How to Avoid With a Google Penalty? List to Quickly Analyze & Fix Your Problems

Every website owner has a story about getting penalized by Google Search Engine. Confirmation suggests that though many websites have been penalized (not just by the big Google updates, but also by any one of the thousands of tiny little manual Google updates), the common marketer or webmaster hasn’t noticed such updates in most of the cases. According to blog I read in Kissmetrics, only 5% of penalized websites are submitting a reconsideration request every month to recover their rankings.

Since websites are all dependent on search engines for traffic, we have to continue aware about the latest updates -- and make changes if our website is affected with any of penalties. Not only is it good common sense to keep side by side of the updates, but it can give you the competitive advantage if you can recover faster than others. As a website owner if you are looking for some professional help than as a Digital Marketing Company you can contact us for that.

Thankfully, here in this article I am just writing down few steps that you need to do to ensure your SEO stays agile and ahead-of-the-game at all times.

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the types of updates that were released by Google and other Search Engines.

Here I am writing down quick list of the most significant updates and an overview of what they included.

A)Panda Updates: Born in 2011

There were updates before Panda, but this was the first substantial pain for every websites.

Its purpose: To clean-up on websites containing poor content, excessive ads, and possibly better design. This was rolled out in stages, and it continues to this day.

B)Venice Updates: Born in 2012

This was the one that increased the number of local results for broad queries.

C)Penguin Updates: Born in 2012

In the same year of Venice Update one more update was released namely Penguin. This update is designed to combat actual SPAMMY websites rather than sites that are legit, but poorly made.

 Its purpose: In this update Google cracked down on keyword stuffing, cloaking, link building ... basically, any method you’ve heard of referred to as “black hat.”

D)Pirate Updates: Born in 2012

This update was targeted at websites that violated copyright on multiple occasions.

Its purpose: Stolen content or copied content would have been hit here.

E)Secure Updates: Born in 2014

In this update preference is given to websites with SSL security.

Its purpose: As website hacking becomes more sophisticated and people are more aware of the risks, it is important to moderate those doubts by offering security (particularly if you require personal and financial details from your web visitors).

F)Mobilegeddon Updates: Born in 2015

In this update preference is given to websites that are responsive.

Its purpose: Unsurprisingly, having a website that is readable and navigable on a handheld device as well as desktop is preferred by visitors.

These updates are not one-offs; they are repeated to keep up with changes in black-hat techniques and to keep ensuring that searchers are satisfied with their results.

To conclude this step, before you go further, make sure your website:

• is not full of ads
• is not keyword-stuffed
• has long-form and/or quality content
• is localized where localization matters
• does not engage in any spammy link building practices
• has a legitimate security certificate
• does not steal or copy content from other websites
• looks good and functions well on mobile

As a website owner if you are looking for some professional help with such website design and security concern than as a Search Engine Marketing Company you can contact us for that.

Step 2: Find out whether you website has a ranking difficulty in Search Engine.

To begin with, identifying the problem is key to success. Without aware of what you have been penalized for, you can’t deal with it.

For example, back in September ‘14, most webmaster thought they were dealing with a Penguin update, but it was in fact an extended Panda update.

Here are a few guidelines to help you appropriately diagnose what happened with your website.

1.  Use a penalty indicator tool to find out what has happened to your website in the past, and if you have yet to recover from it. A fast and simple tool to drop this knowledge bomb on you is this succinctly titled Website Penalty Indicator. Here I am showing screenshot for the same.

This handy tool from FEInternational can show you which of the major Google penalties hit you and at what point they hit. (For example “www.google.com” to see what would happen.)

However, you’ll notice that this tool focuses on the Big Bad algorithm changes and not all of the little manual ones in between. To find out those, you’ll need to follow the next step.

1.  Use tools like SEMrush to find out if your website is penalized by one of Google’s updates.

By using tools like SEMrush, you can do a complete site audit and check how your position has changed in SERPs, check your website backlinks, and analyze your content too with the help of this tool.

To conclude this step, before you go further, make sure your website:

• Use penalty checker tool  for updates effects on your website
• Use website audit
• Check your website backlinks
• Check for SERPs

As a website owner if you are looking for some professional help with such penalty check and website audit than as a Search Engine Optimization Company you can contact us for that.

