Tell me more ×
Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for pro webmasters. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 1 down vote favorite

I had a site that ranked top 3 for one keyword term and top 6 for another.

At the beginning of October both terms dropped radically from the search results.

I had recently changed the .htaccess file to stop redirecting 404 back to the home page.

This resulted in the following:

  1. Some old links to non SEO optimised pages being reported as crawl errors in google webmaster toolkit.
  2. Old pages which have been renamed over the last year being crawled by googlebot because of the redirect back to the homepage

Also I noticed that the pages containing the keywords were not included in the internal links in google webmaster toolkit anymore.

I have added 301 redirects for the crawl errors and the 301 redirects for the updated file names and I am awaiting for google webmaster toolkit to clear the crawl errors and for googlebot to start crawling the correct pages, but I am worried that there is more of a problem for the keywords ranking than the pages errors.

Is there any way of determining if the site has been punished for certain the keywords?

share|improve this question

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Google only punishes a site if it is caught trying to manipulate the SERPs. If you saw a drop in your rankings immediately after making some big changes then the odds are those changes have played a role in the change in rankings you saw. The first thing you should do is undo the changes you have made if possible. If your ranking return you can start making changes again but do them one at a time so you can see what affect they have on your rankings. That will help you identify which change is affecting you the most.

share|improve this answer
The changes were made a month ago so I fear it may be too late to revert and need to stick with the changes instead of changing back and upsetting the algorithm further. I'm monitoring the log file to make sure everything is in order and hoping googlebot eventually only crawls the most up to date URLs. If all is not well after this then I will need to do some further SEO analysis but was hoping to start looking at pages that had maybe been punished for being over optimised – Craig Angus Oct 25 '10 at 13:33
There is no such thing as "over optimized". There only is "poorly done". "Over optimized" is when the search engines are placed above the users in terms of priority. This almost always results in problems. – John Conde♦ Oct 25 '10 at 13:53
up vote 2 down vote

Google Webmaster Tools is the first place to look - you can see which pages Googlebot expects to see which are now throwing a 404 error.

I wouldn't say that your site is being punished - that would imply that there is an intent behind the change in your rankings; it's really just a matter of showing Googlebot that the links to your bygone content are still relevant to your site.

If possible, I would use 301 redirects to push rank from the content which is no longer there to existing content which has similar relevance (or just back to the homepage) and set up a sitemap to ensure that all valid pages are enumerated for indexing.

This might also be a good time to work at building some new links to your site, as well - couldn't hurt and it may help to get Googlebot through your site sooner (depending upon your present indexing priority).

share|improve this answer
up vote -1 down vote

Just try to search in Google some "very unique phrase from your site" in quotes and check search results. If you will not find your site in first page of search results - than you are punished by Google.

share|improve this answer
The questioner wanted to know if it was for some of the keywords, not generally. – paulmorriss Apr 23 '12 at 14:29

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.