Google Penalty or not? What to do next?

Hello everyone, as a new website owner, I am having some problems and I am waiting for your suggestions.

The thing is, I have a 1-year-old website. Recently, I completely updated my website, at the beginning of May. This was a major update, so I made huge changes to both its code and content, and added approximately 1500+ pages.

Everything was fine for the first month, my website were starting to rank and I was gaining some long tail keywords. But then, I lost all my keywords and thus organic traffic dropped to zero. I was gained keywords after Google's March update, and I all lost my keywords before the June update.

Search Console


Ahrefs


Semrush


I already solved all the technical problems. My website's SEO score is above 85-90 in all audits. I get an almost perfect score of 100/100/100 on PageSpeed Insights, and my site is very fast and mobile friendly.

There is no harmful content, spam, malware or popups/ads on my site. The keywords I target are not very competitive. All 1500 pages have been indexed. I do not have a deindexed page. There is no manual action in search console.

so I don't know if this is a google penalty or not. I have no backlinks and authority, but if there is a penalty, I need to decide whether I should leave this site before building backlinks.

I added my site to bing about 3 weeks ago. Even though not all pages are indexed, it performs very well, like 80 impressions - 20 clicks per day.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

looks like a penalty, but I'm not sure of which type (algo or manual). If it's manual, you\re probably screwed, if it's algo you might be able to do something about it...

That authority score of 7, though is awful, google mostly prefers big sites nowadays, so work towards building up your site's authority by building strong links to the homepage (mostly, but also to other important inner pages as pointing 100% of your backlinks to the homepage screams link building)

And speaking of link building, how good is your internal linking game? These things matter nowadays, more than in the past, so step your internal linking game up if you've not done it already!

And what about the content? How good is the content, and how AI is it? Unedited AI sites tend to be hammered lately...

Actually, now that I'm re-reading your post, this thing worries me:

actafool said:

This was a major update, so I made huge changes to both its code and content, and added approximately 1500+ pages.

Click to expand...

you see, google kind of hates new sites that get 1000s of pages all of a sudden, and your site is 1 year old and adding 1500 pages all of a sudden screams.... I don't know... it screams of something google probably doesn't like

If I were to guess, I'd speculate (the key word here is SPECULATE, as in, I'm not 100% sure, I'm just throwing theories out there) that google have recorded the pattern at which your site gains links and publishes content over its existence (1 year in your case) and they've registered this as a "safe and natural growing" for your website, which is why they've given you rankings and traffic. But now, all of a sudden, 1500 pages show up all at once and this might have thrown your site's safety before google off, which is why you might have been penalized.

Either of these, or you've been affected by google's latest update, I can't say which one is true, but these are the points I would look into first...

June 2024 is spam update check backlinks and content

Can anyone tell me, what happens when Google penalty?

hit by the classifier. you are content site and pure content site is bye bye in this update.

First google index your page and keywords after that you will get a "rank" after that if you dont incrase your quality of website , speed , link building etc... will drop ! Definetly its not google punished in your case + after 2-3 days you can`t see that. Some of my website drop 70% and then recover....

I think the "power of AI" content got you a manual penalty.

The update was about that in May. If such is the case, you need a complete overhaul of content, and then slowly build authority links to your main pages, and give it 4-6 months and I am sure you would be able to get some results.

My website traffic down in 2 days. How is it possbile?

actafool said:

Hello everyone, as a new website owner, I am having some problems and I am waiting for your suggestions.

The thing is, I have a 1-year-old website. Recently, I completely updated my website, at the beginning of May. This was a major update, so I made huge changes to both its code and content, and added approximately 1500+ pages.

Everything was fine for the first month, my website were starting to rank and I was gaining some long tail keywords. But then, I lost all my keywords and thus organic traffic dropped to zero. I was gained keywords after Google's March update, and I all lost my keywords before the June update.

Search Console
View attachment 359716

Ahrefs
View attachment 359717

Semrush
View attachment 359718

I already solved all the technical problems. My website's SEO score is above 85-90 in all audits. I get an almost perfect score of 100/100/100 on PageSpeed Insights, and my site is very fast and mobile friendly.

There is no harmful content, spam, malware or popups/ads on my site. The keywords I target are not very competitive. All 1500 pages have been indexed. I do not have a deindexed page. There is no manual action in search console.

so I don't know if this is a google penalty or not. I have no backlinks and authority, but if there is a penalty, I need to decide whether I should leave this site before building backlinks.

I added my site to bing about 3 weeks ago. Even though not all pages are indexed, it performs very well, like 80 impressions - 20 clicks per day.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Click to expand...

This is google algo update result... nothing you can do.

The only thing that might help is to use a new domain name... and of course redirect all the pages from the old one with 301.

yalang said:

I think the "power of AI" content got you a manual penalty.

The update was about that in May. If such is the case, you need a complete overhaul of content, and then slowly build authority links to your main pages, and give it 4-6 months and I am sure you would be able to get some results.

Click to expand...

Nothing to do with AI.

Mr BOLD said:

Can anyone tell me, what happens when Google penalty?

Click to expand...

You dissapear from google search results pretty much almost completely.

Thank you all for your answers. There is definitely something strange.

I notice a lot of interesting details, or they seem interesting to me because I'm new to this. I see a lot of Chinese traffic on Cloudflare and Google Analytics. There are also 20 backlinks, although not many, coming from some spam sites. I don't know when these were added or whether they caused me to lose rank.

However, I am still getting impressions and clicks, even if very few of them. So I haven't been completely removed from Google. Indexing of 1500 pages took from 1 May to 9 July. During this process, I made a lot of improvements, such as adding schema markups and improving meta tags.

Still, I need to find what google hates. If there is an expert, you can review my site in terms of tech and content.

I am attaching the difference between the first month and the current month after update as a screenshot.

tazarbm said:

And speaking of link building, how good is your internal linking game?

Click to expand...

I don't know how good my internal links are. While the total internal link count in GSC appears to be 28,198, it only points to 40 different pages. The vast majority of them are links in the header and footer anyway.

4440 said:

hit by the classifier. you are content site and pure content site is bye bye in this update.

Click to expand...

Actually, this is a completely unique project, it does not fall into any category or classification, of course, I don't know what Google thinks.

yalang said:

I think the "power of AI" content got you a manual penalty.

Click to expand...

There isn't a lot of AI-generated content out there. Also no manual penalty. This is not even a blog. The 1500 pages I added are similar to product pages, they are fetched from my database and provide some information.

petersonpol said:

This is google algo update result... nothing you can do.

The only thing that might help is to use a new domain name... and of course redirect all the pages from the old one with 301.

Click to expand...

How can you be sure of this?

By the way, I think a few of my competitors are experiencing similar problems, but their authority is also very low. Maybe it's a problem with authority, I don't know.

If this is a penalty, is it a good idea to re-establish the exact same site and content with a new domain? By removing the things that cause problems, of course. I'm waiting for your suggestions.

actafool said:

Thank you all for your answers. There is definitely something strange.

I notice a lot of interesting details, or they seem interesting to me because I'm new to this. I see a lot of Chinese traffic on Cloudflare and Google Analytics. There are also 20 backlinks, although not many, coming from some spam sites. I don't know when these were added or whether they caused me to lose rank.

However, I am still getting impressions and clicks, even if very few of them. So I haven't been completely removed from Google. Indexing of 1500 pages took from 1 May to 9 July. During this process, I made a lot of improvements, such as adding schema markups and improving meta tags.

Still, I need to find what google hates. If there is an expert, you can review my site in terms of tech and content.

I am attaching the difference between the first month and the current month after update as a screenshot.
View attachment 359966


I don't know how good my internal links are. While the total internal link count in GSC appears to be 28,198, it only points to 40 different pages. The vast majority of them are links in the header and footer anyway.


Actually, this is a completely unique project, it does not fall into any category or classification, of course, I don't know what Google thinks.


There isn't a lot of AI-generated content out there. Also no manual penalty. This is not even a blog. The 1500 pages I added are similar to product pages, they are fetched from my database and provide some information.


How can you be sure of this?

By the way, I think a few of my competitors are experiencing similar problems, but their authority is also very low. Maybe it's a problem with authority, I don't know.

If this is a penalty, is it a good idea to re-establish the exact same site and content with a new domain? By removing the things that cause problems, of course. I'm waiting for your suggestions.

Click to expand...

I did the domain name swap few times in the past and always worked. Make sure it is redirected properly - each page to each page with 301.

You can do changes on your website if you like and wait but nothing will change. Google marked your domain name as poor. They will ignore whatever you do on the website.

It's algo Penalty

For Manual Penalty you get message on webmaster and email

Check Backlinks Quality and try to Focus only on Authority, you may get your rankings back !!

actafool said:

I don't know how good my internal links are. While the total internal link count in GSC appears to be 28,198, it only points to 40 different pages. The vast majority of them are links in the header and footer anyway.

Click to expand...

linking from header / footer is not internal link. You need to link from content on the page to other content on other page in the same silo (category), similarly to what Wikipedia does (WP has lots of internal links on each page... well, on pages with lots of content anyway, that's proper internal linking)

30k pages is a lot, and interlinking them with each other (where it makes sense) is a lot of work, but you can try automated tools like Link Whisper (if you're on Wordpress).

Although, I tend to agree with the other people that if google had flagged / blacklisted your domain there's nothing you can do about it. Someone said that you should 301 to new domain, but this only works if your current domain is blacklisted, if it's algo penalty the penalty will transfer to the new domain through 301, so it's 50-50 chance that it works

Hmm…sounds like your site might be experiencing a Google algorithm update effect. Even with a solid SEO score and fast site, major changes can sometimes cause ranking drops. Keep building quality content and backlinks…..and monitor Google's updates for any potential impacts. If Bing is performing well, that’s a good sign—Google might catch up soon.

Go for penalty, it will help you avoid the things you’ve done in the future.

ok, another month has passed, during this period I removed the pages that could be considered spam by G, I acquired high DA backlinks, my DA is now 9 according to MOZ, and I still get 0 clicks from Google. I lost all my keywords. There is no manual penalty but my visibility is 0% according to semrush.

Still, traffic continues to come from baidu, yahoo and bing.

In this case how do I diagnose the problem or the reason for the penalty, or do I have to wait for the new August update?

actafool said:

ok, another month has passed, during this period I removed the pages that could be considered spam by G, I acquired high DA backlinks, my DA is now 9 according to MOZ, and I still get 0 clicks from Google. I lost all my keywords. There is no manual penalty but my visibility is 0% according to semrush.

Still, traffic continues to come from baidu, yahoo and bing.

In this case how do I diagnose the problem or the reason for the penalty, or do I have to wait for the new August update?

Click to expand...

The August algorithm update has been released. Has your website traffic improved?

actafool said:

The thing is, I have a 1-year-old website. Recently, I completely updated my website, at the beginning of May. This was a major update, so I made huge changes to both its code and content, and added approximately 1500+ pages.

Click to expand...

Here's your answer... any good article costs over $100 ($200 is more realistic) and you added over 1.5k pages so your min spend was over $150,000? No.
Google simply released that you added a lot of crap and ...