Penalised for keyword stuffing? How long for forgiveness?

di11on

Hi folks,

My site was appearing on the first page of results on Google.ie for the keyword "Toys". I tried optimising my front page a little more and whazam... it disappeared from the listings altogether. I think I may have been penalised for keyword stuffing. Looking back... I think I did repeat the word "Toys" somewhere.

So, if my site has been penalised for this... how long will it take to be "forgiven" and for my site to be ranked normally? I presume there is some historical weighting and it takes some time for the effects to wear off?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

ChipLdr

Just taking a brief look at your site tells me there is a whole lot of keyword stuffing going on here. Count how many times the word toys appears and you'll get what I'm at.

I see you've blocked your source code for the home page as well? While this shouldnt matter just make sure that you haven't altered your robot.txt file to prevent google from monitoring it.

Normally it takes weeks/months for you to get indexed again(this all depends on your link popularity of course). Make sure you do fine tune your website because from what I hear if you get banned again you usually have no comeback.

You can always contact google after you make the changes to your site and claim you made a honest mistake. Whether they buy this or not is another thing.

EDIT Site seems to be unbanned again. Just out of curiosity have you made any changes since you became banned?

di11on

I don't think my site was banned. I just saw a dramatic change in my ranking for searches done on "Toys". My ranking for seaches done on "Wooden Toys" doesn't seem to have been affected.

It seems to me that an algorithmic penalty is applied when your site satisfies the conditions for keyword stuffing and that the impact is confined to that keyword.

Is this the case... and if so.... how long does it take to correct... if it's possible at all.

zAbbo

Check your Webtmaster tools account for any indexing issues.

Fluctations in the SERPS are common, so possibly nothing to worry about.

Don't try to over optimise your site with every seo tip you can find.

Address the issues of:

• Semantic Structure
• Deprecated HTML
• Improper Use of Tables
• Inline Styles

before tweaking content.

di11on

Man, I really don't understand google.

I searched for "toys" and hey presto, my ad turned up around poisition 11.

Then I searched again and it was NOWHERE to be found... not in the first 4 pages anyway.

I noticed that my Adwords ad wasn't showing when I showed up in the organic results and wondered if maybe this was a factor. So I paused my adwords campaign and then did another search.

My site turned up in position 3!!!!!

I searched again and then it was in position 11.

Now, it seems to alternate between position 3 and position 12... how does that work? Is it a datacentre issue?

I hope the position 3 data is the more current :-)

zAbbo

Relax, or you'll go insane tracking SERPS

The reason why your ad might change positions, is because you are frequently searching for 'toys' while not clicking on ads, so Google will rotate the ads it delivers to you.

Currently you're 13 for "toys", and 6 when filtered to Ireland pages.

If you want, feel free to PM me and I can have a look at your Analytics/Adwords accounts and give you some pointers

cfitz

I'm not at all sure about this, so feel free to respond if you know otherwise -
but I have a feeling that if you're position on Google is fluctuating a lot, it's a sign of a problem. However, I don't have many ideas about what you can do.

In general, try not to make a whole lot of changes at once. There are 'keyword cloud' tools online to check for keyword stuffing. If Google doesn't like your website for some reason, it may not fully disappear from the organic results for quite a while. You can check to see the last time it was cached and if it hasn't been cached in a much longer time than usual then you may be in trouble. If you have been penalised by Google, I would recommend registering your website on Google Webmaster and contacting them through the form available on their portal.

Note: It's about six months since I was involved in SEO so it's possible some of this information is dated.

Sully

I thought Google didnt take any notice of keywords anymore?

zAbbo

Sully wrote: »

I thought Google didnt take any notice of keywords anymore?

The meta tag, isn't really relevant. I think we're talking more about a set of keywords which will deliver traffic.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to be an SEO expert at this stage, which means we really do swim with the sharks within the industry.

Bottom line, stop trying to implement every SEO tip you've read, concentrate on semantic clean coding and rich relevant content

Sully

Keywords in the meta tag or within the site content?

I always thought keyword stuffing was related to the meta tag for keywords which I assume was no longer used as a factor in Google due to abuse?

I agree there is a lot of content out there and some of it may be false but I normally stick with the main sites are popular opinion

zAbbo

As the meta tag for keywords is more or less useless, keyword stuffing refers to inserting keywords in the content in a manner which isn't organic or readable (or both)

more here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing