[Need Advice] Is My Site Penalized? What Do you Think?

sageshark · Apr 28, 2023

Hi friends, I need a quick help from you and I really appreciate your time.

I want to know your opinion about one of my clients site that I am working on since past few months. This site was down for a month and a half during Nov to Dec 22. I restored it and started publishing new content and built few good backlinks. However the traffic does not seem to increase. On the other hand it is going down - 50 users a day. See the screenshot below -

The site is all long form articles about health, wellness, hair, beauty, etc. No shop, no affiliate products, only Google Ad Sense.

While I know that if the site is penalized then its traffic tanks down to almost zero and a sudden drop is seen in the traffic. This is not the case with this website. Traffic is not zero.

What do you guys think is this site penalized? or shadow banned? Shall I put in more efforts in this site, like put more content and build more good backlinks, etc.?

Really appreciate your time to read this post and thank you very much in advance!

tazarbm · Apr 28, 2023

I'd check which pages lost rankings / got de-indexed after the site went back online. It does look like some pages got lost in the wild, so I'd check for those and try to reinstate them...

sageshark · Apr 28, 2023

tazarbm said:
I'd check which pages lost rankings / got de-indexed after the site went back online. It does look like some pages got lost in the wild, so I'd check for those and try to reinstate them...

Thanks for sharing your opinion. Really appreciate it.

I was just wondering if this site looks like penalized or not. If it is not penalized then I am ready to put all the efforts in bringing it back to life. But if it is penalized then I will not put efforts in it.

So looking at these screenshots does it appear like penalized to you?

tazarbm · Apr 28, 2023

the only penalty I can think of is due to it being offline, so yes, in this regard it's been "penalized". But it's a small penalty, especially since it already started ranking again, so keep working on it

Mteck · Apr 28, 2023

Starting up a site again! After some time of being offline , should be expecting some low traffic at the beginning, but no alarm, keep working hard on it also with your topics SEO optimised and boom, you will be back to higher ranking and good traffic, but this time around your consistency should be accurate

sageshark · Apr 28, 2023

tazarbm said:
But it's a small penalty, especially since it already started ranking again, so keep working on it

Thank you for morale boosting words. Really appreciate it

Mteck said:
but this time around your consistency should be accurate

Sure, I will take care of that. Many thanks for your feedback!

SunnyLeon · Apr 28, 2023

Can you account for those 19K non-indexed pages? Are they yours? Or were you hacked or something? Maybe this could be the issue

sageshark · Apr 28, 2023

SunnyLeon said:
Can you account for those 19K non-indexed pages? Are they yours? Or were you hacked or something? Maybe this could be the issue

Yes, I can see those non-indexed pages. See the screenshot below.
The site was never hacked. I understand that I need to get these pages indexed soon.

For indexing I always prefer submitting to social media platforms, building links to those pages, interlinking them well and manually submitting to search console.

How do you think shall I plan the indexing of these many pages? I am a bit reluctant to hire any indexing service.

SunnyLeon · Apr 29, 2023

sageshark said:
Yes, I can see those non-indexed pages. See the screenshot below.
The site was never hacked. I understand that I need to get these pages indexed soon.

View attachment 252721

For indexing I always prefer submitting to social media platforms, building links to those pages, interlinking them well and manually submitting to search console.

How do you think shall I plan the indexing of these many pages? I am a bit reluctant to hire any indexing service.

Go for interlinking between articles that are indexed and articles that aren't, that should work.. make it automated with a plugin for so many pages

sageshark · Apr 29, 2023

SunnyLeon said:
Go for interlinking between articles that are indexed and articles that aren't, that should work.. make it automated with a plugin for so many pages

Makes sense. While most of the pages are interlinked well manually, I will still use a plugin for that. Inline Related Posts is a wordpress plugin that dynamically inserts related posts inside the article on the go. Will try it and see. Thanks for the suggestion.

Panther28 · Apr 29, 2023

I have sites that always look like they are going down until I finally hit on the next semi-popular article or good backlink for the site that makes it start going up rankings overall, then I pop the cork, but before I finish the glass, the cycle starts again! lol Thats how it feels for any site I ever worked on.

Consider your plan B, IF many of the site pages continue to decrease, which ones can you make more popular and reinvent, or what other topics can I write about to expand your opportunity at more backlinks and search intent? You best, I find as quick as possible, find out your universe of opportunity and (the size and traffic of what your site can potentially reach, realistically).

Is it a seasonal market? Does the product of which is mostly used by this niche look like it is still popular and rising, or has the trend of popularity dropped? What new competition has entered the top 100 search market? Would like to know a few things like that you know about things

These are all things behind the door info you have to take a peek at while you decide on your best new approach.

Like the suggestions others have made too!

sageshark · Apr 29, 2023

Panther28 said:
IF many of the site pages continue to decrease, which ones can you make more popular and reinvent, or what other topics can I write about to expand your opportunity at more backlinks and search intent?

Thank you for your valuable advice. I really appreciate you taking time to write this long text for help.

As you rightly said I should add some more new topics and make them search worthy, so I have already started discovering new topics and 2-3 such newly added articles have started appearing in the top 10 visited articles in this site.

Will keep adding more valuable content.

Shwepps · Apr 29, 2023

What traffic you're talking about? GSA shows a few clicks a day

HustleTong · Apr 29, 2023

If it was my site, I'd disavow the latest links and wait for a while to see if impressions surge

SeoBacklinkGenie · Apr 29, 2023

sageshark said:
Yes, I can see those non-indexed pages. See the screenshot below.
The site was never hacked. I understand that I need to get these pages indexed soon.

View attachment 252721

For indexing I always prefer submitting to social media platforms, building links to those pages, interlinking them well and manually submitting to search console.

How do you think shall I plan the indexing of these many pages? I am a bit reluctant to hire any indexing service.

For indexing, click on one of these boxes in the "pages" tab in GSC and hit "validate fix" button. Sometimes you might have to "validate" a couple different ones or do it a few times over a week for one of them to register, but it'll recrawl everything on your site and re-index most everything that should be. I've been doing it this way for awhile and works everytime. Ignore if it says "failed" since it should always "fail" since you should always have pages that fail in general.

I think your allowed to do it this way once a month or once every 2 months.

aluron · Apr 29, 2023

My top level thoughts are just keep going, it'll be fine in the long run.

For the immediate, double check the pages if any keywords have gone down in rankings, you might have had a powerful keyword drop off a certain page for example.

But yeah, keep posting great content on the website, building backlinks and you'll be fine.

lotsofmoney · Apr 30, 2023

You should keep adding more content on the site. It was penalized because it was down. It will recover soon.

Nunit · Apr 30, 2023

Did the URL structure change after the site's "resurrection"?

TimGroup · Apr 30, 2023

Need to keep blogging

[Need Advice] Is My Site Penalized? What Do you Think?

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