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TheMenace

New Member
I seem to have been blacklisted, or at least completely de-ranked, from Google for searches for 'property'. I went from the top 10 down to... who knows? Anyway, I can only assume that this is down to keyword stuffing. Despite the fact that I haven't intentionally stuffed the keyword 'property' into the page - and it's in the domain name as well, which doesn't help when I need to print the site name on the page.

Now I can remove the word as much as possible but it'll be to the detriment of the user. Is there any way of putting in an appeal with Google or what?
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Why don't you wait a few days to see if you really are "blacklisted".

When Google is updating site position may move around a lot
 

TheMenace

New Member
Why don't you wait a few days to see if you really are "blacklisted".

When Google is updating site position may move around a lot

Well it's been knocked from the top 10 to God knows where in the last week or two so I can only imagine that it's been blacklisted... otherwise I assume the drop wouldn't have been so drastic.
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
I've seen worse :)

I've also seen it recover

Check your logs carefully

Was your website up all the time?

If the site was down or slow when the bots crawled it might explain part of the issue
 

TheMenace

New Member
I see you at no.30 on "pages from Ireland", so you're not banned...

No, I'm not banned as such but I was in the top 10 for generic searches and now I appear nowhere (or at least a few hundred results down... I haven't been able to find it)

Erratic.
 

TheMenace

New Member
No, it's definitely not. It was up there in 7th or 8th about 2 weeks ago. I'm assuming that there's no way you can appeal against this then? I can only assume that I've been penalised for alleged keyword stuffing. Maybe I should change the domain name :D
 

dude

New Member
I don't think you've been penalised at all.

Google tweaks their algorithm now and then. This can affect rankings. Also, websites which have better SEO than your website can overtake you...
 

TheMenace

New Member
I don't think you've been penalised at all.

Well I went from the top 10 to God-knows-where overnight, so something odd has happened.

Also, websites which have better SEO than your website can overtake you...

But surely I had better SEO than the other sites that I overtook to get into the top 10 in the first place? Effectively what we seem to be saying here is that Google changes its mind as often as most people change their socks and there are no hard or fast rules for SEO. I already knew this but it certainly doesn't give much credit to Google's credibility when it's so erractic.
 

RedCardinal

New Member
Ken log in to Google Webmaster Console (sitemaps) and see if there is any notification of a penalty (should be somewhere over on the RHS).

It could be something simple like backlinks either being removed or de-valued. They've [Google] have been going gung-ho on certain link patterns which I believe happened to hit property niche fairly bad.

It doesn't sound like a penalty though if you are ranking for your own name. More likely something to do with backlinks I imagine.

Could also just be a SERP burp or a slight tweak to algo... Google is just such a strange beast on occasions.
 

glengara

New Member
Seems like most of the links G is showing are paid graphicals and the only links that use "property" as the anchor text are the ones from this forum. To better target that term you probably need to change the alt text to "property" on both your paid links and your logo...
 

RedCardinal

New Member
Seems like most of the links G is showing are paid graphicals and the only links that use "property" as the anchor text are the ones from this forum. To better target that term you probably need to change the alt text to "property" on both your paid links and your logo...
Good spot Stephen

Might be a good idea to mix up the anchors/alts so that the footprint isn't too skewed toward one term. More natural that way.
 
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