Step 3: Learn how to make progress.

This section was contributed by Elena Terenteva, Content Strategist at SEMrush.

“The best thing you can do for your website is to avoid penalties in the first place. Website owners who break SEO rules risk manual penalties or being seriously harmed by algorithm updates. When a website is hit with a penalty, it’s more than likely.”

There are few reasons for that as described below:

• A lack of knowledge on behalf of the SEO specialist
• A purposeful violation of basic SEO principles
• The use of black-hat techniques

But if you have been hit by a penalty, how you'll figure out the root cause will depend on what kind of penalty it is:

1. Manual Penalty:

If a website gets a manual penalty, the owner will be notified through Google Webmaster Tools and receives a letter explaining the reasons for its failure. This means the website owner will at least have an idea of how to recover and can begin working on the suggested changes.

1. Algorithm Change:

If your website is hit by an algorithm change, the situation becomes slightly more difficult. You need to find a correlation between Google’s last actions and your website’s losses. Don’t forget that website position and traffic losses can be caused by general problems and may have nothing to do with algorithmic changes. If you do find that you were harmed by a specific algorithm change, get all the information you can about that update so you can start to resolve the issue.

Of course, all of us want to avoid being hit by a penalty in the first place. So if you want to be prepared, I recommend hire someone who is proficient of consistently running SEO audits. Here are a few things that we will do for you:

• Remove or disavow unnatural or spammy links manually
• Be sure that your anchor text is diversified
• Get rid of all duplicate content
• Create non-keyword-stuffed, quality content
• Keep an eye on UX

Remember that the best strategy is to avoid penalties and realize that SEO is not just about trying something new. It’s also about constantly monitoring the success of your previous efforts.

Although avoiding penalties may seem like building a house of cards that may collapse at any minute ... well, that’s kind of the way it is! That’s why it’s important to ensure that your website is up-to-date, helpful, and trustworthy.

So as a website owner if you are looking for some professional help with such penalty check and website audit than as a Search Engine Optimization Company you can contact us for that.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

How to Get Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics Account - Part IV

Hey Friends as we gone through various techniques to get result from ‘not provided’ keyword list in Google Analytics Account so in this series today we going to cover last method that can help you to generate result from your ‘not provided’ keyword list.

P.S.: Before getting started through this third method if you have missed my first two method I recommend taking theMethod – 1 first Method – 2 second  & Method – 3 before starting this method.

Method 4: Use Webmaster Tools

You all must be aware of Google’s Webmaster Tool when you try to submit your website link into Google Search Engine. Google’s Webmaster Tool’s dashboard is nowhere near as comprehensive as Google Analytics Data Generation ability, but in this condition, the metrics it gathers does add some value. Specifically, you can see a very basic overview of keywords that lead visitors to your site in the Traffic menu, under Search Queries.

Underneath this graph you’ll find a pretty comprehensive list of your website’s keyword performance:

A nice treat that Google Webmaster Tools does give you: It will tell you the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of your keywords from Google Search Results. Sometimes a little more polishing up on your title tags and meta-descriptions can help increase the Click-Through-Rate of your keywords.

Finally, Google Webmaster Tools also tells you an approximate amount of search impressions your keywords are attracting. If you know that a certain keyword is attracting a large number of impressions, it might be in your best interest to put a little more effort towards ranking for that keyword to obtain more traffic. One way to do this is to simply expand your content related to this keyword.

Final Verdict

Google’s ‘not provided’ data is a contentious topic, and there’s no foolproof way to access the data that hidden in Google Analytics Report. However, if you’re losing a important amount of statistical data to ‘not provided’, it’s certainly worth investing some time to overcome the problem. If you having any problem while implementing any workarounds in such data than you can contact us as we are the leading search engine optimization companylocated in India, USA and Canada. And we are also Google Analytics and Google Adwords Certified Company so we can help you in implementing one or more workarounds to help you to improve your understanding of organic keywords and get a better insight into your missing statistics.

