for me.

[brinked]

keyword specific penalty can be from either on-site or off site, usually aggressive link building with not much variation of anchor text

[cangoou]

Thanks. What can I do? I think I was hit by the "off site" part.

[Timetraveler]

I'd also like to post that Tedster's suggestions to change the anchor text in fact does work.

The keyword we were affected with was linked via the sitewide navigation using the affected anchor text. It was 1st page on google and disappeared for that keyword but still stood strong among other keywords.

When we changed the keywords in the navigation to a less obvious term (for example from iron blue widgets to metal blue widget) we went from oblivion to back to page one after multiple months of penalty. The day the page was cached we re-appeared.

Thanks Ted.

[cangoou]

Thanks for your feedback. My problem is: I just don't have such internal links using the 2 keywords which have vanished. But I hope this hint my help others of course.

[Love2Blog]

Me neither, I tried the nav fix, as I too had the site-wide keywords but I had them in the home page link in the sidebar nav, and that is the page that lost rankings, but it's been a few days and no improvement.

[claaarky]

Further update on our two word menu anchor text changes.

A few days after recovering we dropped back again, I'm guessing because we now have too much internal linking on the new phrase. So at some point our internal linking for this phrase reached acceptable levels. We now just have to find that level!

We also found other pages that we didn't realise were suffering rose because we'd reduced the repetition of certain words in our menu.

Since then we've also observed that the penalised phrases were on pages which had code rearranged to show the content first (we did a selection of pages as a test). As our menu is quite big we think it's possible this made it look like we had a huge amount of boilerplate text/links.

So we've changed the code so half the menu comes before the content and half after, reduced repetition of keywords in the menu and varied the menu text throughout the site.

Made those changes on the 16th and 17th July. Hoping to see some results very soon.

Weight of internal links on one phrase definitely seems to be a factor, as does repetition of words in the menu. They may just be the visible symptoms of a boilerplate repetition penalty though as the issue is only affecting pages where we used this method (to help search engines see our content first!).

On a positive note, google is reacting quite quickly (within 48 hours) to changes we make so we should be able to pinpoint all the issues quite quickly.

[cangoou]

Any other one managed a recovery? I changed now 3 sites, on one 1 removed ALL of the keywords, the changes are shown in the cache but the site is still gone.

[brinked]

cangoou, i doubt your site is hit from on-site factors. artificial looking backlinks can cause this as well (unfortunately). If I were you right now, I would try to get quality backlinks with those keywords in it but NOT the exact keyword. Example if your penalized keyword is "widget" you might want to create some articles with different natural looking anchors like "When you want to find the right widget for you" and "a box of widgets is all I need in my life". These look natural because they contain your keyword and you are getting new backlinks with that keyword so google will see you didnt stop receiving backlinks with that keyword even after you're penalized so it will look even more natural.

[cangoou]

Thanks for your reply, I will try this.

[Love2Blog]

My sites are still in the -50 positions as being discussed in the July SERPS update thread, I have continued to build links using the same techniques that Brinked suggested, just totally random strings that include my keywords. No matter what in the end when those links are crawled it could only help in the long run, if not in the short run.

I am also focusing more on getting targeted traffic, while waiting for ranks, have gotten several conversions this month via article marketing and some social sites that have brought sales, sometimes we have to forget about Google and get traffic in other ways, which do exist out there.

[tedster]

There's a chance that the links you build are not "freely given editorial links" in Google's eye. Here's something to consider - maybe right now you need to think more along the lines of writing and publicizing content that ATTRACTS links. The "building" may be too heavy-handed.

[Love2Blog]

@tedster
I will look at that, though I do not aggressively build links, maybe get a couple a day from article marketing and a very high quality blog network that I use. I have been adding more content on a daily basis as well.

[brinked]

also..its a good idea to NOT include your keyword(s) in every backlink. a natural flow of links will also have anchors that are just your domain name or brand name, as well as common anchors such as "view" "click here" and "visit this site"

I like to look at matt cutts blog and how he links to other sites, he uses sentences and he also links to multiple websites on the same page. If a page/article has a lot of text and 2-3 links that are like "widgets" and "blue widgets" that probably looks like a suspicious link to google. Most natural articles will link out to multiple sites for references and have anchors that exceed 4-5 words such as "found this site for blue widgets to my liking"

[cangoou]

What would you do with old links from directories? I found for one site I got a lot "just-the-keyword"-links on them. Would you change them or delete them? It's just the same amount of work.

