Punished in Google - but in a weird way!

by qto
6 replies
  • SEO
  • |
Hi there!

Around the 20th of December all my rankings was completely discarded in Google, which came as nothing less than a mild surprise.

The website this happened to is Epic-Shirts.com

All my pages are still indexed by Google, but I don't have any of the rankings I had before. As an example was the homepage ranked on the first page on "epic shirts". I have a large product portfolio (around 400) and I got a good amount of direct traffic to all these sub pages being the individual t-shirts ie. Big Face Pug T-Shirt - Epic-Shirts.com on search phrases like "big face pug t-shirt" and "golden retriever face t-shirt" etc. The point is the traffic was relevant for my site.

Epic-shirts.com is an affiliate site and it was actually doing really well until it got hit. To me it seems like people found it helpful and relevant, when looking at GA. Added to this the site is from October, so its rather new.

Today, I still get visitors from organic searches but the keywords are widely irrelevant as opposed to my site.

These are the top keywords from organic traffic:

1. Rottweiler
2. Black Panther
3. Boston Terrier
4. Werewolf
5. French Bulldog
6. Saint Bernard
7. Chihuahua

Still the search volume of these is minimal.

What is weird is that I am even found on these search terms. I would never rank anywhere near the top 100 search results for such high volume search terms.

The primary concerns I have as to what has caused my site to disengage from the search engines are

1. Duplicate content (I might have a little on some of the individual portfolio pages such as short reviews from Amazon, but I have deleted most of them)

2. My back links (One of my friends is a SEO and pretty good at it, and he looked at my back links as well as the anchor texts and it didn't look particularly unnatural and I do have a good amount of external articles with dofollow link. I might have been doing a bit too much blog commenting and such, but I have been writing good responses and not just the usual "great post thanks cu".

Can any of you be of service and give me a clue or directioner to where I should point my focus and what I should do/change/add?

The two last blog posts I did a couple of weeks ago have been indexed, but with a weird looking meta-description that doesn't accord with the one I provided myself via (Wordpress SEO).

These are the ones:

The Mountain T-Shirts - Everything About the Epic Shirts
The Mountain T-Shirts - Everything About the Epic Shirts

I would sincerely appreciate help on this one


NOTE: As you can probably see I am not the most experienced dude within SEO.

Cheers,

Joen
#google #punished #weird
  • Profile picture of the author HKSEO Jonbones
    were the keywords that you are now ranking for part of your keyword group originally? Or have these popped up seemingly out of no where?
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    • Profile picture of the author qto
      No they were absolutely not part of it. But it's not like I am ranking for these keywords. I just get a little bit of traffic from these. I am not even in top 100 on them and the traffic is from weird small countries all around world.

      So yes, they have popped up seemingly out of nowhere!
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  • You are probably traffic on related words because of LSI. Happens to me all the time. Some 20% of my traffic is from searches I had never optimized for. I rank for long tail keyword and LSI keywords but not for the short tail keywords I had optimized for.
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    • Profile picture of the author PulseK
      I can't guess why it didn't get penalized earlier, as opposed to now, but I think you have serious onsite issues.

      Post-Panda, the site architecture has become more important. Google has a page based view of the web meaning that having a lot of content moving around inside of one page is not to your advantage.

      Also, you have a veerrrrrry long page load time, which is less than optimal.

      I would go to a standard page layout showing different categories and different products on their own pages rather than weird popups and disappearing items and I'll bet you'll see an improvement
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      • Profile picture of the author qto
        Originally Posted by PulseK View Post

        I can't guess why it didn't get penalized earlier, as opposed to now, but I think you have serious onsite issues.

        Post-Panda, the site architecture has become more important. Google has a page based view of the web meaning that having a lot of content moving around inside of one page is not to your advantage.

        Also, you have a veerrrrrry long page load time, which is less than optimal.

        I would go to a standard page layout showing different categories and different products on their own pages rather than weird popups and disappearing items and I'll bet you'll see an improvement
        Thanks for you feedback! What do you mean with content moving around inside one page? I know the load time is ridiculous, but I have no idea how to fix it. I might have too many items on the frontpage.

        Also about the weird popups and disappearing items, I'm not sure what you mean?

        Cheers!
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        • Profile picture of the author PulseK
          On a traditional page (i.e. not using javascripts and ajax) when you click a link, it goes to a new url and shows new content. On your site, you don't go to a new page, you just hide some content and display some other.

          That's why your load time is so long. Everything is on one page which all loads at one time.
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