Here is why.
In an online discussion, a webmaster complained that his site was no longer listed on Google for one of his most important keywords. The backlinks of the website didn’t look suspicious and the other factors also looked okay. Why did the rankings of the website drop?
What exactly happened?
The webmaster of www.mamajeanius.co.uk wondered why his site was no longer listed for the keyword “materity jeans”. Another forum member analyzed the site and found nothing unusual:
- The backlinks looked okay to the other forum member. At first glance, he didn’t find any spammy backlinks.
- About 417 pages of the website were indexed on Google.
Why did Google delist the website for that keyword?
Google’s John Mueller joined the discussion to explain why Google did not show the website for the keyword:
“It looks like your SEO (or previous SEO) may have tried to promote your site in a way that’s in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, I see a lot of unnatural links in low-quality articles as well as blog comments left by someone called ‘Maternity Jeans.’
Stopping these practices, cleaning up unnatural links like these, and using the disavow links tool in cases where you can’t clean them up, would be a good step in the right direction.
Over time (and this process can take months), as our algorithms recrawl the affected URLs, reprocess the links found on the web, and update their data, they’ll be able to take the new state into account.”
In other words, the rankings dropped because the website was spamming Google with artificial links.
“It looks like your SEO (or previous SEO) may have tried to promote your site in a way that’s in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, I see a lot of unnatural links in low-quality articles as well as blog comments left by someone called ‘Maternity Jeans.’
Stopping these practices, cleaning up unnatural links like these, and using the disavow links tool in cases where you can’t clean them up, would be a good step in the right direction.
Over time (and this process can take months), as our algorithms recrawl the affected URLs, reprocess the links found on the web, and update their data, they’ll be able to take the new state into account.”
In other words, the rankings dropped because the website was spamming Google with artificial links.
What does this mean for your website?
Google is serious about removing spam from the search results. If you want to get high rankings on Google, you should know that:
If you need help with SEO for your website contact CP Communications to help you to get better search engine rankings, more customers, and higher sales.- Artificial backlinks (blog comment spam, low quality articles, forum spam, etc.) will get your website in trouble.
- It can take months until your website recovers from bad backlinks (see John’s answer above).
