Google Penalty on keyword

anyone experience this?

[FillDeCube]

I am affraid that my site has been banned for certain keywords.

A few of my important keywords not show up in top #100 results. My site was ranking #2~#10 for the past few months and my site is currently having PR5.

Any clue..?

[Marcia]

If you're still in the index and having PR5 it's not banned, but could be experiencing one of those ranking quirks others have also been having.

Interesting about the keyword association, though. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm seeing something funny with the PR on a site and suspect it may be the presence of certain keywords.

Unfounded speculation, so please take with a grain of salt:

The site in question is ranking fine on that keyword phrase, and actually better for others, BUT the site's internal PR is a total mess, and I'm wondering if pages with that keyword phrase on them are just not passing Page Rank, either through the site's outbound links or to other pages on the site.

I'm thinking maybe links to such pages will divvy up the PR passed on from pages that link (like the homepage and others that are "innocent"), decreasing the amount passed to other pages on the site, BUT not passing PR back out though the site from those pages, causing some of the site's PR to go into a black hole.

Just speculating on this, but it does look suspiciously like it could be a possibility.

[srinivas]

my site has pr5 and it is not there in the index but it is showing 95 backlinks is this a penalty

[GrinninGordon]

srinivas

I don't think so. I think that the page rank and keyword relevance from your backlinks has not been calculated / factored in yet. Is the site under 6 months old, or have you recently been active on it? If so, this is why.

[martinibuster]

I am afraid...

That says it all.

Many people post here saying that they've been banned but that is usually not the case. There is a high amount of fear, and 50% of it stems from a growing awareness of the importance of search engines, and the other 50% comes from not knowing the real details of what is going on.

[FillDeCube]

I have also found that my site's backlinks has dropped from 200s to 30s..All my internal page not reflect in backlinks (it used to be there..)

My important keyword appear in #1 in yahoo but no where in google.. something is wrong

[LogicMan]

I thought the same for my site.

For months, I have been #1 or #2 for the 3 word search phrase of word1 word2 word3 and then not to be found. (Note: When the page would 'disappear', I had a page in position 25 & one in #38 and G only seems to ever list top two) However, on the two word search phrase of word1 word2, the page rated #1 and on the two word search phrase on word2 word3, it was #6. On the 2 word search of word1 word3 I was in the 42nd position.

During this dance, on the 3 word phrase, the page would go out, then in, then out. Fortunately, I am back in position #1 and it seems to be holding.

My page is PR6 and was the highest PR on the search term, and I noticed when I dropped out, sites with weaker PR jumped in (at least looking at the top 10). My page and 5 others with good PR of the previous top 10 were going in and out like me.

I think G might have been 'turning the knob' on the weighting of PR. Could this explain your fate?

[srinivas]

my site has been active for last two years but it went out of index in the last update then it din't even showed backlinks and google toolbar showed grey now after this update i am seeing the backlinks again but dropped to 50%

[seofreak]

It will all come back in some days.

[giggle]

Same thing is happening to a site of mine.

Then I noticed a mistake on my part that the textual content was duplicated on two different sites.

When I search for a keyword phrase only one of my sites (there are two) comes up. When you click on the 'Repeat the search with the omitted results included' link at the bottom of the search results then the missing site appears!

Try this, you might be hidden due to duplicated content?

Just an idea.

[FillDeCube]

seofreaks, why do you think that it will be back in days?

[FillDeCube]

ooppps... seofreaks. those keywords are back..

hmmm.. you're right.. hope those index will stay there for some time..

[Adam_C]

Just read this thread cos I have experienced EXCATLY the same thing at this update.

Last month my site was no. 1 for my main phrase. At the beginning of the update it was still page 1 - various positions.

Then checking over the last few days - nowhere to be seen in teh top 100.

Now, sure enough its back in the top ten. Worries over.

[djgreg]

The same thing happend with some of my sites. They were ranking #1 or #2 for main keywords and now they are gone for this keywords, but for some other keywords, which are more specific and don't bring that much traffic sites still ranking high. The #1 positions for the main keywords have now sites with less backlinks and less PR.
Maybe we should think about the theory of "overoptimaziation" again? All my Backlinks have the main keywords in the anchor text. Maybe this is indeed a penalty for a specific keyword because it was used in the anchor text too often?

[martinibuster]

I am afraid...

That says it all.

Many people post here saying that they've been banned but that is usually not the case.

The above posts bear this out.

[Herath]

In the lastest ranking algo twist, it looks like the
priority given to the <title> has been reduced
significantly.

[Robski]

I'm pretty sure it has something to due with over-optimization. For about a year I've been developing a theme site which focuses on the most important and frequently searched three word phrase for this theme. It ranks great, even number 1, for other less popular search terms, but as far as that one elusive three word phrase is concerned; the site always winds up burried. Mind you that this even occurs with allinanchor showing my site in 8th place for this phrase. Definitely something worth thinking about.

[doc_z]

I observed this partial penalty after the Dominic update:

- the index page is in the top ten for keyword1, while it's nowhere for keyword2
- allinanchor:keyword2 is still good, while allintitle and allintext are worse
- normally only the index page is affected
- a search in Google's directory (!) for keyword2 returns the index page on the old (top) position
(Someone else who observed this? An index page which was dropped (filtered out) for a keyword after the Dominic update, appears in the top ten for a search in the directory while it's still nowhere for a normal search.)

As far as I know, made those people who solved this problem just changes for the index page, not for incoming links.

