Which SEO companies offer Penalty analysis?

[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.