Has google 'blacklisted' our website?

[GaneMarshall]

Is there any way to say conclusively if a website has been blacklisted, or penalised, by google? We've seen sudden drops in our ranking for several keywords over the course of the last year, and I don't know if it's possible to pin down the exact cause and whether it's something that can be rectified.

A bit of background: we're a small travel company specialising mainly in African safari holidays. Our web presence is pretty poor, and always has been, but we've been trying to improve it over the last couple of years and for a while had some limited success employing an SEO specialist. They managed to have us ranking for a small number of mostly uncompetitive search terms, though I don't think the work they did at all justified how much we were paying them (more on that in a moment). At the beginning of this year we saw a big hit in our rankings, dropping several pages for some keywords and dissapearing altogether for others. Our SEO specialist explained, somewhat obliquely, that this was caused by changes to google's algorithms. A few of our keywords continued to rank, thankfully, but have recently also dropped. Seemingly overnight we've gone from the bottom of page 1 to page 5 for "Namibia safari". This was our last page 1 ranking for a competitive search term, and so I feel we really need to do something about this.

We've since dropped the SEO specialist we were using. I've learned a lot more about SEO since then and I can see that the work she had been doing was shoddy - I've looked at the links she had been creating, and they were all very poorly written (I'm assuming she outsourced the work) spam posts on forums and blogs, most of them totally unrelated to our business. This is why I think we might have been actively penalised by google, but is there any way to find out? And would deleting some of these spam links (assuming that's possible) help us regain our place in the search engines?

We're still appearing in google searches, just lower, and we do have a few page 1 rankings, though for pretty useful search terms. If we had been 'blacklisted' would we not be appearing at all in the search engines? I appreciate these are probably pretty novice questions but any advice would be appreciated.

 

[sirbrandy]

Yes, you were right that the "poorly written" links were the cause of your drop.

You can do 'link pruning' - a term that became popular after the Google Penguin update. Sites were cleaning up the "dirty" links they've left everywhere on the web. Some had success with it. But, consensus is you'd rather start from scratch.

Re: blacklisting, I guess you are referring to Google stopping the indexing of your site. That means they would not let your pages appear on search engines.

The only way to find out if that is the case is to do a 'site:' search.

Type this on Google search:
site:yoursite.com

It will show all the pages that Google has indexed in your site. If nothing appears, that means Google has stopped indexing your site. You can check Webmaster Tools (provided your former SEO specialist has used this) and see if Google has left you a warning message.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

To get a definitive yes or no with regard a manual penalty (blacklisting for want of a better term) then verify google webmaster tools and your site, look there at the manual actions tab. if tyhere is amanual action it will appear, if not then the loss is algorithmic.

Any more questions just ask

 

[ZeroDouble]

Impossible to say without seeing the site, but most likely you've just lost your rankings because of lost links (since you stopped using the SEO company) as opposed to being penalised, either way, I'd look into that first.

Also, note that there has just been a major google algo update, so best to wait a week or two for the dust to settle before you evaluate your rankings.

 

[GaneMarshall]

Thanks all for the very helpful advice.

I've done a site: search and returned plenty of results for our website, so that's a good sign.

We do have Google Webmaster for our website (which I forgot all about...) I'm not overly familiar with it but I've logged on now and, assuming I'm looking in the right place, there doesn't seem to be any warning for our website.

Regarding link purging - is this a complicated process, and, I appreciate this is a general question, but is it likely to be worth it in our situation? Will poor links continue to do damage our website, or has the damage already been done? More to the point, is there any way to tell which links are harming us - if something looks like spam can I assume that google will treat it as spam, or might some of these links actually be benefitting us? I don't want to do anything that will make our google position even worse.

I do have one more question: I've read here and elsewhere that google doesn't like duplicate content. I've checked our website using an SEO tool which tells me that it's about 20% duplicate content. Is this something I should be concerned about?

 

[OldWelshGuy]

In WMT this is what you need to do

Log in to WMT
click on 'search taffic'
click on 'manual Actions'

HOPEFULLY you should see 'No manual webspam actions found.' If you see an action message then you have an issue. if not then it is algorithmic.

Can the link profile hurt you? well yes it can really, but there are degrees of 'hurt' the worse being a manual penalty. Algorithmic penalties and algorithmic filters will impact on rankings. But you really don't want to be messing about with your backlink profile if you are not sure what you are doing, because you could inadvertantly delete what could be a powerful link.

Why not get a link audit carried out, that would be the first step, as then you will have an idea of how good/bad your link profile is, and then take action.

Duplicate content in the eyes of google refers to 100% duplicate content on your site. there IS a panda filter (which has now been rolled into the main algorithm) that frowns upon 'thin' pages, that being a significant amount of content across numerous pages, but with very little to differentiate. e.g. your header, footer and navigation are likely to be sitewide. so if you ahve a page with 50words of text on it, then that is likely to be sen as 'thin'

 

[GaneMarshall]

Thanks. I've had a look now and there's nothing under manual actions, which is a relief.

What you say about 'thin' pages is interesting. We do have quite a few low-content pages on the site, though few with as little as 50 words. What I think might be causing the problem is the way we upload itineraries to the website. These are uploaded as PDFs. They're updated quite frequently, and when we reupload them it creates a new version, adding a numberic at the end to distinguish it from the old version. So we in effect have multiple versions of the same itinerary on the website, but only the latest version is linked to. Could this cause any problems? I had understood that google only picks up on pages that are linked to internally, so it should only pick up on the latest version of each itineray, but I'm not sure about this.

