Possible Google Penalty ¿How to recover? ¿301 redirection?

ResistanceX

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Hello,

In January of this year, I lost the 99% of my organic traffic (Went from 7.000-8.000 daily users, to 100). I did not receive any manual penalty or security issue in Webmaster Tools, and my site is still indexed.

All my top 1-3 keywords went to page 2 or 3, and I lost all my rich snippet positions.

After that, and to recover from the lost positions I have been improving my website without any success. I have done a lot of guest posting, increased the speed of my site, posted new original content, etc.

Now, I am only getting social traffic. I am doing pretty good in Pinterest with around 3.000 to 5.000, daily visits. The problem is that this is only giving me around 12-15$/day with adsense.

In the last month I have been thinking in moving the website to a new domain and do a 301 redirect. My question is if it will make any difference.

Explanation

To fully understand the actual situation of my website, let me introduce you a little bit more:

In 2016 I created my first Wordpress website. At that time, I was a complete newbie, so I had to learn everything from zero.

It was designed as a micro niche of X type of recipes. I will use as example “cakes recipes”. After one year, I had already a decent amount of “cake recipes” and I started to receive some traffic.

To get more traffic, I created new categories with other related recipes, for example: cookies, cake pops, donuts, etc,

So, the structure of the blog ended like this:

Home: Cake recipes

  • Category 1: Cake recipes.
  • Category 2: Cookie recipes.
  • Category 3: Cake pops recipes.
  • Category 4: Donuts recipes.
I added an extra category with home appliances reviews, to get some commissions from Amazon. The type of “best 10 ovens” posts (for example).

  • Category 5: Best products

Then I started to do Offpage SEO, creating backlinks with guest posting, profiles, blog comments, etc. I was maybe a little bit aggressive with anchor text, but nothing really heavy, as at that time I was still learning.

Everything was going fine, and the organic traffic started to grow. (See Google Analytics screenshot)

The 5th of November of 2019, I lost the 40-50% of the organic traffic, and it was going down until 1st of January 2020, that suddenly it recovered.

After a few days, the 13th of January I got hit again, and then I lost 99% of the organic traffic.


Ahrefs Organic traffic:

ahrefs-organic-traffic.jpg



Google Analythics Organic traffic:

google-analytics-organic-traffic.jpg



All the content of my blog is original and written by myself. I have followed the SEO onpage and offpage recommendations.

It is true that I have done a good number of backlinks with diverse anchor text and with a low velocity. But I am afraid that Google could detect some of them as Spam, and that I why I lost my positions.

¿Possible solution?

My idea is to migrate the website to a new domain and do a 301 redirection, and to avoid cannibalization, change the name to something that can englobe better all the categories.

For example: “Dessert recipes”

So, in this way I will redirect the old Home of “Cake recipes” to the Category “Cake recipes” and create a new home of “Dessert recipes”.

I know that is a lot of information, but I need good advices before I start with 301 redirections an so on.

Thanks!
 
If you decide to migrate, then I would avoid a 301 or you'll risk carrying the penalty over.

You did not get penalized for original articles that's for sure, so whatever caused your penalty is still there.

If you really care about this content you should probably try to clear the penalty first before starting over on a new domain.
 
Hello,

In January of this year, I lost the 99% of my organic traffic (Went from 7.000-8.000 daily users, to 100). I did not receive any manual penalty or security issue in Webmaster Tools, and my site is still indexed.

All my top 1-3 keywords went to page 2 or 3, and I lost all my rich snippet positions.

After that, and to recover from the lost positions I have been improving my website without any success. I have done a lot of guest posting, increased the speed of my site, posted new original content, etc.

Now, I am only getting social traffic. I am doing pretty good in Pinterest with around 3.000 to 5.000, daily visits. The problem is that this is only giving me around 12-15$/day with adsense.

In the last month I have been thinking in moving the website to a new domain and do a 301 redirect. My question is if it will make any difference.

Explanation

To fully understand the actual situation of my website, let me introduce you a little bit more:

In 2016 I created my first Wordpress website. At that time, I was a complete newbie, so I had to learn everything from zero.

It was designed as a micro niche of X type of recipes. I will use as example “cakes recipes”. After one year, I had already a decent amount of “cake recipes” and I started to receive some traffic.

To get more traffic, I created new categories with other related recipes, for example: cookies, cake pops, donuts, etc,

So, the structure of the blog ended like this:

Home: Cake recipes

  • Category 1: Cake recipes.
  • Category 2: Cookie recipes.
  • Category 3: Cake pops recipes.
  • Category 4: Donuts recipes.
I added an extra category with home appliances reviews, to get some commissions from Amazon. The type of “best 10 ovens” posts (for example).

  • Category 5: Best products

Then I started to do Offpage SEO, creating backlinks with guest posting, profiles, blog comments, etc. I was maybe a little bit aggressive with anchor text, but nothing really heavy, as at that time I was still learning.

Everything was going fine, and the organic traffic started to grow. (See Google Analytics screenshot)

The 5th of November of 2019, I lost the 40-50% of the organic traffic, and it was going down until 1st of January 2020, that suddenly it recovered.

After a few days, the 13th of January I got hit again, and then I lost 99% of the organic traffic.


Ahrefs Organic traffic:

View attachment 148524


Google Analythics Organic traffic:

View attachment 148525


All the content of my blog is original and written by myself. I have followed the SEO onpage and offpage recommendations.

It is true that I have done a good number of backlinks with diverse anchor text and with a low velocity. But I am afraid that Google could detect some of them as Spam, and that I why I lost my positions.

¿Possible solution?

My idea is to migrate the website to a new domain and do a 301 redirection, and to avoid cannibalization, change the name to something that can englobe better all the categories.

For example: “Dessert recipes”

So, in this way I will redirect the old Home of “Cake recipes” to the Category “Cake recipes” and create a new home of “Dessert recipes”.

I know that is a lot of information, but I need good advices before I start with 301 redirections an so on.

Thanks!


pm me your website and I'll take a look for you.
 
If you decide to migrate, then I would avoid a 301 or you'll risk carrying the penalty over.

You did not get penalized for original articles that's for sure, so whatever caused your penalty is still there.

If you really care about this content you should probably try to clear the penalty first before starting over on a new domain.

Yes, that's why I'm trying to find a solution. I have improved several things in the last months, but the organic traffic is not move, even a little bit. So it looks like there is a penalty affecting the complete domain.

pm me your website and I'll take a look for you.

I can't send pm yet. Can you send me one and I will anser to you? Thanks!
 
Last edited:
Have the same issue. 10 year domain which was loved by Google. Original self made photo and video content.
November - lost Rich Snippets. December - recovered.
May 5 - lost Rich Snippets, removed from Recipe Carousel.
Have not recovered yet. Traffic dropped from 1,5m/month to 300 thousand visitors.

Interested thing, that penalty applied only for group of recipe URLs. Articles was not penalized by Google.

From server logs I've found a lot of automatic scrapers with low trust. Now all mostly banned. Backlinks from them added to disallow links tool.
Technical audit, etc. was succeed - everything is OK!

Waiting for new Core Update and hope that is was BUG and will be fixed.
 
Have the same issue. 10 year domain which was loved by Google. Original self made photo and video content.
November - lost Rich Snippets. December - recovered.
May 5 - lost Rich Snippets, removed from Recipe Carousel.
Have not recovered yet. Traffic dropped from 1,5m/month to 300 thousand visitors.

Interested thing, that penalty applied only for group of recipe URLs. Articles was not penalized by Google.

From server logs I've found a lot of automatic scrapers with low trust. Now all mostly banned. Backlinks from them added to disallow links tool.
Technical audit, etc. was succeed - everything is OK!

Waiting for new Core Update and hope that is was BUG and will be fixed.

That's not a penalty.

Penalties are site wide and you COMPLETELY drop. Every page down to page 5-10+

Penguin is page based, but penalties are not.

Going from 1500/month to 300/mo is because you've lost your rich snippets/top 5's etc.

If a bunch of your pages went from rich snippet to #6-7 you would lose most of your traffic, but you certainly wouldn't be penalized.

Also, google has removed a lot of rich snippets. There's WAY less now.
 
Keen to know your findings if OP is ok with that
I second this. Quite interested to know what's causing it.


Bad links.

A sitewide hidden link on 1 domain sending 3k links.

Another one with 1500 links from 1500 different subdomains of a web 2, all with the same anchor, to the same page, with the exact same text on every subdomain, title for title, word for word.

I also see viagra and cialis links.

To be honest it looks like someone did a neg seo campaign on him. I actually said in pm that these are so bad it's what I'd do if I was neg seo'ing someone, but now I see the viagra stuff I'm thinking maybe he was attacked.


EDIT:

Just checked again. All the bad links were in 2020. Need to find out specifically what links he had pre nov 2019
 
Bad links.

A sitewide hidden link on 1 domain sending 3k links.

Another one with 1500 links from 1500 different subdomains of a web 2, all with the same anchor, to the same page, with the exact same text on every subdomain, title for title, word for word.

I also see viagra and cialis links.

