Subtle On-site Factors That Could Cause a Penalty

[BobGW]

It looks like we have the same penalties on more than one ecommerce site.

What subtle on-site factors can contribute to non-manual penalty, specifically rankings slowly going down for all short tail keywords? And what does it take to pull yourself out of these penalties?

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

For sites whose rankings are slowly going down, I would be very hesitant to use the term penalty. Penalties usually result in large, noticeable drops - more than 10 places lost at once and huge percentages of traffic gone "overnight". If several sites are losing one or two positions a week, it is more likely that competitor activity is taking place at a higher rate or quality.

There are a myriad of things competitors could be doing to slowly push ahead - the usual suspect is better / more link building: competing is not about matching competitors link for links, but rather:

1. Acquiring links at a faster rate
2. Acquiring more relevant links
3. Acquiring better-quality links (a BBC link as opposed to a link from a hobby blogger, etc.)

If link activity isn't the answer, so many other reasons can account for slow drops. Pagination issues resulting in duplicate content may not be enough for Google to outright penalise a site using its Panda algorithm, but they could be enough to make a site look like it was lower-quality and didn't deserve to rank as well as a tidy, well-optimised site.

Heavy "mentions" from around the web (e.g. the Telegraph mentioning a company 10 times in one month without linking to it) are positive signals, as is heavy social media activity and interaction.

What is the rate at which these sites lose rankings? I'd like to know a little more about how quickly they're dropping in order to think more about the "penalty" potential.

Thanks,

Jane

[BobGW]

You're right, it's not a penalty. Rankings have been slowly dropping over the past 8 months. Many keywords have gone from the top 3 to the second page. Our DA is as strong as the top sites.

I'm wondering if slight keyword stuffing (repeating a keyword once or twice in the title and h1 on a few pages like a title that says "Running Shoes, Walking Shoes" when the page is about all types of shoes) and other on-site factors could be causing this.

[JaneCopland]

Hi again,

This could be dampening Google's view of the site, but I would be interested to see what the link building and other promotional activity of your competitors looks like. DA might not have caught up with what they're doing yet, but the subtle improvements are enough to make the "playing field" a little tougher for you.

When you're being slowly out-done, I'd definitely recommend making sure the site is absolutely perfect from an on-page point of view. If you suspect you're keyword stuffing at all, resolve that and tidy up any other house keeping issues you come across. I don't think that would be enough to take a site from top 3 rankings to page 2, but it won't help if there are other competitive aspects you are being beaten on.

Forgive me for linking to my own post, but I wrote about competitive link analysis a few years ago and it might be helpful if you're looking at what others are doing as far as links go: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/competitive-backlink-analysis.html