What triggers this "penalty"?

nakamura · Sep 19, 2020

This situation happened to me a few times in the exact same way.

I am creating a new websites (doing proper Onpage SEO), the website is getting indexed, I am building links and writing content, rankings are increasing until it is in the top 5. Thats how it goes and this is how it should be like.

But once I reach the top 5 I stay there for a couple of days and suddenly my sites are getting this "penalty" (no message on GSC) and being sent straight to page 5 where they stay for months.

(btw. no intentional subliminal advertising lol)

What triggers this "penalty"?
How to avoid this?
How to recover from this?

It happened to 5 websites of mine already and its a clear pattern. Rankings increases, reaching top 5 and then it gets this penalty. There must be something in the Google algortihm, which triggers this penalty. So far none of my 5 websites could recover from this. They are still on page 4,5 and 6. Some of them are there since 6 months already.

ridersark · Sep 19, 2020

Came across quite a few of these cases. Site hits page 2 or page 1 bottom and then drops rock bottom. Would like to hear what others have to say on this.

Mr Positive · Sep 19, 2020

Is it negative seo? Keyword cannibalism?

pepeneo · Sep 19, 2020

Well think about it for a second, what happens when you are in the top 5? you start getting some traffic, if the user engagement is poor than your site will derank it is as simple as that.

virtualbyron · Sep 19, 2020

Yes, it's related to the CTR, bounce rate and time-on-page

BrandingCat · Sep 19, 2020

virtualbyron said:
Yes, it's related to the CTR, bounce rate and time-on-page

I am thinking at the same thing, bounce and time on page.

Show us how analytics look last 30 days as per bounce at least.

xjapan · Sep 19, 2020

let me guess, google updates

nakamura · Sep 19, 2020

pepeneo said:
Well think about it for a second, what happens when you are in the top 5? you start getting some traffic, if the user engagement is poor than your site will derank it is as simple as that.

Yes, I thought so as well, but then I checked the remaing 9 websites which are in the top 10 for this keyword. Facebook page, Pinterest share, some spun content and one website was even deleted and still in the rankings. Competition is low to medium. They should have a much lower engagement, time-on-page and a much higher bounce rate.

My meta title and description are optimized and way better than the competition. This means my CTR should be much higher than theirs. Same goes for the user-engagement. I actually tested and added slides etc. to keep the people on the page for as long as possible. I added click to action buttons to the bottom of the page, so people are scrolling until the end.

Personally I don't really think the user engagement is what is triggering this penalty, especially if I compare my website with the other ones.

kamaa · Sep 19, 2020

Furnish us with Data on Keyword Density, Word count etc more so the general trend of the same in your Niche

soa0611 · Sep 19, 2020

nakamura said:
Yes, I thought so as well, but then I checked the remaing 9 websites which are in the top 10 for this keyword. Facebook page, Pinterest share, some spun content and one website was even deleted and still in the rankings. Competition is low to medium. They should have a much lower engagement, time-on-page and a much higher bounce rate.

My meta title and description are optimized and way better than the competition. This means my CTR should be much higher than theirs. Same goes for the user-engagement. I actually tested and added slides etc. to keep the people on the page for as long as possible. I added click to action buttons to the bottom of the page, so people are scrolling until the end.

Personally I don't really think the user engagement is what is triggering this penalty, especially if I compare my website with the other ones.

are your sites new or on expired domains?
and what type of links?

bartosimpsonio · Sep 19, 2020

Could be several things.

My guesses:

- You moved from the fresh to the long term index. When you did, you lost the fresh site boost.

- Manual review. Manual reviewer scores have lots of weight on new sites. If a manual reviewer disliked your site on their 1st visit and gave you a bad score, they'll fuck your site up for months even years.

Both these things happen frequently for new sites.

When your site is new, it has few signals, so a manual reviewer on a bad day will fuck you up instantly.

t2van · Sep 19, 2020

bartosimpsonio said:
Could be several things.

My guesses:

- You moved from the fresh to the long term index. When you did, you lost the fresh site boost.

- Manual review. Manual reviewer scores have lots of weight on new sites. If a manual reviewer disliked your site on their 1st visit and gave you a bad score, they'll fuck your site up for months even years.

Both these things happen frequently for new sites.

When your site is new, it has few signals, so a manual reviewer on a bad day will fuck you up instantly.

Agreed not to mention the manual review won't get mentioned or triggered in your console till 6+ months later... the manual review process is a pain in the ass.. I've always put it down to the reviewed didn't get laid that morning / previous evening..

The hosting is it shared? Sites you got hit with before using the same host or IP or even similar IP range? anything else like that or is everything completely fresh before the hit?

terrycody · Sep 19, 2020

bartosimpsonio said:
- Manual review. Manual reviewer scores have lots of weight on new sites. If a manual reviewer disliked your site on their 1st visit and gave you a bad score, they'll fuck your site up for months even years.

I will seriously consider this shit from now on, even though joke muller claimed this is not truth.

seogirl19 · Sep 19, 2020

Meddie said:
I am thinking at the same thing, bounce and time on page.

Show us how analytics look last 30 days as per bounce at least.

How do you reduce this bounce rate & increase time on page?

nakamura · Sep 19, 2020

bartosimpsonio said:
Could be several things.

My guesses:

- You moved from the fresh to the long term index. When you did, you lost the fresh site boost.

- Manual review. Manual reviewer scores have lots of weight on new sites. If a manual reviewer disliked your site on their 1st visit and gave you a bad score, they'll fuck your site up for months even years.

Both these things happen frequently for new sites.

When your site is new, it has few signals, so a manual reviewer on a bad day will fuck you up instantly.

This might be possible, but if I consider how long they take for example to check an Application for the Play Store (at least 7 days) and while this pandemic they slow down a lot, I don't think they have the resources to immediately manual review a random website for a low-medium comp keyword.

Also, the other search results for this keyword are pure spam. Like broken websites, spun content, social bookmarks. I am really thinking this whole Google algorithm is broken.

soa0611 said:
are your sites new or on expired domains?
and what type of links?

expired domain, tf 10+ (if someone cares), i built web 2.0 handful pbn, social bookmarks, high da profile links

t2van said:
The hosting is it shared? Sites you got hit with before using the same host or IP or even similar IP range? anything else like that or is everything completely fresh before the hit?

I am using a reseller hosting and the websites are all on different servers/locations.

HustleTong · Sep 19, 2020

Manual review often triggers penalty.

RayBay · Sep 19, 2020

Google dance is over, your site was not engaging enough to qualify for top positions. Now start linking (internal, external) and take note of the progress.

bartosimpsonio · Sep 19, 2020

nakamura said:
I don't think they have the resources to immediately manual review a random website for a low-medium comp keyword.

I read somewhere that they employ an army of reviewers. For every person reviewing appstore apps, they got 2000 doing site ranking.

javabro · Sep 19, 2020

How common do you guys think manual reviews are? There are gazillion sites. And they don't have gazillion employees.

Imo, unless you guys target some big boy keywords - we have lot to worry about before manual reviews.

Epicster · Sep 19, 2020

What about same google webmaster or analytics account?

It has happened to me too, couldn't find out what was the reason.

What triggers this "penalty"?

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