To be honest it looks like someone did a neg seo campaign on him. I actually said in pm that these are so bad it's what I'd do if I was neg seo'ing someone, but now I see the viagra stuff I'm thinking maybe he was attacked.


EDIT:

Just checked again. All the bad links were in 2020. Need to find out specifically what links he had pre nov 2019

Ouch.

Personally, if I wanted to pull a neg SEO, I'd be afraid that Google would know that links that bad were probably an attack and just ignore them.

I hope you're able to resolve this, OP.
 
That's not a penalty.

Penalties are site wide and you COMPLETELY drop. Every page down to page 5-10+

Penguin is page based, but penalties are not.

Going from 1500/month to 300/mo is because you've lost your rich snippets/top 5's etc.

If a bunch of your pages went from rich snippet to #6-7 you would lose most of your traffic, but you certainly wouldn't be penalized.

Also, google has removed a lot of rich snippets. There's WAY less now.
Most Hight Traffic keywords from /recipe/ URL group went from 1 page to 2-nd, 3-rd. But /article/* group didn't and stay at top with rich snippets.

I've made tests and change slugs from /recipe/* to different word - recipe starts showing in SERP with snippets and carousel.

So what is that if not an algorithmically penalty? I haven't idea.

Screenshot 2020-10-08 223524.jpg
 
Most Hight Traffic keywords from /recipe/ URL group went from 1 page to 2-nd, 3-rd. But /article/* group didn't and stay at top with rich snippets.

I've made tests and change slugs from /recipe/* to different word - recipe starts showing in SERP with snippets and carousel.

So what is that if not an algorithmically penalty? I haven't idea.

View attachment 148569

I don't really call these things penalties though. Penalties don't generally send you from page 1 to page 2/3. It's just changes in the algorithm. They change things up and sites move up and down. Many big sites lost big chunks of pages, but you definitely wouldn't say they had any sort of penalty.

You're welcome to pm me your site and I'll take a look
 
The only solution is a 301 redirect. Don't take care of the people saying you're carrying forward the penalty and bla bla....

Just test, test and test with it.

It's SIMPLE.
 
Yes, that's why I'm trying to find a solution. I have improved several things in the last months, but the organic traffic is not move, even a little bit. So it looks like there is a penalty affecting the complete domain.

They have a panel where they write annotations on sites.

If your site has been annotated as spam, it's been placed on the slow lane and it'll never recover.
 
Almost the same thing happened to one of my websites except it wasn't hit by the November 2019 update.
Hell broke loose on January 4th, 2020 with a silent update and I lost 90% of my traffic. The funny thing about that is my main keywords were still ranking high but I lost all long-tail keywords (my bread and butter) that were bringing traffic and sales.

Nothing was done to the site but it looked like it started to recover around February 28th, that was short-lived and lasted for about 2 weeks before it took a deep dive again.

On April 15th, 2020 it picked up some speed, and again it looked like it was recovering again. That lasted for about 2 weeks and the final blow was delivered on May 3rd. Initially, it picked up some traffic but from May 5th it was a downhill ride and getting worse and worse every day (not that I care at this point).

Looking at the ups and downs that happened in Fab. and March looks like they were turning ON and OFF some kind of filter to prevent certain sites from ranking. Now it looks like that filter is hardcoded and hoping that the next core update will fix it is wishful thinking. It's not going to happen.

My best bet is that it has something to do with backlinks and anchor text as my on-page SEO is spot on. Nothing shady or anything like that. The content is spot on. I have to admit that I was aggressive with the exact anchor text I wanted to rank for a couple of years ago. Although the majority of those links no longer exist it doesn't matter to Google as they keep a history of a website and use it against it as they wish.

I no longer look for a solution as I'm moving on to business the does not depend on Google's organic traffic. I am so sick and tired of it. And I'm not going to spend any of my time constantly editing my content to make them happy.

However, if you want to do 301 keep in mind that the algo penalty attached to your current website will eventually be transferred. Initially, you might see positive results but at one point, it'll go down. There are a number of posts on this forum regarding this topic. It used work a couple of years ago but Google has caught up with the 301 games some webmasters were playing and the 301 game is over unless you find quality expired domain to boost your new domain. Old to new won't work.

2.jpg
 
Last edited:
301 redirect a harmful site over? DON'T!
 
I don't really call these things penalties though. Penalties don't generally send you from page 1 to page 2/3. It's just changes in the algorithm. They change things up and sites move up and down. Many big sites lost big chunks of pages, but you definitely wouldn't say they had any sort of penalty.

You're welcome to pm me your site and I'll take a look

I have sent you a pm. I'm not sure If you have seen it.
 
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