Manual penalty or not?

[DingDing0220]

Has been doing guest post for over two years for two inner pages. This happened since last December, when it happened at the beginning, only two of my most import keywords disappeared from SERP. All my other keywords for the same inner page are fine and still show on SERP. I thought was Google dancing since there was a core update back in November. Then I realized that one (only one)of my my competitor's page also gone from SERP when search those two keywords. then a few weeks later, I searched those two keywords, it showed on SERP again, so did my competitor's page, but it won't stay on SERP for more than 2-3 days, it would be disappeared again from SERP, with my competitor's page at the same time. it just on and off like this for the past year, and my competitor's page would be always be on and disappeared at the same time. Most recently, the same thing happened to the other inner page I was doing guest post, 3 of the keywords are disappeared from SERP., and my competitor's page too.

I checked my Google search console, it has no warning or anything, This is so strange, and I couldn't figure out what really happened, and what's the cause. If this is Google dance, then it has been almost a year now, and just happened to a different inner page with different keywords. Do you guys think this is Google manual penalty?

Thanks in advance

 

[tazarbm]

it's definitely some sort of penalty, but not a manual one I think. As far as I know manual penalties totally obliterate your site from the SERPs, and they usually happen for 3 reasons: someone reports you for copyright / trademarking rights infringement, someone reports you for backlink building (or google themselves figure out what you're building links), or google employee review your site and find it low quality and decide to take it out of the index. These are the only reasons that I've heard sites being manually penalized for, but your site still ranks (albeit not for the main keywords), and this doesn't look like a manual penalty.

As for google dance, the dance usually happens for 2 reasons: your site is new and, thus, bounces in and out of the SERPs until google "figure" out where to rank it... or, your site had acquired a link (or more) that's capable of improving your ranking and so it will bounce in and out of the SERPs again (usually for few days) until it stabilizes where it should based on the power of that link / those links. It doesn't mean that each time you acquire a strong link your site is going to google dance, but I did see it happen before to not consider this a possibility.

These being said, the fact that your main keywords lose rankings during the same time each year (which, coincidentally or not, it's the highest spending time for people as it's near Black Friday and Christmas) makes me say something that I've heard numerous times before and which, knowing how scumbag-gy google are, I think to be true, which is: you're losing your rankings so that your spot can be taken up by the big budgeted sharks and mobsters that google loves keeping happy because those are the ones who put a lot of money into google's pockets via Google Ads. And if your keywords that lost their rankings have commercial intent (or if your site is ecom), then most likely this is the reason for you losing the rankings so conveniently for the ultra rich and powerful exactly when people spend a lot of money online, and then, starting with the new year when things go back to normal your rankings come back again, as well. Too much of a coincidence for me not to believe this conspiracy theory

And yeah, google are not going to give you warnings for this. They're not stupid to keep us aware of the real reasons they're doing all of the updates and algo shuffles that they do. That's why you're not seeing anything in your GSC.

In conclusion, I don't think it's a penalty (definitely not a manual one), but rather a filtering of some kind

 

[DingDing0220]

it's definitely some sort of penalty, but not a manual one I think. As far as I know manual penalties totally obliterate your site from the SERPs, and they usually happen for 3 reasons: someone reports you for copyright / trademarking rights infringement, someone reports you for backlink building (or google themselves figure out what you're building links), or google employee review your site and find it low quality and decide to take it out of the index. These are the only reasons that I've heard sites being manually penalized for, but your site still ranks (albeit not for the main keywords), and this doesn't look like a manual penalty.

As for google dance, the dance usually happens for 2 reasons: your site is new and, thus, bounces in and out of the SERPs until google "figure" out where to rank it... or, your site had acquired a link (or more) that's capable of improving your ranking and so it will bounce in and out of the SERPs again (usually for few days) until it stabilizes where it should based on the power of that link / those links. It doesn't mean that each time you acquire a strong link your site is going to google dance, but I did see it happen before to not consider this a possibility.

These being said, the fact that your main keywords lose rankings during the same time each year (which, coincidentally or not, it's the highest spending time for people as it's near Black Friday and Christmas) makes me say something that I've heard numerous times before and which, knowing how scumbag-gy google are, I think to be true, which is: you're losing your rankings so that your spot can be taken up by the big budgeted sharks and mobsters that google loves keeping happy because those are the ones who put a lot of money into google's pockets via Google Ads. And if your keywords that lost their rankings have commercial intent (or if your site is ecom), then most likely this is the reason for you losing the rankings so conveniently for the ultra rich and powerful exactly when people spend a lot of money online, and then, starting with the new year when things go back to normal your rankings come back again, as well. Too much of a coincidence for me not to believe this conspiracy theory

And yeah, google are not going to give you warnings for this. They're not stupid to keep us aware of the real reasons they're doing all of the updates and algo shuffles that they do. That's why you're not seeing anything in your GSC.

In conclusion, I don't think it's a penalty (definitely not a manual one), but rather a filtering of some kind

Thank you! I really appreciate it !