For more tips and tricks on how to do search engine optimization of your website and various other methods on promotion and marketing you can sign up for free newsletter so that it will directly deliver to your Inbox.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

How to Get Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics Account - Part III

Hello Friends welcome back. Hope you are looking forward to try this next method for getting your Google Keywords‘not provided’ data for generating better marketing strategies for such keywords as these are the keywords through which people are visiting your site and if you get right insight of these keywords you can make your website more informative friendly and if you work more towards it you get chance to convert visitors to lead to prospect.

P.S.: Before getting started through this third method if you have missed my first two method I recommend taking theMethod – 1 first Method – 2 second before starting this method.

Method 3: Examine AdWords Data

As mentioned in this series of articles, ‘not provided’ is only an issue for organic search queries. Paid (Google Adwords) search isn’t affected with this. That means you can dodge the problems caused by ‘not provided’ results by paying for Adwords and measuring the response rates to keywords via PPC. These are shown in Google Analytics as Matched Search Queries.

P.S.: Remember one thing again, this isn’t an entirely precise solution; the data shown in Adwords is only related to traffic that you’ve paid for – not the organic traffic. However, if you are willing to pay the cash to spend on keyword research, it’s another way to boost your understanding of user behavior and make your SEO research more meaningful.

If you are not willing for Google Adwords or PPC Management still I can help you with one more method where you can dig into Keywords List of ‘not provided’ report. And as you know you can find that in my next part.

For more tips and tricks on how to do search engine optimization of your website and various other methods on promotion and marketing you can sign up for free newsletter so that it will directly deliver to your Inbox.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

How to Get Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics Account - Part II

Hello Friends hope you are looking forward to try this next method for getting your Google Keywords ‘not provided’data for generating better marketing strategies for such keywords as these are the keywords through which people are visiting your site and if you get right insight of these keywords you can make your website more informative friendly and if you work more towards it you get chance to convert visitors to lead to prospect.

P.S.: Before getting started through this second method if you have missed my first method I recommend taking theMethod – 1 first

Method 2: Use Traffic Sources Data

Within Google Universal Analytics, there’s a second set of metrics that can help you to decode your most popular keywords. The Search Engine Optimization report is designed specifically for this purpose – specifically the Queries report.

Data in this report is generally two days out of date, and it’s fair to say that the metrics here are partial in scope. If you’re managing a busy website, Traffic Sources simply won’t give you the detail you need to properly analyze your Queries and Landing Pages; the number of results it can show is partial, for example.

However, for smaller business sites, this report is worth a look for a very basic overview of what’s happening with organic search on your website.

Don’t worry readers if you running with busy website and facing such problems I have so many other methods in my knowledge so keep reading this blog post as still there are other ways through which you can get your ‘not provided’keywords list. 

If you have any questions, please contact us.

How to Get Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics

Google Universal Analytics is a incredible resource tool for any website owner or search engine optimizer. From small personal sites to big corporate website, from small bloging to full e-commerce website, Google Analytics is a “goldmine” of useful information and statistics about visitor trends and behavior though out journey of a visitor to lead, lead to prospect, prospect to client.

However, there is little area where Google Universal Analytics frustrates its users: “The Organic Search Query Report.” An increasing number of results in this part of Analytics are listed as ‘not provided’ – not much use when you’re trying to find out what people are searching for when they comes to your website, which is most important inside for you to start working on.

P.S.: the ‘not provided’ is lifted for paid search results. It’s just the organic search results that are often hidden from view.

So everyone who is working on this Universal Google Analytics has this common question in their mind:

 “Why Is Data Hidden and ‘Not Provided’?”

Before 4 years in October 2011, Google changed the way it produces data from search to protect users’ privacy.

If a user is logged into any of the Google product (such as Gmail or Youtube) when searching, their search is conducted over SSL. As such, the referral data relating to that search is hidden.

Referral data includes some constructive information such as the keywords used to perform that search. Google can still see this information, but website owners – and Analytics account holders – can’t access it. This missing data leaves a gaping hole in our analytics reports, making it difficult for us to know the ROI of specific keywords we rank for in organic search.

Luckily, there are a few workarounds that can reveal the data behind these figures.

So here in this blog I am helping everyone who has this common question in their mind:

“How to Unlock ‘Not Provided’ Results in Google Analytics Report?”

Before we get into this guide, first thing first it’s a good idea to verify just how many of your organic search keywords are listed as ‘not provided’, and whether this is increasing with time or not. You’ll need to assess whether it’s worth investing time into decoding these results before you continue with this guide, since none of these techniques provides a single, foolproof solution.

