Why is our site being penalized?

[Sangeeta]

The rankings for our transcription site (gmr transcription) fell around Jul 19. Its been an uphill task to get the rankings back particularly for the keyword 'transcription services'. As per our opinion except for one competitor the rankings of the other top 4 makes no sense to us.

We have tested our site and there seems to be no reason for it to be penalized.

After a month of trial I am reaching out to the community for advise.

[webfeatseo]

Hard to tell without a link to your site to see what is going on.

[Sangeeta]

Hi webfeat,

The website is gmrtranscription.com(I am avoiding linking) and the keyword we are having trouble with is 'transcription services'.

[Maximise]

Is your website www.gmrtranscription.com?

If yes then it's very possible you have been hit by one of the recent updates which target over optimised backlink profiles. You have over 800 links with the exact anchor text "transcription services", which your most linked term, many of these are also sitewide. These links do not look natural to search engines and I would recommend that you try and get them changed.

A natural link profile would mostly contain your brand name or url and then have a wide variety of other terms. I think you need to try to address this balance.

[AndreVanKets]

I second what Maximise has said.

Going forward, start promoting your websites brand rather than its keywords. Concentrate on obtaining quality links with the anchor "GMR transctiption Services" or simply GMR transcription services.com

Have a look at your backlink profile and remove site wide links or atleast vary the anchor text were you can.

Your back link profile Ideally should be made up of about 70% branded terms, and 30% "money terms" otherwise it looks un natural to Google. (Generally speaking, its not an exact science)

Greg

[Maximise]

Thanks Greg.

Sangeeta, At the moment these are your top anchor text terms:

• transcription services - 882 links
• transcription services - 601 links
• transcribe - 402 links
• gmr transcription - 335 links
• transcription company - 177 links
• digital transcription - 173 links
• www.gmrtranscription.com - 166 links
• audio transcription - 164 links

As mentioned already though, many of these are sitewide so you should be able to address the percentages fairly easily by contacting some of these sites and asking for the links to be changed.

[Sangeeta]

Thanks Maximise. I will try and rectify the link pattern. Most of the links are old and will be very difficult to moderate.

[CyrilWilson]

I checked  the keyword transcription services position in Google Singapore and Google USA. I see it has position of Number 3 and 1 respectively.

But if you think anything wrong has happened, you must follow what has been suggested by others here. Besides, i would like to add which for me is the most striking the  moment you open the page. The occurrence of keyword "transcription" is approximately 66 times on the home page.

Excessive use of keywords can negatively impact rankings and should be avoided.

[CyrilWilson]

I checked  the keyword transcription services position in Google Singapore and Google USA. I see it has position of Number 3 and 1 respectively.

But if you think anything wrong has happened, you must follow what has been suggested by others here. Besides, i would like to add which for me is the most striking the  moment you open the page. The occurrence of keyword "transcription" is approximately 66 times on the home page.

Excessive use of keywords can negatively impact rankings and should be avoided.

[MarieHaynes]

Do you have any warnings of unnatural links in your webmaster tools?  If so, the answer is to do a thorough cleanup of your links, documenting everything you do in order to try to get the self made ones removed and submit a reconsideration request.

Otherwise, you may be a victim of Penguin.  I used to think you could only get "Penguinized" on the date of a Penguin update, but I've seen evidence of sites that have been affected in very similar ways to Penguin within a few weeks of launching a backlinking campaign.  As others have mentioned, if your backlinks are primarily anchor text, and you're dropping in the serps for that particular anchor text, then you need to get those links changed to your url or removed.

Sometimes, if you're not sure, it's a good idea to hire a professional to look at your backlink profile and advise you which links need to go.

If this is a Penguin thing (as opposed to an unnatural links warning in WMT) then you have no chance of recovery until there is a Penguin refresh.

[Sangeeta]

Marie, thanks for responding. No we did not get any warnings. I had no idea that a site could be "Penguinzed" so late after an update.

Greg and Maximize suggested altering the site wide link status. We had control over two of our sister websites. We corrected that and hey within an hour we were back!

Seems like magic!

[MarieHaynes]

Well that's good news...and a little bit strange too!  It's possible that there is a Penguin update in the works, but there's no official word as of yet.

I'm tempted to think that there was something other than Penguin going on here.  But, regardless, I'm glad to hear you are ranking again!