How to check if my website is penalized ?

[i3arty]

Hi all,

I just went over some post that my page can get penalized for over optimizing.

I realized my page has quite a lot of h1 (6 it had 30) and a lot of "bold" keywords, does the bolding affect the page seo/penalizing the page?

the page im talking about it palmislander.com/dumaguete-travel-guide

Thanks

[Nozzle]

I've never seen ranking drops because of bolding too many words. As long as it looks good to a human, I wouldn't worry about it.

[JordanLowry]

Sometimes if you have a manual penalty you will receive a message through Search Console. Other times you'll have to pay close attention to your organic traffic and rankings to see if you've been impacted by any recent algorithm updates.

I've never heard of a site being penalized from bolding too many keywords but I'd pay special attention to how you acquire backlinks and make sure you're producing unique content.

Out of curiosity have you noticed any drastic drops in rankings or organic traffic to warrant your site being penalized?

[i3arty]

Hi there,

Thanks for replying and helping.

I have checked in the console and i think the problem that no one can find my web pages is because in the console my URL is "URL is not on Google" I try requesting the index without success

How can i fix this ?

[JordanLowry]

Hey, I took a look and it looks like your site is fairly new. It's likely Google is still crawling and slowly indexing content on your site.

I'd use a web crawler like Moz and/or Screaming Frog and make sure all the pages are easily accessible. Also, try requesting the "Live URL" in Search Console to see how Googlebot views the page. You should also double-check to make sure your XML sitemap is up to date and submitted in Search Console.

Also, it just takes time for a new site to get indexed and ranked. I know it sucks but it doesn't happen overnight and you have to be patient. Keep producing good content and try to build some initial backlinks to get started.

Best of luck!

[i3arty]

Hey,

This site has been online since 2019 January, so its not that new. I'm pretty sure it's something wrong with my site but i'm not sure yet what.

[JordanLowry]

I would recommend running your site through a technical audit. Here's a good template for that: https://www.distilled.net/technical-seo-audit-checklist/

[i3arty]

I have run the checklist and it seems to everything be a pass.

I also noticed that the "URL is not on google" was because i didnt put "/" at the end of link if i put the / then it shows all good.

The pages also shows up on google at "site:" so looks like everything is right and working, its just that my pages are not really optimized well so people dont see it on google. I have only about 8 impressions over past 20 days and no clicks

Will have to work on my seo i think, but i already did not sure what im missing

Thanks for helping

[JordanLowry]

Absolutely, you're welcome. At least you know there are no major technical issues. Have you done any keyword research? Are the terms you're targeting too competitive? I noticed you don't have a ton of backlinks and you seem to be targeting the travel niche.

That could be one issue.

[i3arty]

Yes correct, I believe back links are links to my site from external sources, how could I have more back links?

Also I did keyword research however when I type the keyword let's say "Bari travel guide" in incognito my website does not show up at all even at 15th Google page, so I'm not sure how to check if my website shows up at all for specific keyword

[areebtahir1]

You should wait some time and try to share your website on social media to get related traffic.

[JordanLowry]

That link you placed to your site is no follow btw.