Here in this I am going to cover different methods one at a time. So don’t forget to follow me on this for complete solutions with your Google Analytics problem in your reporting.

Method 1: Recognize the User’s Behavior with Landing Page Reports

The first and most important way to get around the ‘not provided’ result is to mine Google Universal Analytics for other information that will reveal more about those visitors and what they were doing on your site during their visit.

1. In your Analytics account, head to Admin, then Profiles.
2. Click the name of the profile you want to work with, and select the Filters tab.
3. Create a new filter in your Analytics account:

The purpose of this filter is to extract the ‘not provided’ terms. To do this, extract the URL and rewrite the two in place of the original ‘not provided’ text. Although this doesn’t reveal the exact keyword, it can help you to understand where that traffic is going and whether you need to dig deeper with other techniques. (The important part – the rewrite – is highlighted in BLUE in our screenshot.)

P.S.: Here you need to understand one thing that this filter can’t be applied to historical data; you’ll only see it in action for new visits.

Don't Forget to Next Method on this Blog.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Google Analytics not provided keywords IBIS Technologies

Domain Relocation Guidelines To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

Re-branding your company name is one of the most common and toughest marketing initiatives for businesses across world, and can occur at any time for variety of reasons. Whether it is an effort to dissociate with the performance of the past or to simplify the brand name of your company for future, this marketing tactic can be very successful if approached properly.

Some notable brands have undergone this process including Hutchison’s rebranding to Vodafone, and the Federal Express rebranding to FedEx. In the digital world, Google rebranded from their original name, BackRub.

SEO Ranking Preservation

SEO Ranking Preservation can be a broad term that may include a variety of performance indicators including page-rank, traffic, ranking keywords, online purchases, bookings, and many more. When SEO Ranking preservation is not a key factor throughout domain migration or the URL restructuring process, there are some key lessons that can be learned. As search engine optimizers, we understand that often other factors like time-resources, budget, other marketing efforts, or even client buy-in to the SEO process may inhibit the preservation process. Brands that have failed at this process chose to focus on other priorities during their website migration process, and unfortunately, as a result they have seen dramatic dips in their site performance.

Another “frightening scenario” for SEO is to have domain migration occur so that both domains remain live for some time and links connect the old and new sites back and forth. To avoid this, coordinate the shift all at once because the existence of two live domains with substantial amounts of duplicate content and partial implementation of redirects will send conflicting signals to search engines about which site should rank. Consequently, the domain authority is then split instead of shifted from the old domain to the new one. In some cases we’ve seen domain authority drops for both the old and the new domain.

Re-brandings with SEO Ranking Preservation in Mind

What are the precautions do you need to plan ahead for, in order to minimize the chance of these re-branding drops impacting your business?

There are 6 significant components to maintaining domain authority, digital presence, and accurate tracking of the domain migration. Some of which impact how the domain is perceived and some are related to how the migration is tracked. Keep in mind these significant elements if you are planning for a re-branding:

1)Redirects

The most apparent first step is to put in place redirects which automatically route a user from the old domain and page to the new one. There are a range of types of redirects that are available, but for these types of redirects, a 301 is best. A 301 status communicates to search engines and web browsers that the page has been permanently relocated and redirects the user to the correct page. A 301 redirect also transfers ranking power (sometimes called “link juice”) that the legacy page had built up to the new page.

In order to identify every page on the site that needs to be redirected, several tools, including Screaming Frog, Integrity for Mac, are available to “crawl” the legacy site. Pay special consideration to URLs that have the most in-bound links, or receive the highest volume of inbound traffic from other sites. These pages are home to most of the site’s “link juice” and must be maintained. Tools such as Google Search Console, MozOpenSite Explorer and Majestic SEO, can be used to compare and make sure that nothing gets skipped or overlooked.

Once the list of legacy pages is complete they must be mapped to pages on the new site and redirected. A simple way to help you do this is to create an excel file listing the old URL’s in one column and the new ones in another. It also helps for verification purposes later.

It’s important to be prepared to make all of the changes at once instead of drifting a handful of pages at a time. Leaving both domains live sends conflicting signals to search engines and can damage the domain authority of both the legacy and new domains.