 

[fisicx]

Is google indexing these PDFs? If not then it's not a problem. If yes then all you have to do is tell google to stop and just publish generic itinerary info on the site and link to the PDF.

So you then have Home > Location > Trip Information (that is static) > PDF (which isn't indexed).

 

[GaneMarshall]

Is google indexing these PDFs? If not then it's not a problem. If yes then all you have to do is tell google to stop and just publish generic itinerary info on the site and link to the PDF.

So you then have Home > Location > Trip Information (that is static) > PDF (which isn't indexed).

I assume they're being indexed, as a couple of them appear in google searches. I'd like them to be indexed, as they're text based pdfs and should be naturally keyword-dense. I recently went through most of them and added meta descriptions and keyword tags thinking this would help our ranking - I'd like to think this wasn't a total waste of an evening!

I think I'll ask our web designer to simply change the way pdfs are uploaded, so that they overwrite files of the same name rather than creating new versions, and then see if we can delete any duplicate versions. It's a bit time-consuming, but hopefully it will help..

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Are you optimising those PDF's for the search engines? if not you are missing a trick

 

[webgeek]

If it's the domain that matches the company name, then based on what you've stated thus far and a few corroborating facts, I'd have to state that:
- You're suffering from dupe content -

Go to Google and search for: site:yourdomaingoeshere.com Now page down to the last of the visibile results and note the report that "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 596 already displayed.
If you like, you can...."


A quick scan of the 866 or so pages of the site reveals 160 with duplicate titles, likely due to pages under categories being identical (think pages under Tanzania and Zanzibar or country vs adventure), where Google sees 2 URL's, but 1 unique set of content.

Hypothetically speaking, if someone were to make a polar expeditions page, and place it identically under 2 categories, then one of them should have the meta robots tag in the header as "index, follow" and the other should have "noindex, follow". Don't even think about a canonical tag, as it's the biggest whale fail the internet's seen since BT tried to launch a mobile phone network.

If a page of content lives in multiple places, one should be indexed, the rest should not.

This dupe content of on page content, titles, meta descriptions and H1 tags is sending all the wrong quality signals to Google, in effect making you Panda-bait.

You need to, or have someone help you to, identify the dupe content issues, then work through them. Nudge Google along with the WMT tool which does a fetch as Google, and you'll get the quick recrawls. This will speed the repair along.

Keep in mind that once you get thrown into the supplementary index (as referenced above), it can take 8+ weeks to get back out of it, assuming you've done everything right. It can take longer, but 8 weeks is normally the fastest you can expect the secondary / supplementary index issues to get re-indexed.

Food for thought...

 

[joeptsearle]

I found this post and I think it may help you out -http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-ways-find-google-list-blacklisted-sites/

 

[Scritty]

Are you optimising those PDF's for the search engines? if not you are missing a trick

Google seems to love PDF's. This may be because many of them contain reports and have a less commercial nature than many web pages. A fuzzy way of saying that they think you are less likely to just have "Buy Now" content on them and more "Info"

The PDF's will have their own URL. Make sure that is promoted correctly and perhaps have a nice E-book image describing the content, this really helps with downloads I've found. Software that can do a decent looking "book shot" is around for pretty cheap (£10?..not sure) or someone on Fiverr can do one for you.

Scritty

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Editing the meta information on the PDF is the real key to optimising them

 

[GaneMarshall]

Food for thought...

Plenty! This is a massively helpful post. Thank you very much.

Many of our pages are duplicated, as you point out, mostly for good reason (it makes sense to have Zanzibar as a separate destination, but also as a region of Tanzania; Kilimanjaro is our biggest destination so we want it on the main Africa pages (hence accessible from our home page) but it also belongs in the Trekking pages) I hadn't considered that this was a problem until you mentioned it - I'll look into how we can deindex some of these pages, or simply get our web designer to create just one of each page but separate hyperlinks - I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier. Thanks again for the suggestions.

Make sure that is promoted correctly and perhaps have a nice E-book image describing the content, this really helps with downloads I've found.

For aesthetic reasons or is this something that could directly benefit SEO?

 

[Scritty]

For aesthetic reasons or is this something that could directly benefit SEO?

Both. The image will have another URL which can be posted on image sites to promote the post. Google likes multimedia, so whatever page the PDF is linked from (a linking URL on a webpage say) will also contain an image.

But click through is the best reason. I'm not allowed to link out but on Forbes there is an article which says links in many cases images are something like 4x more likely to be clicked on. That's one very large up-tick for your click through rate.

Scritty

 

[JMaddox]

You can always check why your site has been penalized with a penalty checker - Jellyfish have a free tool (find it here http://www.jellyfish.net/seo-tools/google-penalty-checker ) that quickly figures out whether or not your site has been penalized.

 

[wearewattle]

Plenty! This is a massively helpful post. Thank you very much.

For aesthetic reasons or is this something that could directly benefit SEO?

I own a digital marketing agency that works with travel companies, I recently wrote a blog post that actually covers using brochure downloads for lead generation, it seems relevant to you so here it is http://www.wearewattle.com/blog/2014/07/travel-leads/