Did we get hit by Panda? What do we do?
-
Hello,
here's our site:
nlpca(dot)com
We had a big drop in rankings, going from about 19th to about 43rd for our main keyword and having significant drops in other keywords. This happened roughly 6 weeks ago
We thought it was being caused by either:
- Placing keywords in titles before we had them in the content.
or
- Trying to rank for Utah keywords - we're the NLP Institute of California and we are in both places now, but the site talks about mainly California.
We changed both these things, and we're still at the low rankings.
Will we move back up?
What do we do?
Will a backlink campaign be effective at this point?
-
We found out that we had 2 other domains that were duplicates of our site. Could that be a problem?
-
This is very helpful William, I'm still working on this.
-
Great Points webfeatseo,
I went to the website and at first blush I did not see what I expected to see such as scraped content or duplicate content. I did not get too deep but one suggestion would be to review all of your page content and use something like plagium checker as well SEOMOZ tools such as the On-Page Report Card tool also maybe run the SEO Web Crawler to find any possible issues.
I did run a quick scan with Copyscape and it did find your content on other sites but not too bad but it maybe work getting the pro version to check deeper
http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nlpca.com%2F
Also I ran a test with Xenu site scan and it found a lot of broken links with 403, 301, 302, 404 Errors.
It also looks like you have a lot of outbound links from this domain.
Other items found:
Broken page-local links (also named 'anchors', 'fragment identifiers'): http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#null anchor occurs multiple timeshttp://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#US not found
Again this is just a quick review I hope this helps....
-
Don't think you were hit by panda. That is more so for scraping and content issues. Are you doing any of that? And keyword placement in titles will not have a big impact like that on its own.
Your main page title tag has 4 keywords in there which could be causing some confusion on what the page is about. Try to target only 1 or 2 per page and target other words on other pages. On just a quick look your site does not really seem well optimized with on page factors.
Try using the seomoz on page grader tool to increase your page relevancy.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hit by an unnamed Google update on November 30th - Still suffering
Hi, Moz Community. Just decided to sign up for a free trial because I'm absolutely at my wits end here. Here's my site: cheapgamesguru.com I run a small PC gaming blog monetized by affiliate marketing. I do all the writing, SEO, etc. myself. The content I write is, from what I can tell, fully complying with Google's guidelines, and in and of itself is pretty informative and high-quality. My site was started in December of 2015, and it was doing very well for a good 10 or 11 months - until late November of 2016. Then something happened. My traffic started plummeting - I went from getting nearly 300 organic users a day (Not sessions - actual unique users) to 80, then 40, and now I'm lucky to get over 15 a day. I do not do ANY black hat SEO whatsoever. I have not taken part in any shady link building schemes, nor do I try to trick Google in any way. I just write good content, do good keyword research (Targeting only low-hanging fruit and low-difficulty keywords using KWFinder), and do my best to provide a good user experience. I run no ads on my site. Glenn Gabe wrote about a potential Google update on November 29th, but the stuff he said in his article doesn't seem to affect me - my mobile site is perfectly fine, according to Google's own metrics and testing tools. Here's the article in question: http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/november-30-2016-google-algorithm-update/ At first, I thought it was possible that this was a result of my competitors simply doing far better than me - but that doesn't seem to be the case, as their rankings did not actually move - mine simply pummeted. And many of their sites are far worse than mine in terms of grammar, spelling, and site speed. I understand backlinks are important, by the way, but I really don't think that's why my site was hit. Many competitors of mine have little to no backlinks and are doing great, and it would also not make much sense for Google to hit an otherwise great site just because they have few backlinks. A friend of mine has reached out to Glenn Gabe himself to see if he can get his input on my site, but he's had a busy schedule and hasn't gotten a chance to take a look yet. I recently obtained a backlink from a highly relevant DA 65 site (About a month ago, same niche as my site), and it now shows up in Search Console and Ahrefs - but it hasn't affected rankings whatsoever. Important Note: I'm not only just ranking poorly for stuff, I'm ranking in position 100-150+ for many low-competition keywords. I have no idea why that is happening - is my site THAT bad, that my content deserves to be ranking on page 15 or lower? Sorry for the long question. I'm struggling here, and just wanted to give as much information as possible. I would really appreciate any input you guys can give me - if any SEO experts want to turn my site into a case study and work with me to improve things, I'd also be open to that 😉 I kid, of course - I know you guys are all busy. Thanks! P.S. I've attached a picture of my SEMRush graph, for reference, as well. mhgSw
Algorithm Updates | | polycountz0 -
Have I been Hit by a Penguin? No Warning in Webmaster / Some Pages still Rank
Hi all, I have recently signed up to MOZ as I have seen a large drop in the turnover of a site I work with as well as a slump in visitors. I know part of this slump is the transition from google product search from being free to paid and chewing through our adwords budget quicker. The other part though seems a little more tricky, I have always been under the impression from reading online that an algorithm update would see a site destroyed for most terms and a notification generated in webmaster tools, however the site still seems to still rank for some terms, others however it has fallen off the face of the earth for. As you can see in the attachment webmaster tools is showing much decreased visibility, and MOZ agrees with this. Key terms that have lost rank have done so by around 4-10 positions. The content on the site has all been hand written by myself, however some of the pages are a little "stale" so I am currently running through re-writing every product page on the site (1000 products or so) all my product pages grade a minimum B with 99% A on the Moz page grader. I am keeping my fingers crossed that fresh content should assist in getting google interested again? However my real questions is, Is this Penguin? or is this just stale content? dmDdMr5.jpg pYkzck0.jpg 9f4mgM9.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | speedingorange1 -
Why am I not getting on Map Listing Results?