2)Resubmit Sitemap

Once the redirects have been implemented it’s vital to notify Google and Bing Webmaster Tools that a change of address is happening. Leave the old site’s XML sitemap live for about a week after the migration because crawling never happen immediately to your sitemap so crawlers can still access it, follow the links therein through the 301 redirects, and start working the old URLs out of their indexes.

Create a XML sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools/Search Console. Typically, it can take a day or two before the new crawl takes effect and you can compare the number of indexed pages once the crawling happen. You can access crawling information from your webmaster tool.

3)Directory Listings

Along with inbound links, one more significant factor to consider is directory listings are one of top sources used by both search engines and users to find a website or domain. It’s considered best SEO practice to make certain that listings in online and print directories are current and accurate. A domain migration requires returning to all of the directories that list the legacy domain and updating them to reflect the new address. These directories may include (most generically) Yep, FourSquare, InfoGroup, Localeze, Yellowpages, and DMOZ. An aggregation tool like MozLocal can help bring all of these directories into alignment.

In addition to the generic directories most businesses have an opportunity to be listed in industry-specific directories. From real estate-agents to Dentists or home maintenance professionals, you’ll likely find a set of available directories. The longer a legacy domain has been in existence, the more directories that will subsequently need to be updated.

4)Social Media

Now as we are into this Digital world there is a strong correlation between social media engagement and web traffic. Announcing and publicizing the domain name change to provide important social signals and promote the re-branding in its own right. This will generate higher than usual volumes of traffic to the new domain in order to compensate for the potential drop in organic traffic while Google is indexing the new domain. While it isn’t critical to update all legacy posts with a new domain, it’s crucial to make sure that any pages that have social media links to them are correctly redirected. Update social media profiles, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google +, but don’t neglect LinkedIn, Instagram, Blogger, Pinterest,  Stumblr, YouTube and any others that are connected to the website.

5)Analytics and Search Console Profiles

The profiles in an analytics package, whether it is Google Analytics or a third party fee-for-service provider, will track the traffic to a specific domain, and if it’s set up correctly should not be tracking activity on other domains. In the Admin tab of Google Analytics, the property name and default URL should be updated to reflect the new domain. This is also the time to annotate Google Analytics in order to track the date of the migration.

In addition to Google Analytics it's important to update settings in Google Search Console, only AFTER the migration has occurred.

6)Audit Redirects

Once everything is complete, it’s important to verify that everything is working as expected. The Screaming Frog web spider tool can help run an audit of the old and new site to examine the results.

A). Upload: The legacy URL’s

Switch the SEO Spider to ‘List Mode,” select the file with all the old URLs to audit and upload.

B). Select: The ‘Always Follow Redirects’ box

Navigate to the ‘Advanced’ tab inside the ‘Spider Configuration’ and select the ‘Always Follow Redirects‘ option.

As default ‘List Mode’ works at a 0 crawl depth, meaning it just crawls the URLs included in the upload. With this feature selected, it ignores depth and will follow redirects until the final destination (a no response, 2XX, 4XX or 5XX etc.).

C). Start the crawl

Now hit the ‘Start’ button let the SEO Spider crawl the site, reach 100%, and come to a stop.

D). Click on ‘Reports’ & ‘Redirect Chains’

This report does not just include URLs which have redirect chains, it includes every URL in the original upload and the response in a single export. If a URL has multiple redirects in a chain, this export will map out each hop along the way, redirect 1, to redirect 2, to redirect 3, and all the responses along the way until the final target. It will also show how many hops there are (remember 5+ Google might give up and treat as a 404) and identify any pesky redirect loops.

This report provides a comprehensive method to audit all redirects in a site migration in a nice, easy, single export.

Effective Domain Migration To Preserve Search Engine Rankings

While there are a lot of steps in this process and many intricate details to pay attention to, we at IBIS can defiantly help you out with this preparation and a clearly outlined plan. Sometimes it can be possible to identify unexpected behavior or disparities before they have a notable impact on traffic and visitors. So for that expert services of professional can guide you well. Following the steps to update analytic packages and audit redirects will help identify opportunities to make changes before they become problems.

If you have any questions, please contact us.