Does your site have problems with Google?
The purpose of this publication is to explain to webmasters the main reasons why their sites may, to put it mildly, dislike Google. It also offers a diagnostic system whether the site has fallen under the sanction of Google or not.
Is my site under Google filter? How to find out how? Sank the site in the issue, what is the reason? Positions are falling and there is no attendance, what's the matter?
With that title, you’ll see topics on most well-known SEO forums and the Google Webmaster Help Forum .
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Immediately, we note that instead of the word “filters” in such situations it is more appropriate to use the word “algorithms”.
In fact, the cause of problems with the site may not be related to Google’s impact measures.
1. First, check if there are any problems with hosting.
2. Then check if this meta tag is present in the source code.
As the experience of communicating with webmasters on the Google Help Forum has shown, the presence of this meta tag in the code is a typical mistake for WordPress sites. Why WordPress is difficult to say, but these are the results of observations. Probably, webmasters sometimes forget to remove the index in the theme settings, which prohibits search engines from scanning the site. The second option - this meta tag appeared as a result of hacking the site.
3. Verify that the primary site domain is configured correctly.
4. Check your robots.txt, if you have not closed there is something extra.
If none of the above is the cause of problems with the site, then you need to dig in the direction of Google.
There are only three communication channels through which you can accurately find out from Google whether your site fell out of favor (under sanctions) or not. The first and easiest is to check both (all) versions of the site in the Google Search Console for the presence of measures taken manually (section “Search traffic”). The second is to go to the Google Webmaster Help Forum. For each help forum assigned employee Google. In the Russian-speaking webmaster forum, these are Andrei Lipattsev and Ekaterina Chertkova. When contacting the forum, it is not necessary to write something like “Andrey Lipattsev, help” in the title of the topic. The fact is that the Google employee responds to the forum if he has time for it or if the Leading participants cannot offer a unique solution (notify the Google employee). The third channel is to write to the Google Webmaster Community . There, too, Google employee Andrei Lipattsev often answers questions from users.
If you find a message about measures in the Search Console , read it carefully and follow the instructions.
Practice shows that in 75 percent of cases, measures are applied for reference and anchor spam, 10 percent for uninformative and useless content (usually as a supplement to the copyright breaches), 10 percent for concealment and covert redirection — for example, for a wap click, and 5 percent for other violations of the Recommendations for webmasters.
If there is no report on measures in the Search Console, but the traffic and the site’s position are falling sharply, or, God forbid, the site was completely excluded from the index, then the most likely cause is the effect of one of Google’s algorithms.
There are four main algorithms that webmasters know about and that affect ranking:
Page Layout Algorithm - punishes websites for an excessive amount of advertising.
Categorically should not overload the top of the web page with advertisements. A flurry of advertising should not fall on users coming to your site . [1]
Pirate Algorithm - pessimizes websites for copyright infringement (DMCA). Google also has a special form through which the right holder can file a complaint. In practice, there have been cases when, due to a complaint of the right holder on the illegal use of images, the main page of the site was removed from the index. All information on such violations (“abuses”) is eventually collected in Lumen (previously in Chilling Effects).
Google Penguin - Penguin is probably one of the most famous algorithm in the webmaster environment. It is designed to deal with all cases and types of spam on the Internet.
Google Panda is an algorithm that got its name from the name of one of Google’s engineers - Panda Navneet. Google Panda is an algorithm for changing the results of Google search rankings, which was first released in February 2011. The changes are aimed at lowering the rank of substandard sites or useless content, and returning to the top of the search results for high-quality sites . [2]
Additionally, we recommend to study:
Amit Singhal. Additional recommendations for creating sites with high-quality content.
In fact, there are significantly more such algorithms than four. About many of them, for example about Payday Loan Algorithm, little is known to webmasters or practically nothing is known.
Information about whether a site is affected by a particular algorithm is known only to Google employees. Naturally, they do not share this with webmasters.
Thus, we (webmasters) can only assume whether the site is pessimized by Google’s algorithms or not. There are several markers on which it can be assumed which algorithm affects the site and for what.
Consequently, the first and main marker is a sharp drop in traffic, positions in the search results. This suggests that in the eyes of Google, your site is drastically lost in quality. You need to establish the cause.
If the site is hung with advertising as a New Year tree - the impact of Page Layout algorithm is possible. Here you need to take into account the following nuance:
Type in the search box operator site: domain.com, press the Enter key. Add to the end of the link in the browser & start = 990 and press the Enter key again. View from the end selectively five pages of issue results. If you see the message “In response to a complaint received on the basis of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (US Copyright Act in the digital age), we deleted several results ...” - this means that the copyright holder filed a complaint against you. The more complaints, the higher the likelihood of being affected by the Pirate Algorithm.
The second marker is spam diagnostics.
Analyze your domain service Ahrefs . Pay attention to sharp peak jumps in the growth of dofollow-links .
Linking dates can also be used to detect spam. Usually, a “law-abiding” document (page) draws backlinks slowly. A large (peak) increase in the number of backlinks may indicate that the page is the source of popular news, or signal an attempt to search for spam. [five]
Despite the fact that Google does not officially confirm this, you should listen to the opinion of the founder of Cognitiveseo Razvan Gavrilas and Vareni Vyacheslav that if the share of dofollow links in the structure of the reference profile is less than 10 percent, this may indicate its unnatural (spam a) formation.
Pay attention to the anchor structure of your backlinks. In our opinion, anchors with a share of more than 15 percent of the total can be classified as spam.
An excessive amount of keywords in the content and in the meta tags also indicate spam.
The third marker is content quality.
The automatically generated text, the text “how to pour a glass of water”, the absence of its useful and informative main content - may be the reason for the pessimization of the site.
The best way to see if the site has escaped the algorithm is to track organic traffic with analytics, paying attention to large drops. Then you should check to see if Google has confirmed the updates. [6]
You can check whether the site has a Panda or Penguin algorithm using online tools or analyze them yourself.
Google Penguin Checker Tool - shows the dynamics of organic traffic using SEMrush data and Penguin algorithm updates.
Website Penalty Indicator is a more functional online tool. He also uses SEMrush data, but in addition to Penguin updates, he also shows updates of several important algorithms, including Google Panda.
If you want to use the online tool, it is better to choose one that takes data from Google Analytics.
Barracuda is a free service that uses data from Google Analytics and shows the dynamics of traffic between Google Panda and Google Penguin updates.
As for the tool Diagnostics sanctions from SEOlib, unfortunately it has not recently updated information on the latest updates of Google algorithms.
For self-analysis, log in to Google Analytics - Traffic Sources - All Traffic - Source / Channel. Here you need to pay attention to what place in the list is “google / organic”. This is usually the first or second position.
As we see at this site organic traffic from Google is only the third, and Yandex is the fifth.
Check the box next to "google / organic" and click on the "Show on Chart" button. Match the periods of sharp decline in organic traffic with Google with confirmed dates of updates to Google algorithms.
We hope that this article will help you quickly figure out whether any sanctions apply to your site or not.
Information sources
[1] searchengines.ru "Matt Cutts at Pubcon Las Vegas 2013: What Google Webmasters Should Wait for Soon."
[2] Google Panda. Wikipedia article.
[3] searchengines.ru "Google does not give advice to those whose sites have suffered from algorithmic sanctions."
[4] Hangout with webmasters - 06/18/15 - Recommendations for quality assurance (50th minute).
[5] Document scoring based on document inception date. United States Patent Application 20070094254. Kind Code A1. Cutts; Matt; et al. April 26, 2007.
[6] searchengines.ru Google Panda 4.2: Questions and Answers.
Is my site under Google filter? How to find out how? Sank the site in the issue, what is the reason? Positions are falling and there is no attendance, what's the matter?
With that title, you’ll see topics on most well-known SEO forums and the Google Webmaster Help Forum .
')
Immediately, we note that instead of the word “filters” in such situations it is more appropriate to use the word “algorithms”.
In fact, the cause of problems with the site may not be related to Google’s impact measures.
