Penalty Or Devaluation: How Bad Can Be Devaluation And How To Come Out Of It?

What do you do when you see that your SEO efforts are not working? What if your traffic is falling badly?

Whom you blame for it?

Of course, you must be thinking that your site has fallen into a penalty, or a bad linking or even some major technical glitch.

However, there is much more than these factors that you blame for having a degraded SEO for your website. At times there are “penalties” which are not levied actually in the form of penalty. They work more like devaluation process. So, if your website has lost its ranking then it may not be due to penalty or technical team fault but probably because your site is loading too slowly or else it has a thin content in it.

There can be many factors for the loss of  ranking which should be given a careful eye.

What should you do for it?

Nothing better than finding the problem and solving it then and there. Professionals from SEO company Dallas suggest three main components to look at while finding the problem. These are:

1. Did anything pushed your ranking lower?

• Addition of any rich snippet

• May be there is a new answer box

• More PPC ads are appearing

2. Do you own pages which ranks within top 100 instead of your first page and top 5 results?

3. Is your site is totally out from top 100 pages except for your trademark?

The third one which is listed as problem generally happens when a site suffers a penalty from the search engine. Penalized sites do not typically appear for any search query in the top 100. 

In case you are facing problem number 1 in which you are losing your ranking, probably because the design of your search engine result has made you site come down or going out of traffic position.

If number 2 is the problem which is quiet commonly found, it would mean that their is some duplicate content, thin content or competing pages within your site which creates a ranking dip. The three problematic thing are easy but sometimes it is labour intensive.

Let us discuss some tools to solve these problems:

1. Duplicate content

Experts from best SEO company in Denver identify duplicate content to be a situation where the  body of the copy and the metadata is exactly the same within multiple pages. 

In technical terms there would be same codes, tags etc as well within these pages but here we will focus on the body copy part.

Tools like Moz, SEMrush,Screaming Frog and Deep Crawls can help in easily identifying the duplicate content issue by looking at various aspects of the content which is duplicate or incredibly similar. In order to fix the problem of duplicate content, it is important to find why you have duplicate content within your website. 

You can begin by looking at:

• The .htaccess to see all redirects and formats are equal

• Canonical links are set up for the best version or original version of the page to be shown.

• Meta robots noindex dofollow is set for all duplicate versions.

2. Thin content

The secret to success is actually no secret. It is your content which leads you to win half battle, however, the only condition here is getting unique and reliable content.  You may think you have an engaging content but in reality things can be different.

If you ranking has sinked from being on first page to no traffic, then make sure to have a look what is on the page and what is ranked in top 10.

You can straight away look towards your competitors and ask:

• Is your competitors providing better solution to users problem?

• Is there more or less content than the previous top 10 sites?

• does the new ranking sites have informative content or simply sales copy or it is more like a store?

• What is the speed of page loading?

• How long it takes to reach the first page and the page to fully satisfy the users intent?

• Do they have proper schema?

• What is the structure of their site?

After you get the answers, it is time to think how you can incorporate the result in your website but in better format and easy to understand basis. Thin content is a problem which is commonly faced and the issue can be fixed easily.

It may take time for search engine to understand the changes and reconsider the site. However, if you have made a significant approach and build your site content on the basis of quality, you ranking will get improved significantly and will increase because of long tailed keyword and rich snippets.

3. Competing pages

This issue is mostly found within websites. The most common tool that can help to find and resolve solution is Authority Lab. Unlike Moz and SEMrush, authority lab helps in tracking top 100 positions and all the URLs showing for each other position for that particular position.

Authority Lab provides history for pages from your own URL which are ranking. Websites which are new to ranking from the term or phrase and which has been disappeared. If your website disappear from top listing then you should start looking up for the keywords and find which URL used to be in traffic position. Then move ahead and look up when it first disappeared and find if it got dropped from top 100 or are still ranking.

Usually the “content penalty” given to sites are mostly due to competition and duplicate issues. It can be possible that the canonical tag has gone missing or the blog post made is not unique in true senses from the main page and both of them are now out of top 100 waiting for getting ranked.

If you discover group of URLs ranking for same keyword phrase, then you have a chance to delete the bad one or redo the content copy for the new ones for giving enough of new unique twist and turns so that it does not compete with the core pages of your website

How can you detect and resolve the issue:

• Use the keyword from Google Search Console and feed them in any of the tool account into Authority Labs account and begin collecting data.

• See how many of the URLs are coming up and from where

• Have a look at the URLs and note their respective themes

• Go for some research, seek help from Google Keyword Planner or Quora or any other and create a list of certain topics and unique idea around each specific theme.

• Outline new pages which are based on new topics that are somewhat similar to each other.

• You can also markup or create a copy with internal links to help in defining which page speaks about what and why.

• Lastly, begin with implementing the copy and adding keywords to authority lab to see URLs hopefully disappear from the main keyword phrase and starts appearing for their own keyword phrases.

Always keep in mind that when you create a unique copy even for similar product or service, your unique content gives a reason to search engine to rank these pages on their own. You will find that such pages will start ranking for their respective keyword phrases rather competing with each other.

Summary

When you hear about site getting penalty, do not always consider to be actual penalty. It may the devaluation of content and its UX which leads to fall in ranking and traffic. If your site structure and speed is not a issue, then consider digging deep within your website.