It’s the bain of any SEO or webmaster’s existence…your site for some reason has been penalized by Google and you’re experiencing a drop in rankings or site traffic. It may seem that all you have worked for may be slipping away. Your boss is unhappy or worse, that client you labored to obtain is getting nervous or upset.
No reason for despair if this happens to you. Rather, look at it as a process of discovery as to why you’re site’s dropped…you may be surprised at what you find out.
Here’s a method you can use to aid in your quest of finding the source of your problem and getting right with Google…watch the video below for more details.
Are you sure it’s a penalty?
There’s a good chance that it’s not even a penalty per se but more of a technical issue. Maybe there’s a crawl problem or you forgot to include keywords in some of your content. Check and see if Google is indexing your pages by typing a keyword phrase, a colon then your web address (keyword:http://www.yoursite.com/) and see if they’re indexing your pages.
Try and identify whether you’re experiencing a rankings drop or a traffic drop…doing that will help you determine what you can do to fix the problem.
Are any links you have causing the problem?
Links are big part of building rankings in the search engines so it stands to reason something could go wrong and cause a drop in rankings or traffic. There are a couple of possible reasons for this.
The first is a more outright penalty for having links from sites that make it look kind of obvious that you’re employing spammy/black hat type practices. They frown upon this and you can consider it to be more of a direct penalty.
On the other hand, you have many sites linking to you that were acquired legitimately through Google’s eyes that may not be valued as much or not at all for whatever reason. Maybe they’re engaging in bad linking practices or another site linking to them is. Either way, the link value you were getting isn’t there anymore so it will be prudent to get rid of that link to try and remedy the problem.
Getting right with Google
Once you’ve identified the problem, now you need to get back on the right side with Google’s spam team. Getting back in is usually based on three factors:
- Severity of the penalty or mistake
- Is this the first time or is it a repeat problem?
- Are you a brand name or little guy?
The more severe the error the tougher it will be getting back into Google. If you’ve engaged in any spammy/black hat practices for example you will have a harder time getting back in. First timers are given a little more leniency than repeat situations. And of course, size matters in this world so if you’re a big brand name site like Sony, Walmart, etc. you will have an easier time.
But if you’re a little guy and it’s the third time on a pretty bad penalty, you’re probably toast…you’re really at the mercy of the Google gods so the best thing to do is when you contact their spam team, be completely honest about any mistakes, etc. and what you discovered as your problem.
It’s possible they may ignore you and at some point, you will need to decide what to do. If you go a couple of months and you’re not getting anywhere with Google after you’ve discovered your problem, consider redirecting your site through a 301 redirect and starting over.
As you see, there are many reasons why you could be experiencing trouble with your Google rankings…watch the video for more details and other technical reasons as to why.