Google has a penalty on my website? How to resolve?

[ZSuttonPhoto1]

I recently purchases Moz pro, hoping to find out why my website isn't ranking on specific keywords. I'm done analytics on myself and my competition and it seems that I rank better than them on 95% of the categories (using OpenSiteExplorer and keyword research tools). So I purchases Moz Pro hoping I'd find the glaring error in my ways.

I found a few small issues I was having, and have dealt with them. Overall however, they were small issues, and have led me to believe Google as a penalty in place for my website (SEO friend have also suspected this). In my Google Webmaster tools, nothing is marked under Manual Actions.

So does anyone have a way to contact Google and have them directly look at my website to insure there is no errors in their system?

[KeriMorgret]

First step is that you want to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools. You can then go into GWT and see if Google has left you any type of notice.

[ZSuttonPhoto1]

I have verified my website in Google webmaster Tools.

And while my website is verified, there are no notifications from Google to suggest that my website is blacklisted for any reason whatsoever. My website gets crawled every day or two, and while I rank very high on Bing and Yahoo for my keywords, I'm entirely ignored in SERP rankings for Google.

[Felip3]

Did your site ever rank well on Google? If you don't see anything on GWT most like you don't have a penalty. Ranking on bing and Yahoo is usually much easier than ranking on Google.

You can use the "compare" button on opensiteexplorer to see how your link metrics are different from the websites ranking higher. Here is a step by step:

1. Go to opensiteexplorer.org
2. Put your site URL there and click on "Compare up to five sites".
3. Include in the list websites ranking in the top 10 for your keyword

ps: Make sure you compare not only the home page, but the pages targeting the keywords you are going after for example:

• mysite.com/targetkeyword
• competitor1/com/targetkeyword

You can also use the on page grander to compare  and fix your on page optimization.

I hope it helps.

[ZSuttonPhoto1]

At one point in time, I was ranked on the top ten page for Google for my specific keywords. At the time, I had gotten greedy, and decided that instead of ranking around 8, I wanted to rank in the top three. I had hired someone to manage my SEO, and they used blackhat tactics, by spreading backlinks to hundreds of sites that didn't necessarily pertain to my websites focus.

Since then, Google has ignored me considerably, and I've spent the better part of the last 18 months cleaning up those ugly backlinks. I've tried disavow, which Google has ignored for the last 120 days or so, but was also able to get many of them manually removed. For the past couple months now, I've had a significant drop in the spammy and untrusted backlinks, and have gotten my website incredibly optimized for SEO tactics in my local market.

However, Google has still managed to dock my rankings for my most common keywords, which leads me to believe that they have a penality set up on my website that isn't being shown in Google Webmaster Tools.

[ZSuttonPhoto1]

And in terms of my OpenSiteExplorer rankings, I'm beating my competitors (off of which rank much higher than me) in virtually every measurement...yet I'm nonexistent on Google.

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[MoosaHemani]

My answer is totally based on my experience and the information you have provided so far. I believe that your website is not under any manual penalty but still due to the low quality of links you have built over the period of time; it is now affecting your rankings.

How to get out of it?

The best way to start is by auditing your links, get all the links from Open Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tool and if you can invest then get the link profile of your website from Majestic SEO as they have the largest index of links among all.

Audit the link profit and separate the bad links (you can use software like Link Detox and Link Risk here) from the profile and try to remove as many bad links from the link profile as possible and create a disavow file for the rest.

Upload the Disavow file in Google Webmaster tool and you are half done!

This way you have told Google that you don’t want a link juice from the list of links that you have updated in the disavow file.

The step two is to create regular and kick ass content on the website and get quality links back to the website. After submitting the disavow file your core job is to create quality content and get high quality links naturally that points back to the website.

Hope this helps!