Greetings Mozzers, To my knowledge I'm doing everything that is "required" to start showing up on the map results when searching something local, however, we never seem to be on map results (A, B, C, D...etc). We have a Google+ page, submitted to Google Places (received PIN and entered it), optimized address to identical and in high authority map listing directories (GetListed.org), increased citations throughout the web, optimized keywords for categories on Google Places, schema.org HTML markup for address, meta address tags, consistent reviews being written by unique visitors to review sites (Yelp, Google+, etc). Am I missing a major component? Any advice would be great as I feel like I'm hitting many notes that should translate into a map result. Even for keywords that aren't incredibly difficult where we are ranking #1 above map results every time. Thanks and hope all have a great weekend!
Algorithm Updates | | MonsterWeb280 -
Frequency & Percentage of Content Change to get Google to Cache Every Day?
What is the frequency at which your homepage (for example) would have to update and what percentage of the page's content would need to be updated to get cached every day? What are your opinions on other factors.
Algorithm Updates | | bozzie3110 -
Recovered from penguin/panda but which one?
So the good news is that for the first time since April 24th, one of our websites is back in the search results as of around December 12 but I am still unsure as whether it was panda or penguin (or both) that was impacting the site?? Note this was not a manual penalty. I diagnosed it as a penguin issue (drop on April 24th, aggressive on-page optimisation, around 10% of links from spammy directories like addyourfreelinks.com with anchor text built by a questionable agency), but on further advice it was thought that panda was also an issue because it is a hotel microsite so there was duplication with our own brand site and across third party travel sites and there were a number of pages with bare content. I figured it was a good time to clean everything up to address both. Here is a summary of actions taken: submitted disavow file on October 24th with all questionable links including actions taken and comments. Since then I have cleaned up some content so it is less aggressively targeting certain keywords. Amended several third party listings with duplicate content No follow,indexed pages that were directly duplicated with our brand site and over the last month have built a few good quality links. Cleaned up 404's in webmaster tools over the last week I have searched to see if there were any algorithm updates around December 12 but cannot find any mentions. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | jay.raman0 -
Infographics Links could get discounted in the future
Hey guys, I read this article this morning on SEL. Not sure what to think about it.. Matt did have a point that a lot of infographics are of bad quality (even with wrong information present at times) , and hence don't deserve to gain links from it. But how could Google possible know whether the infographic itself is of high quality or not?? http://searchengineland.com/cutts-infographic-links-might-get-discounted-in-the-future-127192
Algorithm Updates | | Michael-Goode0 -
Panda Updates?
Anyone aware of any algo updates/refreshes today? Been seeing some serp movements on .co.uk
Algorithm Updates | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Was Panda applied at sub-domain or root-domain level?
Does anyone have any case studies or examples of sites where a specific sub-domain was hit by Panda while other sub-domains were fine? What's the general consensus on whether this was applied at the sub-domain or root-domain level? My thinking is that Google already knows broadly whether a "site" is a root-domain (e.g. SEOmoz) or a sub-domain (e.g. tumblr) and that they use this logic when rolling out Panda. I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions though?
Algorithm Updates | | TomCritchlow1