One week ago two of my websites (Polish market) was downranked by Google for almost all of the keywords.
Fortunately, these 2 sites aren’t very important for us, (we have few dozen more important), but it harms us as well.
We aren’t alone – about 2 weeks ago a lot of high ranked price comparison services in Poland also was downranked by Google.
There was a lot of articles about it in Polish blogosphere, because they are really very big players – according to alexa.com:
Ceneo.pl – 1754th place in global rank
Nokaut.pl – 6061st place in global rank
Skapiec.pl – 6329th place in global rank
Google’s quality engineer, Kaspar Szymanski (he is responsible for Polish market for the same things, as Matt Cutts for English market) wrote on Google+, that they are fighting against buying links by websites. Clear…
Evidence for our downranking by Big Brother Google behaviour (for one of our websites) you can find below:
On 8th February (marked with red line) all of our monitored phrases ranked down
For promoting our webservices we use mostly white hat SEO, so the question appears: WHY?
Sometimes we outsource some of recurrent work (for example adding to directories or article marketing), but it shouldn’t harm us…
One more thing, before I share with you this information – down ranking may be done by algorithm or by Google quality people…
Top 10 reasons, why your site may be downranked in SERPs
1) Too fast link amount increasing
2) Too fast link amount decreasing
3) Exchanging links with other sites
4) Keyword stuffing on your site (in text, in links, in tags, in meta tags)
5) DC – Duplicate Content on your site
6) Harmful links on your site
7) Harmful links providing to your site
8) Participation in links farm
9) NEW! Participation in contents farm
10) Selling/buying links
My colleague add 2 more points to this list:
11) Google changed algorithm, and your site isn’t here any more 😛
12) Something else, what Big Brother Google consider BAD
You can read also Google Penguin attacked – 50 types of links to strengthen your website
If you know some more reasons, why your site may be downranked, don’t hesitate and share your knowledge with us.
After investigation, we came to conclusion, that in our case, only one point (from top ten) is common to 2 sites and potential reason for penalty by Google – keyword stuffing.
Unfortunately, the keywords we are “monitoring” are very competitive – something like mortgage or loans, but for Polish market. Due this competition, our articles has been written by very good specialist in this area and are “SEO mastered” by SEO writers.
But our articles are written for our readers, and must have these keywords inside…
Maybe we have also to much titles and links concerned on some keywords? We aren’t sure, about it, because some our other sites (and not only our) has even more keywords on site, and are high ranked by Google…
Summarizing – no risk, no fun 🙂
Do you have any experience with down ranking your pages in SERPs?
Niall says
May 17, 2012 at 1:46 pmFortunately, my site wasn’t effected by algorithm changes this year until the Penguin update; but I haven’t lost too much traffic fortunately!
Chris says
May 17, 2012 at 4:12 pmYes, Penguin is unpredictable 🙁 …
John Ernest says
July 12, 2012 at 5:56 amYou really have to monitor your links and the sites that link to your website. If possible, it would be great for Google to allow disavowing links that the owner of a website or blog has not made himself which can potentially harm the PR of his website. This would have been a great feature and will allow for more diversity and control of the links.
Chris Madej says
July 12, 2012 at 6:33 pmHi John. Matt said some time ago that they are working on such functionality. But when they will run it…