Today’s guest post is from: Chris Madej, who is an entrepreneur, interim manager and blogger at NoPassiveIncome.com. On his blog he writes about SEO tools, blogging tips and passive income.
Did Google Penalize My Site?
Google is the best most common search engine for English content. Every day there are hundreds of millions of search queries typed into Google. Every site owner, entrepreneur, blogger, SEO specialist or even hobbyist wants to be listed in the first page of the SERPs. (Search Engine Result Pages).
However, it is impossible for everyone to succeed. There are more than 25,270,000,000 pages indexed by Google. What’s more – Google doesn’t like stagnation. We see a lot of small updates to its algorithm every week and yearly we have 1-5 big changes to the Google algorithm (Google Panda, Google Penguin, Venice, Caffeine, May Day, Vincent – see a list of all of them at this link).
So it’s not so easy to hold the 1st place of the SERPs for your keyword. Particularly after the Google Penguin update, it is very hard to get to the Top Ten or even to keep your current rankings.
On the other hand – not every fall in the SERPs means that your site has been penalized by Google.
Below, you will find seven main reasons for a drop in search engine rankings:
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Your Website has Changed
This is very common. If your site is getting less and less organic traffic it may be caused by changes on your site. You should check for:
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The speed of your site – maybe your web host changed some parameters?
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Your template – did you change it recently?
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New code – did you add some new code to your pages?
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Time your readers spend on the site – Perhaps your articles are too short?
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The average amount of pages your readers visit on your site – Maybe your articles are less related today then they were in the past?
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Bounce rate – If it has increased recently, that could indicate that your site isn’t relevant for the searches people are making.
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Is your site free of viruses and malware?
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Your Competitors have Changed
It’s the most probable reason for a drop in your site rankings. Check for the following:
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There are new players in your market
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Your competitors have better or more relevant content
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Your rivals have better on-page optimization
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You have less ‘quality’ backlinks than your competitors
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Your competition is more social
There are a lot of tools for researching your competition. I’ll list a few of them here:
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Alexa
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Majestic Seo
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SEMrush
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Google 😉
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Environment has changed
In most cases it means changes in the SE algorithm. As I wrote at the beginning of this post, major changes in algorithms are very rare. However, you may be hit by an algorithm change, especially if you use one or only few sources for links or when your site is relatively new)
If you want to be up to date with SEO, which changes all of the time, here are some resources for you:
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Your Site (or Page) Was Filtered
The Google filter is different than a penalty. Your website can be filtered. One example is duplicate content.
In most cases filtered phrases are moved 30 places down. So if your position on a particular keyword was 7th, it will be found at or near the 37th place. The good part about this is that after removing duplicate content from your site (or from sites where your content was placed) your ranking should improve.
Now, we will discuss the bigger problems.
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Your Site got Automatic Penalization
In most cases it last 30 days, and mostly we receive notification in Google Webmaster Tools.
Reasons for automatic penalization:
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Hidden text,
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Back door pages,
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Bad neighbourhood links from your site.
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Selling/buying of unrelated links
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Some other black hat methods
After removing the reason for the penalty, Google bots should visit your site. The penalty should be removed (automatically) in about 30 days from this point.
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Your Site Received A Manual Penalty
This would be the worst possible scenario for your site. In this case, the Google “quality” team is watching you 24h/day. Of course I’m joking, but your site is in trouble…
The reasons why are similar to #5, but on a larger scale. Sometimes your site may be “voted” down by your competitors.
If your website has suffered from a manual penalty, you must fix it. You must also send in a reconsideration request. The Google quality team will read your message only once. Provide them with a step-by-step guide regarding what you did to improve the quality of your site.
This is not a certainty – sometimes you will get the penalty removed. Sometimes, you will not. Remember – Google may forgive you only once. In other words – if you do it again, forget about organic traffic…
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Your Site Was Deindexed (Banned)
Please make sure that your site is really deindexed. You can check it by typing your domain name with site operator directly to the search form. If your site is not listed in search results – it’s not in Google index. You are in trouble…
Example: Site:yourwebsiteblog.com
This is not good – if your site is deindexed it means that you probably used a lot of black hat methods for a long time… Bad boy (or girl)…
You can of course work on your site and submit a reconsideration request. But it is very uncommon to be indexed again – in most cases it’s better and faster to get another site (for traffic from Google).
But wait!
Maybe there is a chance! Perhaps you made some changes or updates to your site. Maybe you did something wrong by mistake? For example, maybe you accidentally placed the “noindex” meta tag?
Please look at the source code of your pages for this line:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
If it is there – you may be safe. If it is not – you must look for another domain or SEO specialist for your site).
So, do you now know why you lost traffic?
What has been your experience with Google? Do you like or dislike Google? Please share your thoughts, feelings, and questions in the comment section below.
Further reading
35+ Traffic and SEO Tips & Articles
Chris Madej is an entrepreneur, interim manager and blogger at NoPassiveIncome.com. He writes about passive income, blogging tips and SEO.