Any ideas why this site is being penalized?

[jimpannell]

http://www.my-french-house.com/ has been online since around 2004 and has nearly always been in the top 10 serps for terms like 'property for sale in france'. However, over the last 12 months we've been hit really hard by Google and have fallen dramatically in rank. Can anyone give any insight into what may have happened?

As an aside, we've had no message in the Google Webmaster Console and have not contacted Google about the apparent penalty / penalization.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Jim

[justin-brock]

Do you have a Google Webmasters account set up? Are there any messages there?

My hunch is that Google killed most of your links. I'm not sure how many links you had previously, but now you only have 7. [See attachment]

You may have done nothing to get penalized. But the sites linking to you may have. I recommend getting a Majestic SEO account [www.majesticseo.com] and diving into your historical link profile.

OhVWKk9.png

[jimpannell]

Thanks for that Justin. We do have a webmaster console account and we've had zero messages relating to bad practices etc.

Re the number of links - there should be way more than that as far as I'm aware! How could there only be 7 now?!?

I'll take a look at majesticseo.com. Anything else we can do?

[justin-brock]

I'd review this article for more ideas about why your traffic may have dropped [http://3qdigital.com/experience/diagnosing-traffic-drop/].

Also, when you do get into Majestic SEO, you want to look for links with high-volumes of the same, non-brand anchor text. If your anchor text is uniform across a majority of your links, that's not good. If it turns out to be the case, you'll want to contact as many of those websites as you can to see if they'll modify the anchor text.

[MickEdwards]

The link operator only shows a snapshot and is in no way representative of the actual links.  Open Site Explorer on here will give a more accurate account of your link profile.

You also want to take a close look at your organic traffic stats and compare with the Google update dates here http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and see if there is a pattern emerging.

I have dealt with sites that have just generally declined organically over a year or two and usually it comes down to poor on-site SEO (including possibly panda) and the indirect effects of penguin.

[anthonydnelson]

I haven't visited your site or looked at the backlinks, but most likely, you were hit by either Penguin/Panda or both. Save yourself some time and use Panguin Tool to look at your traffic stats compared to Algorithm updates. This is the best tool for a quick insight into potential traffic loss. http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

See if your traffic drop-off aligns with a particular update(s) and then move forward with fixing it from there. If nothing lines up with the algorithm updates, perhaps your own site has made a mistake during a code update.

[jimpannell]

It is looking like we've been hit by Penguin 2.1 (5th Update). There was a significant drop in organic traffic on 6th October 2013. There was another drop around 17th March 2013, which looks to be related to Panda update 25. However, weirdly enough we recovered quite considerably from 7th July until Penguin 2.1. Is that something that others have experienced as well?

In view of this, does anyone have any specific advice?

[anthonydnelson]

Hi Jim-

There are plenty of good articles about Penguin recovery, but here is the main goal:

Remove unnatural backlinks: Look for non-relevent backlinks, backlinks with manipulative anchor text or unnaturally high anchor text ratio, sitewide links, etc.

This can vary with each site and please don't look at my blurb and just start getting rid of backlinks. There has been a ton of discussion on Moz about Penguin recovery, which you should read up on: http://www.google.com/#q=penguin+recovery+moz.com

Do a lot of research if you are going to tackle it yourself instead of hire it out.

Best of luck!