Which SEO companies offer Penalty analysis?

[wellnesswooz]

I'm having a hard time finding a (good) SEO company which specializes itself in Penalty analysis? Any recommendations?

I only found Bruce Clay, but they charge 8,000$ :)...

[TomRayner]

I imagine quite a few would, even if they do not explicitly mention.  If you find a company or agency that you like the look of, it's always worth dropping them a message to see if they would do this service for you.

On that note, have a look at SEOMoz's recommended company list and see if any of those companies offer what you're looking for, or if they have expertise and/or a portfolio with companies in your industry - that's always a good sign.

If you'd like to go down the route of self-diagnosis, I'd highly recommend the Panguin tool and MyTrafficDropped.com.  Both are great diagnosis and analysis tools, while also providing you with actionable advice.  MyTrafficDropped also provides consultancy for penalty removal.

Hope these links help!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

We specialise in SEO Audits which can cover a range or problems (including penalty analysis) but it can also be something that you can do on your own. Certainly, there is a lot of moving parts and it depends on the complexity of the site, the history and a number of other variables.

So, for starters, can you provide a URL for some feedback? Additionally, can you provide any other details?

• History
• Platform (CMS : WordPress, Magento etc)
• Problems including dates and any additional information

As a starting point that should enable you to get some feedback from the community and the problem may be quite apparent and tied to known dates with algorithm updates.

First up take a look at your analytics and then compare any obvious drops to this:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Then, if you find a date that tallies up, take a look at your traffic for two weesk before and after the drop. Check out search terms, landing pages and anything else important to see what was most effected and build a list of terms and pages to start your further analysis.

Then, with http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ you can examine these individual pages and anchor text terms and look for obvious patterns and problems with external elements.

If, it is more of a panda type penalty then you can use services like copyscape to get an idea of what is going on from a duplicate content perspective.

Ultimately, there are so many permutations and possibilities that without a URL and some more info it's near impossible for anyone to give you any more targeted feedback.

Certainly though, if you would like someone to take a look, give me a shout and I can at least give you some quick feedback. Other folks of note from this forum are Ryan from Vitopian and Dr. Marie who are both well versed with penalties and good, honest folks.

Hope that helps

Marcus

[wellnesswooz]

Thank you Tom and Marcus, for your responses. It was really helpful. I value it highly.

Just to be clear, the penalty is on page-level and only on Bing. Weekly I see 1 or 2 pages from my website removed from the index on Bing (page 1 or 2 ranking before). I use the weekly ranking report of Seomoz as an indicator. This has been happening since January. When I go to Bing I indeed can't find the pages that lost the ranking according to Seomoz. They seem totally removed from the search index. Also no messages in Bing Webmaster tools.

I have no idea what is triggering this page-level penalty. So I'm looking for an expert on this matter.

I prefer not to share my website openly.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hmm, interesting, so are these new pages that rank well and then drop out of search? Again, near impossible to provide any more feedback without a link but feel free to fire me a PM or email and I will feedback here (keeping your anonymity intact)

[wellnesswooz]

HI Marcus,

No, the pages are 2 to 6 years old.

I will send you a PM with the link now.

Thank you.

[Marcus_Miller]

Okay, quick look at three pages that have dropped from Bing.

If I take a chunk of text from the homepage and google it in double quotes I often find 50 or more pages with the same content. Not a good start but at least your page comes up first indicating that you are at least the owner / originator of the content.

If we do the same in Bing, I am finding your pages, but only after several others with the same content AND bing ranks other sites above your site indicating a problem.

What to do? Well, it depends. How did this content get onto all these other sites? Has it been pinched from your site? If so, you need a content audit and to find any other sites using your content and to ask them to take it down.

You could try some DMCA takedown requests but often, if this is an old site and you have been wildscale plundered I have found rewriting the content is often easier on your site.

As an example, I have a client I have worked with for 10 years or more. We set them up and they have been pretty much ruling the roost in their little niche for years and were the first site to really set up doing what they do we believe.

Well, long before panda or penguin they suddenly dropped out of search and I had a panicked phone call. A bit of digging found literally hundreds of sites all over the world that had copied content, also, some pretty much out and copies of the website (with not all links replaced as well so still pointing to some pages on the source site).

We tried to contact all these folks but in the end just used it as an excuse to freshen up the content and do a rewrite and it bounced back.

Now, not saying you don't have other problems, it was the quickest of quick looks but certainly, this is the direction I would go in.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[MarieHaynes]

This is an interesting question given that your ranking drop is happening in Bing and not Google.  I think this is the first time I have ever heard anyone with that issue.

I don't have the answer for you, but I have one quick thought.  Duane Foresster, head of Bing, mentioned a while back that they use keyword stuffing in the meta keywords tag as an indicator of spam.  If you've got meta keywords tags in place I would remove them.  It probably won't make a huge difference, but it can't hurt.

Also, have you checked your Bing WMT?  There may be some clues in there as to what is going on.

[wellnesswooz]

Hi Marie,

Thank you for the tip. I will definitely check if there aren't too many keywords on the page.

In the theory of Marcus, it could make sense that Google recognizes the original content, while Bing does not recognize us as the original content. Google places us on top, while Bing places us below. This indicates that Bing is using different metrics which are not in my benefit.

I also checked Bing WMT, but no messages.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, not to say there are not other issues, but that is an obvious line of investigation and worth pursuing if only to tick it off the list - a real audit would dig a lot deeper!

As Dr. Marie said, it's an odd one to be Bing specific - that's what piqued my interest!

Good luck! 
Marcus

[wellnesswooz]

When I copied & pasted chunks of text in Google & Bing, I did notice that Google showed way more results then Bing. This could also indicate that Google is more tolerant to duplicate content in their index then Bing.

The links you checked were totally removed from the index on Bing a few weeks ago. They are now back in the index, but not (yet) in the top 50. What does that indicate?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hard to say but it smells like algorithmic filtering of sorts - they were picked up for some reason and are now downgraded.

My approach would be to do an experiment, pick one page, totally rewrite it, track it's progress against the other pages.

Always try to apply scientific rigour, change one variable, measure the results, use that information to steer further decisions or inspire further tests and experiments.

[wellnesswooz]

That seems like a good plan. In which timeframe should I expect results (if any)?

[Marcus_Miller]

Keep an eye on the cached version of the page - once it is updated you may see something straight away but I would tend to give it a couple of weeks after the page is crawled.