Technical side
1. First, check if there are any problems with hosting.
2. Then check if this meta tag is present in the source code.
/>
As the experience of communicating with webmasters on the Google Help Forum has shown, the presence of this meta tag in the code is a typical mistake for WordPress sites. Why WordPress is difficult to say, but these are the results of observations. Probably, webmasters sometimes forget to remove the index in the theme settings, which prohibits search engines from scanning the site. The second option - this meta tag appeared as a result of hacking the site.
3. Verify that the primary site domain is configured correctly.
4. Check your robots.txt, if you have not closed there is something extra.
Will Matt Cutts call?
If none of the above is the cause of problems with the site, then you need to dig in the direction of Google.
There are only three communication channels through which you can accurately find out from Google whether your site fell out of favor (under sanctions) or not. The first and easiest is to check both (all) versions of the site in the Google Search Console for the presence of measures taken manually (section “Search traffic”). The second is to go to the Google Webmaster Help Forum. For each help forum assigned employee Google. In the Russian-speaking webmaster forum, these are Andrei Lipattsev and Ekaterina Chertkova. When contacting the forum, it is not necessary to write something like “Andrey Lipattsev, help” in the title of the topic. The fact is that the Google employee responds to the forum if he has time for it or if the Leading participants cannot offer a unique solution (notify the Google employee). The third channel is to write to the Google Webmaster Community . There, too, Google employee Andrei Lipattsev often answers questions from users.
If you find a message about measures in the Search Console , read it carefully and follow the instructions.
Practice shows that in 75 percent of cases, measures are applied for reference and anchor spam, 10 percent for uninformative and useless content (usually as a supplement to the copyright breaches), 10 percent for concealment and covert redirection — for example, for a wap click, and 5 percent for other violations of the Recommendations for webmasters.
If there is no report on measures in the Search Console, but the traffic and the site’s position are falling sharply, or, God forbid, the site was completely excluded from the index, then the most likely cause is the effect of one of Google’s algorithms.
Google's basic algorithms
There are four main algorithms that webmasters know about and that affect ranking:
Page Layout Algorithm - punishes websites for an excessive amount of advertising.
Categorically should not overload the top of the web page with advertisements. A flurry of advertising should not fall on users coming to your site . [1]
Pirate Algorithm - pessimizes websites for copyright infringement (DMCA). Google also has a special form through which the right holder can file a complaint. In practice, there have been cases when, due to a complaint of the right holder on the illegal use of images, the main page of the site was removed from the index. All information on such violations (“abuses”) is eventually collected in Lumen (previously in Chilling Effects).
Google Penguin - Penguin is probably one of the most famous algorithm in the webmaster environment. It is designed to deal with all cases and types of spam on the Internet.
Google Panda is an algorithm that got its name from the name of one of Google’s engineers - Panda Navneet. Google Panda is an algorithm for changing the results of Google search rankings, which was first released in February 2011. The changes are aimed at lowering the rank of substandard sites or useless content, and returning to the top of the search results for high-quality sites . [2]
Additionally, we recommend to study:
Amit Singhal. Additional recommendations for creating sites with high-quality content.
In fact, there are significantly more such algorithms than four. About many of them, for example about Payday Loan Algorithm, little is known to webmasters or practically nothing is known.
Ways to diagnose the effects of algorithms
Information about whether a site is affected by a particular algorithm is known only to Google employees. Naturally, they do not share this with webmasters.
As for the search algorithms, here we usually cannot give any specific advice .
John Mueller [3]
Thus, we (webmasters) can only assume whether the site is pessimized by Google’s algorithms or not. There are several markers on which it can be assumed which algorithm affects the site and for what.
The best indicator of site quality is traffic.
Maria Moeva [4]
Consequently, the first and main marker is a sharp drop in traffic, positions in the search results. This suggests that in the eyes of Google, your site is drastically lost in quality. You need to establish the cause.
If the site is hung with advertising as a New Year tree - the impact of Page Layout algorithm is possible. Here you need to take into account the following nuance:
Starting today [Nov 2 2015 - approx. auth. ], pages with interstitial ads for installing applications that hide a significant amount of content when switching from search results pages will no longer be considered as adapted for mobile devices . Instead of full-page interstitial ads, we recommend webmasters to use more user-friendly formats, such as banners for installing applications.
Andrey Lipattsev
Type in the search box operator site: domain.com, press the Enter key. Add to the end of the link in the browser & start = 990 and press the Enter key again. View from the end selectively five pages of issue results. If you see the message “In response to a complaint received on the basis of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (US Copyright Act in the digital age), we deleted several results ...” - this means that the copyright holder filed a complaint against you. The more complaints, the higher the likelihood of being affected by the Pirate Algorithm.
The second marker is spam diagnostics.
Analyze your domain service Ahrefs . Pay attention to sharp peak jumps in the growth of dofollow-links .
Linking dates can also be used to detect spam. Usually, a “law-abiding” document (page) draws backlinks slowly. A large (peak) increase in the number of backlinks may indicate that the page is the source of popular news, or signal an attempt to search for spam. [five]
Despite the fact that Google does not officially confirm this, you should listen to the opinion of the founder of Cognitiveseo Razvan Gavrilas and Vareni Vyacheslav that if the share of dofollow links in the structure of the reference profile is less than 10 percent, this may indicate its unnatural (spam a) formation.
Pay attention to the anchor structure of your backlinks. In our opinion, anchors with a share of more than 15 percent of the total can be classified as spam.
An excessive amount of keywords in the content and in the meta tags also indicate spam.
The third marker is content quality.
The automatically generated text, the text “how to pour a glass of water”, the absence of its useful and informative main content - may be the reason for the pessimization of the site.
The best way to see if the site has escaped the algorithm is to track organic traffic with analytics, paying attention to large drops. Then you should check to see if Google has confirmed the updates. [6]
You can check whether the site has a Panda or Penguin algorithm using online tools or analyze them yourself.
Google Penguin Checker Tool - shows the dynamics of organic traffic using SEMrush data and Penguin algorithm updates.
Website Penalty Indicator is a more functional online tool. He also uses SEMrush data, but in addition to Penguin updates, he also shows updates of several important algorithms, including Google Panda.
I would like to explain how we collect our data. We have a database of 106 million of the most popular keywords distributed across 26 regional databases. When we update a keyword, we search for it in Google and take a snapshot of the first two pages of the issue.
Thus, if there is no traffic information in SEMrush, this means that the domain did not appear in the results on the first two pages for the keywords contained in our database. Usually, however, estimated traffic according to SEMrush is less traffic in Google Analytics.
Elizaveta Lavrienko, SEMrush Customer Support Specialist
If you want to use the online tool, it is better to choose one that takes data from Google Analytics.
Barracuda is a free service that uses data from Google Analytics and shows the dynamics of traffic between Google Panda and Google Penguin updates.
As for the tool Diagnostics sanctions from SEOlib, unfortunately it has not recently updated information on the latest updates of Google algorithms.
For self-analysis, log in to Google Analytics - Traffic Sources - All Traffic - Source / Channel. Here you need to pay attention to what place in the list is “google / organic”. This is usually the first or second position.
As we see at this site organic traffic from Google is only the third, and Yandex is the fifth.
Check the box next to "google / organic" and click on the "Show on Chart" button. Match the periods of sharp decline in organic traffic with Google with confirmed dates of updates to Google algorithms.
We hope that this article will help you quickly figure out whether any sanctions apply to your site or not.
Information sources
[1] searchengines.ru "Matt Cutts at Pubcon Las Vegas 2013: What Google Webmasters Should Wait for Soon."
[2] Google Panda. Wikipedia article.
[3] searchengines.ru "Google does not give advice to those whose sites have suffered from algorithmic sanctions."
[4] Hangout with webmasters - 06/18/15 - Recommendations for quality assurance (50th minute).
[5] Document scoring based on document inception date. United States Patent Application 20070094254. Kind Code A1. Cutts; Matt; et al. April 26, 2007.
[6] searchengines.ru Google Panda 4.2: Questions and Answers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/274189/
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