Is this a penalty?

mikeshinobi

mikeshinobi

Throbbing Member
Nov 15, 2011
1,494
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48
Indiana, US
mattcutts.com
I hate to be one of those guys who asks this question - "hey guise my site lost 3 spots on teh serps yesterday am I sandboxed?" - but this is driving me insane, and if this is what a penalty looks like then I'd just like to know so I can give up instead of hopelessly monitoring it and building links in the hopes that it will come back

I'm pretty sure it was over a week and a half ago that it was ranked 22, 17, and 11 for these keywords. Then there was that algo change...

iVYjD.png


This is a screenshot from today. For that first keyword, the site will go back and forth between being ~#130 and not being in the SERPS at all, and for those last two keywords it bounces between 45-55 and ~130 (seeing something like that -113 every other day isn't uncommon).

My previous rankings (2nd page) were almost unwarranted I felt like - the domain is a .info and it was a pretty new site.

So, what do you think? Penalized? Abandon ship?
 


Define 'pretty new'. Have you done any link building to it over the last week and a half?
 
iTechno said:
Define 'pretty new'. Have you done any link building to it over the last week and a half?
Click to expand...

Well by pretty new, at the time it was about 2 weeks old (I created the site on 1/21). So now it's almost a month old. I would have normally not sweated it and just chalked it up to a dance (hence why I waited so long to create the thread) but in my experience my dances have never lasted this long.

I don't recall everything I've done but I know I've made some blog comments, I might have made a few bookmarks but if I did, not many. I've had it in my daily ALN submission service off and on, and I just recently decided to give the Senuke trial a go so I did a 2.0 profile submission to the money site and did forum profile submissions to the 2.0 profiles.

So yea, that's about it.

Now here's another screen cap, with only like 6 hours passed:

z81jm.png


The ∞ on the first keyword implies that it had appeared on the SERPs at some point within that time, and has now gone back off. This is what happens pretty much every day... if it were doing it in some sort of steadily increasing fashion, ie. goes to 50, drops to 100, goes to 45, drops to 95, etc. then I wouldn't be as worried. But it doesn't seem to be doing that.
 
I wouldn't get too worked up about it. What I used to do, before I became more of a service provider... Was post new content to my site, at least 5 new posts on the homepage, ping them, and submit the site in webmaster tools (if you have this). Then I would run a promotion on it, worked every time for the most part. Just keep building and adding to the site.
 
So I finally break down and, despite the shame I knew it would bring upon me, posted this thread on WF. And on this very day

OobKB.png


it returns, for at least one keyword, almost to where it was previously...

I'm not sure how to interpret this exactly. It's still off the SERP completely for the big honcho keyword, which is sad. But if I can get page 1 for just 1 keyword, I will be happy.

skohh said:
I wouldn't get too worked up about it. What I used to do, before I became more of a service provider... Was post new content to my site, at least 5 new posts on the homepage, ping them, and submit the site in webmaster tools (if you have this). Then I would run a promotion on it, worked every time for the most part. Just keep building and adding to the site.
Click to expand...

I can't believe I overlooked something so obvious. I tried to improve my onpage... I removed my sidebar ad so there were fewer ads above the fold. But I never even considered adding new content. I'll definitely do that.

As for GWMT... well it's weird you mention that. I just added my site to that tonight because I thought I read somewhere that it'll tell you if your site has been penalized. I wonder if this is connected to my sudden rise in rankings?

I dunno, my head is all fucked since that algo change and I haven't even been doing this very long.

Update:

tTkdc.png


Now I am definitely questioning the implications of this, when it comes to my main keyword (which my domain is an EMD for) and also when it comes to adding a site into GWMT... It was bouncing up and down forever, I put it into GWMT and it suddenly decides to do this? I realize correlation does not equal causation, but damn.
 
Last edited:
mikeshinobi said:
So I finally break down and, despite the shame I knew it would bring upon me, posted this thread on WF. And on this very day

OobKB.png


it returns, for at least one keyword, almost to where it was previously...

I'm not sure how to interpret this exactly. It's still off the SERP completely for the big honcho keyword, which is sad. But if I can get page 1 for just 1 keyword, I will be happy.



I can't believe I overlooked something so obvious. I tried to improve my onpage... I removed my sidebar ad so there were fewer ads above the fold. But I never even considered adding new content. I'll definitely do that.

As for GWMT... well it's weird you mention that. I just added my site to that tonight because I thought I read somewhere that it'll tell you if your site has been penalized. I wonder if this is connected to my sudden rise in rankings?

I dunno, my head is all fucked since that algo change and I haven't even been doing this very long.

Update:

tTkdc.png


Now I am definitely questioning the implications of this, when it comes to my main keyword (which my domain is an EMD for) and also when it comes to adding a site into GWMT... It was bouncing up and down forever, I put it into GWMT and it suddenly decides to do this? I realize correlation does not equal causation, but damn.
Click to expand...

Could be related, but who knows, It's SEO, be ready for a shit storm!

I know it's definitely helped me bring back a bunch of sites ;P but don't keep all your sites in one basket, if you dig

in after shit storm
 
Both. Like I said, I added 5 posts to the homepage, pinged, submitted to GWMT and ran a cycle of my own on it. Not sure if it's just a coincidence but it worked

I did this for several sites. successfully

P.S the blogs are all AA forgot to mention that. enjoy
 
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