Manual Penalty?

I've got a web in 3 languages.. Exact translation..

When the keyword is in english, the serp result is in spanish in spanish territory.

Recently I added a new url in english with its translations:

Inmediately serp position #50 with the url in english,

two days after, serp `position #39 not with the new url in english but with the home in english.

3 days after, serp position #15 with the url in spanish (the exact translation but in spanish).

^^^This above happends when I search the keyword in english in spanish territory.

When I search for the english keyword in english in USA or Great britain, the serps never rank the specific url, always ranks the HOME in english.

^^^^ This above is what happends when I search in serps with keywords in english. But when I search keywords in other languages like spanish or german or other languages, the serp results are the specific url in its language, regardless the country I'm looking.

If the best result for a keyword in german is the specific url in german, why is not in english?


Any thoughts?

This doesnt look like a penalty, more like an onpage SEO issue

Just checked again with screming the canonicals and hreflang and everything is perfect..

any clue?

Its not a manual penalty otherwise it would show up in GWC as a message. I haven't seen your site, but assuming it is fairly legit it is unlikely to be an automatic penalty. It does seem much more like Google does not know which page to put with which language, i.e. it is confused, which is an onsite issue.

How long has the site been up? How long have the translations been live?

fasttrak said:

Its not a manual penalty otherwise it would show up in GWC as a message. I haven't seen your site, but assuming it is fairly legit it is unlikely to be an automatic penalty. It does seem much more like Google does not know which page to put with which language, i.e. it is confused, which is an onsite issue.

How long has the site been up? How long have the translations been live?

Click to expand...

The site its up since 2015, totally legit.

The translations were done in 2017 with alternate and hreflang errors.

In the begining of 2018 (genuary-february) all on site errors were fixed ( canonical etc..)

In jan 23 of 2019 I made another big update of the website, a part of the update was to fix some english misspellings to see if this behavior could be corrected, the answer is:

From may 2018 (first track of the serpbot) until NOW the usual thing is: english keyword, ranks the url in spanish in spanish territory, although there is some ocasional exception ranking the home in english, or ranking the specific url in english for a week and turning back to the url in spanish (exact translation).

Also, there are some strange behavior (that does not have to do with the languages): sometimes google ranks for a specific keyword another url. Could be because, even the description, title, h1, h2 h3, is optimized for that keyword, other articles talks indirectly about other keywords.

^^^I think a better interlinking could solve this last issue, but I have fear of droping down the ranks since google seems to have a peculiar way to give authourity (PR) to each specific url.

This doesn't look like a penalty. Moreover you will get alert messages in Webmaster tool incase of any penalty actions.

That's not a menual penalty or something... You just need to add hreflang attribute (also referred to as rel="alternate" hreflang="x") which tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can serve that result to users searching in that language.
Here's the code example which should be added specifically for targetting different languages and countries:
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com" hreflang="en-us" />

By adding the hreflang tag you'll see the correct results showing with specific region and its set language.

Kaapo Jed said:

That's not a menual penalty or something... You just need to add hreflang attribute (also referred to as rel="alternate" hreflang="x") which tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can serve that result to users searching in that language.
Here's the code example which should be added specifically for targetting different languages and countries:
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com" hreflang="en-us" />

By adding the hreflang tag you'll see the correct results showing with specific region and its set language.

Click to expand...

In the begining of 2018 all these errors were fixed. So I dont know where to point. Also, as far as I know, not all the manual penalties leave a comment in GSC.

In the begining of 2018 (genuary-february) all on site errors were fixed ( canonical etc..)

Click to expand...

If it is a manual penalty then it definitely show up in GWC as a message. I think google puzzle up with confusion