[Robski]

Hmmm interesting doc_z, you may be correct about the directory and index page correlation. Performing a search in the directory shows my site to be number 5 for this particular phrase. I guess I will try to update the index page and see what happens. Perhaps cutting down on this particular phrase density will improve things. I am just curious whether this "unconfirmed filter" was tripped site wide or whether updating the index page will be enough to correct matters? I'll post back if I see any changes within the next few weeks.

[doc_z]

The keyword penalty (for keyword2) expired. As in the other cases I know, the problem was solved by changing the index page, i.e. the keyword penalty was caused by on-page factors.

The assumption that the penalty is caused by on-page factors was already given and confirmed (for at least two cases) in the semi-penalty thread [webmasterworld.com].

By the way, I'm wondering why there are only few people who seem to be interested in a serious analysis of this phenomenon, i.e. collecting facts, looking for commonness, before drawing conclusions. Also, I haven't seen a discussion how to solve this penalty, while there are numerous speculative theories about this topic.

[djgreg]

I have expirienced something similar.
Before Dominic started my sites were used to stay at Nr. 1 or 2 but since then some are somewhere in the 90s and I don't know why, because I have more backlinks and higher PR as the sites above me.
I am going to try to change somethin on my index files and see what will happen...

Hope this will help.

greg

[customdy]

I have also experienced this....well, whatever "this" is that comes and goes about 20 times per day. I swear everything I check our main keyword I get different results, either #3 or #60, it swaps back and forth many times per day for the last several weeks. The keyword on our index is very dense, as of last night we reducded the density and removed the H1/H2 titles. Lets see what happends, we can always go back the other way. We are getting fresh tags everyday for the last several day so we may know soon. Anyone have any results with this experiment yet?

Thanks

[DavidT]

Another one chiming in here, was #2 or #3 for my two main phrases, keyword-keyword. Now completely vanished on those ones but still showing up for minor terms as before. On Inktomi am #1 for one of the phrases in question.

On Google I have been replaced in the #2 position by a site that mentions the keywords a handful of times but doesn't actually sell these particular widgets, just sees fit to mention them a bit.

Of course this is leaving out all the guestbook pages, ghastly links pages, and other assorted rubbish that G seems to view as a better representation of the topic.

Maybe if you sell widgets you should avoid talking about it too much.

[customdy]

an update, since we de-emphasised our #1 keywork on June 26th, our index page as been at #4 since... the roller coaster ride stopped for us....maybe this helped, maybe things just settled down at the same time... now we are going to go back in and add things one at a time to try to figure out what happens.... We had Fresh Tags on our Index Page on June 27th... our guess is the H1 tags.......

[soapystar]

exactly, you now get more and more sites where the word you are searching for only appears in pages pointing to the listed page. This is soooooooo bad, what we now have is the situation where content can hurt you. My affected sites have good content which means the linked anchor text is repeated many times on page, google no longer likes this. What i see now is content pages replaced by pages with almost zero content where the links and anchor text have been made perfect and by having no content on the page itself they avoid triggering the keyword penalty. I know google has a bunch of brainboxes who think the whole thing out but wouldnt it be easier and better for the user if anchor text had to be justified by content on the page rather than having the content trigger the penalty? am i missing something here?

[customdy]

I wish we could get GG comment regarding keyword penalty or over optimization,it appears there are some new spam filters....

[2_much]

Okay, this has been on my mind as well.

I think there are several possible reasons:

1. Fresh spidering
2. Spam algos applied after the update is rolled out
3. Different algos on different data centers

Repeatedly I've had sites that are dropped only for a keyword (usually these are larger keywords), while they still rank well for every other keyword.

It hadn't ocurred to me to check for over-optimization of that particular keyword.

However, I'm not too inclined any more to pay attention to on-page factors, hence I can't believe this is the actual reason.

Does anyone have any further thoughts about what could be causing this problem?

[Marcia]

>>1. Fresh spidering
That's been a factor in fluctuations, something we'll have to get used to.

>>2. Spam algos applied after the update is rolled out
We expected that was going to happen.

>>3. Different algos on different data centers
Has to be, given that there are drastic differences doing consecutive searches on the same phrase - and that one set of results can appear on www and www2, vastly different.

I'm not too inclined any more to pay attention to on-page factors, hence I can't believe this is the actual reason.

Does anyone have any further thoughts about what could be causing this problem?

Further thoughts:
Off-page factors like proliferation of phrases in anchor text of links is worth some thought.

[doc_z]

In principle, Google could consider numerous factors for the ranking algorithm, e.g.:

- on-page factors (the usual factors as well as size or JS)

- 'on-site' factors: local PR (i.e. PR neglecting all incoming and outgoing links), number of pages

- off-page factors: anchor text, PR, incoming links from bad neighborhood, topic-sensitive PR

- freshness of the page, frequency of changing the page, age of the site

- duration (page or site), number of visited pages on the site (e.g. from the Toolbar)

- clickthroughs from Google

- random components

(These are just examples which could influence the results. I don't believe that all these factors are considered and I din't say that all of them make sense.)

Therefore, all these points could cause problems (theoretically).

I still believe that off-page factors alone couldn't cause a problem. Otherwise you could hurt a competitor. I already described my experience [webmasterworld.com] with this penalty.

[jady]

Our "focus" keyword is too lost in the wind, however a more competitive keyword is moving up.. Very strange but I am not going to worry about it at this point. Just going to sit back and enjoy the ride and see what happens.