I was thinking: Well, they are not worth anything (perhaps even beeing bad for the site?) so why not delete them? On the other hand if I change them the way brinked suggested (not containing the keyword at all perhaps?) wouldn't that give a good variety to the backlink-profile?

[brinked]

I would leave them. instead, just increase your link profile with natural looking backlinks..this will offset the directory links and bring your ratio down.

[Love2Blog]

@cangoou
I would think that going back and changing existing links would look too artificial and manual, better to diversify the anchor in future links, looks more natural.

[cangoou]

Did anybody come back yet having this problem for OffPage (links)-reason? It's funny because some of my affected keywords rank for the search without filer ("Gádet"), and some don't.

I got only one site back (now: 68, before: 23) for which I activly changed and deleted links in directories - but for another site, this didn't worked at all.

[Timetraveler]

@Claaarky - We changed the navigation anchor and bounced back almost instantly but also have gone back down. It would pop back and forth for about a week but is gone now for that one phrase.

I'm going to be changing the Title of the page to slightly vary and also dramatically change the anchor text of a few new links. I think we are very close but there is still a hanger somewhere....

[Timetraveler]

Just an observation but with the new Google, caffeine, or whatever people are calling it the keyword(s) in question that disappeared from the rankings show on [www2.sandbox.google.com...] . Whether they are still working on the backlinks or what not, it seems whatever the problem was before "might" be fixed.

Maybe what I saw last month in the ranking change was a brief look at the new google when rankings came back for the designated keyword.

I'm curious if others are also seeing this?

[cangoou]

While my keywords on google.com are kicked back to about 350, there are on about 150 on caffeine.

Do your keywords do rank on caffeine?

[Timetraveler]

Yes, they rank back at normal positions in caffeine but nowhere to be found for that keyword in the current live version.

[cangoou]

Puh, mine where all Top10, in caffein there are now at 150 (as I said).

[cangoou]

I'm still gone with the affected keywords. I tried to changed my backlink-profile carefully for some of my sites, and some keywords did come back to around 30 or 50 for 1 or 2 days but disappeared again.

I now guess that it has to be an penalty of some kind and I'm hoping after 3 month the sites will be released.

[gn_wendy]

Sorry that I phrased my answer ambiguously. The kind of penalty I'm talking about apparently can come from overusing a keyword in internal anchor text that points to the penalized url or any other url on the site. At least, I've been involved in several cases that regained rankings after lowering the frequent repetition.

I had this exact problem - but it wasn't my internal links kicking me down. It was inbound links from other pages... and it was really annoying. The links where from a bunch of blogs. It seems some authoritative blogger decided to cover us (which is great), but then several other low-ranking blogs decided to cover us also, i.e. simply copy that post.

After writing to some of them and asking very nicely if they would please change the anchor text the issue was resolved and we now rank better than before.

So yes. Google needs to dail it down.

[b2net]

I've been suffering this for 6 months now, stuck at pages 3 or 4. If I do a search for widgets* I'm on page one. How do you guys rank for keyword*? I also rank first for cheap widgets. I haven't done any link building, all links are natural but anchor texts do include the main keyword because it is also the site name and even the domain name.

[cangoou]

Hm, I do not rank for widget* at all. But I rank for "cheap widgets".

[AG4Life]

Same here. For "cheap widgets", I'm still number 1. For "widgets", it's not even in the top 1000. And it's not just one link, all links related to the keyword on the "www" domain has been removed from the index for "widgets" (but the links on the other subdomains remain unaffected, for now).

[aakk9999]

I have a similar case:

Up to 2 weeks ago we were #1 on google.co.uk and #5 on google.com for the most competitive 2-word phrase in our niche. Then 2 weeks ago we dropped to #3 on google.co.uk and #87 (!) on google.com.

However, if I search for the same two words phrase, but enclosed in quotes, then google.com shows us on #7. The google.co.uk is unchanged regardless whether the phrase is in quotes or not.

The site is co.uk domain and the ranking for other phrases are unchanged.

We were convinced we got a penalty for a phrase, but what confuses us is that we still rank as #3 on co.uk and we still rank for the phrase when it is enclosed in quotes.

Any ideas?