Ask HN: What do you do when your website seems to be penalised by Google?

41 pointsby mmavnnover 10 years ago

I have a personal blog (mostly dev related); it's been going for a while. On a couple of specialist subjects (F# type providers being the main example) some of the posts are reasonably popular and linked to by many other people. Although it's a small site, on these subjects it tends to show up in the first page on Bing, Duck Duck Go, etc for searches like "Type provider tutorial" and right at the top if you use a specific phrase (like the title of my most popular post, "Type Providers from the Ground Up".Google hates it. Basically, however specific the query, my blog never turns up unless you actually put the base url into your query. Ironically, plenty of spam sites' copies of the posts appear quite high in the search results.What do you do in these types of situations? I've done no SEO beyond writing content, so I'm pretty sure I've used no "black hat" techniques. I've no ads, no duplicate content. Google webmaster tools claims the site is not blacklisted and that there is nothing wrong with it.It feels wrong and possibly pointless to start again several years down the line with a new url just because Google doesn't seem to like the current one; but on the other hand, the lack of organic search results will always be a limit on the readership. For a personal blog this is irritating and disappointing - if I was freelance or this was my company blog, it would be a real and immediate financial hit.Thoughts or advice for people facing this situation?

8 comments

patio11over 10 years ago

This is a hard thing to debug from outside the Googleplex, but you are currently serving a canonical tag:<link rel="canonical" href="<a href="http://blog.mavnn.co.uk/type-providers-from-the-ground-up">" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mavnn.co.uk/type-providers-from-the-ground-up"></a>for a URL which cannot possibly return an HTTP 200. (It 301s to a URL with a / on the end.)This combination could cause Google to conclude that you have no page which requires inclusion in their main index.

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mtbcoderover 10 years ago

Regarding the spam sites, in your RSS feed, you are publishing your full articles. More than likely, the scraper sites are pulling directly from these feeds, publishing quickly and getting Googlebot to see the content before it hits your site (thus receiving attribution). I would suggest:1) Summaries only in RSS feeds. 2) Throttle the RSS feed back by several hours so that your latest article is not listed immediately. 3) Upon publishing, immediately link to the article via all of your social media outlets. 4) When internally linking within articles, use full URL paths and not relative. (If the spam sites are directly pulling your content and not cleaning up, you may be able to get a link back to your site from the scraped content.)When publishing, timing is everything. Just my $0.02 based on my own experiences dealing with spam sites.On a side note, even though we are in the age of HTML5, I would still suggest sticking with one H1 tag per page, if possible.

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dredgeover 10 years ago

Early last year Google asked people to report such problems. You probably won't see any direct impact from doing so, but there's no harm in trying.The form is still live at least: <a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tool-185532" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tool-185532</a>

JVerstryover 10 years ago

First, make sure your sitemap.xml is exhaustive. Then, check the number of indexed pages in Google Webmaster Tool (after a couple of days if you had to update you sitemap). If few pages are indexed, go through this checklist at <a href="https://ligatures.net/content/expertise/site-not-indexing-checklist.html" rel="nofollow">https://ligatures.net/content/expertise/site-not-indexing-ch...</a> to fix possible issues. If your pages are still not displayed in search results, then you are likely another victim of a well-known chicken-and-egg problem for content based sites: you need links for ranking and you need ranking to attract links. Yet, most niche are saturated and you are likely crushed by competition. The only efficient way out is to obtain dofollow backlinks from sites/blogs which are: i) Not under your control (i.e., a forum profile link is under your control...) ii) Editorially reviewed iii) Have relevant topics to yours iv) Which are already trusted by Google v) Which are popular Other links won't make much of a difference.

borrameover 10 years ago

I have the same situation, without manual actions in webmaster tools my website was wiped from search since 5th Dec 2014.It appears if you search domain.com and if you search site:domain.com but if you search just "domain" it doesn't appears and the website has been more than 10 years well indexed.I'm very worried because I can't contact google to know what happens because as I said I don't have manual penalties to reconsider and I'm losing my own users that search for the domain.

rfergieover 10 years ago

Have you registered your site with Google webmaster tools (<a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/</a>)?That would be a good first step for seeing if Google are having specific trouble with anything on your site

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kevinbowmanover 10 years ago

Presumably all of the spam copies are actually harming your rankings as well, as Google will see those as duplicate content.(Note that I'm guessing here, I have no particular authority in the area)

franzeover 10 years ago

hi, first things firstdo not use the word "penalty" - you want to show up for a certain query in google, you think you should show up for it, you don't show up for it.that is the issue, nothing else.you formulated a hypothesis: you think your site is "penalised by Google"ok, go to google webmaster tools and verify<pre><code> - http://blog.mavnn.co.uk/ - http://mavnn.co.uk/ - http://www.mavnn.co.uk/ </code></pre> check the "Site Messages" navigation point of all these domain variations, if you have a penalty, then there will be a message. pro tip: only ever talk about "penality" if you get a message that says you have a "penality". (everything else is just SEO b#llshit talk)my guess: there won't be such a message.ok, the second quess is the wrong canonical, you already fixed that one. but: if you point a canonical to an HTTP 301 redirect, and the redirect points back to the original URL google will basically ignore the canonical. the canonical could have been the issue, but as <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.mavnn.co.uk%2Ftype-providers-from-the-ground-up&pws=0&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.mavnn.co.uk%2Fty...</a> has been indexed (without ending slash) i doubt it.ok, let's look at anything that might be unusual about your sitei.e.: your start page <a href="http://www.mavnn.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mavnn.co.uk/</a>basically it consists out of a "Hello World" and a link to a broken URL and a link to a piece of duplicated text."Hello World" is a typical "this server was just set up, nothing to see here" message.your start page is not indexed (see: site:<a href="http://www.mavnn.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mavnn.co.uk/</a> )that is strange. let's formulate a hypothesis.your startpage communicated a basic "this server has just been set up, nothing to see here" message. google has a) no interrest into indexing such websites b) the webmasters are pretty pissed, if their newly set up servers are indexed in this way, as newly set up servers are usually not very secure, yetadditional google sees common subdomains i.e. blog.example.com as part of the main site and not as independent webproperties (yeah, they figured that one out quite some time ago).hypothesis: you communicate via your startsite that your website is not yet - probably - set up and that is why it does not send you traffic.my bet is, that this is the case. why? because you startpage is the one thing that is definitely not ... like other websites our there.fix it, two possibilities: <a href="http://www.mavnn.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mavnn.co.uk/</a> -> HTTP 301 -> <a href="http://blog.mavnn.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mavnn.co.uk/</a>or you set up a proper startpage, some text what this is, some links to your other ressources.after you have done one of this, do a fetch-as-googlebot (via google webmaster tools) and click the "submit to index" button.wait two days.if not, test another hypothesis or post in the google webmaster forum, actually google guys dig these kind of errors.