In the past six months I know of several prospects and AdWords clients whose site’s have received an organic smackdown from Google. Some business owners have come to us not even knowing that they have been hit by a penalty just that they seem to have dropped off Google.com. I will be writing a two post series on this topic.
First you need to know if you may have been hit by a penalty. Here’s how to tell.
1. Has your business suddenly dropped?
2. Have phone calls stopped?
3. When you do a search for your domain on Google do you even appear under your own business name.
There are different levels of severity of this visibility problem and some harder to correct than others. If you think you may have been hit by a Google penalty for organic placement, take time to dig a little deeper.
1. Do a search like this on Google: site:yourdomainname.com. Does anything come up?
2. When you do searches that you would typically appear for is your home page visible or just inside pages?
3. Check your Google Webmaster control panel for messages. If you don’t have one, set one up ASAP and verify your website there. You will want to look for messages and also manual actions.
4. Even if you do not have a message you may have still been hit by a Google penalty.
If you think you have been hit with a Google penalty what may have caused the penalty?
1. Duplicate content may be one issue.
2. Server and page problems. If your site is delivering a lot of 404 errors (file not found) you may have been penalized.
3. Your SEO firm has done some things without your knowledge that have caused a problem such as buying links, using link farm pages to try to boost link numbers, used keyword stuffing in your pages and source code, added hidden links to your pages. For the full list of possible reasons, please read this article for more insight. Know that even if you did not know of these tactics taken on your behalf you will still have the consequence.
On Thursday I will be writing about how to try to remediate your problem and get back on Google so make sure to check in.