My site was hammered by this last update -- I'm freaking out -- what now
-
I looked at my seomoz report yesterday, almost all my money keywords went to hell. When I was looking at the graph for one of my keywords it looked so depressing I don't think I can look at it again. The funny thing is that my competitors have bunch of low quality links on unrelated websites and they haven't been touched. How to approach this problem, I'm scared to do anything at this point.
-
I logged into my wmt but nothing, I don't think it's links, since one of my internal pages that has no inbound links got slammed the same way as the homepage targeting the same keyword
-
Tolod,
Did you get any messages on your GWMT? Any messages on Unnatural Links or not meeting Google Quality guidelines? That might help in figuring out why you were penalized.
-
Hi, You are not alone... http://www.seomoz.org/q/lost-50-google-traffic-in-one-day-panic Best wishes, Georg
-
Taking from a recent blog post that I wrote today, here are a few tips:
- _Make sure that your webpage titles make sense and are relevant to the webpage content. For example, don’t have your webpage title as ‘New Shoes, Running Shoes, Sports Shoes – Sport Shoes Ltd’. This kind of title looks spammy in itself and will certainly not help with your click-through rate. Try something more along the lines of ‘Sport Shoes Ltd – High Quality, New Running Footwear’. You will have got in pretty much all of your keywords there but without the chance of being penalised.
_ - _Check that the links on your webpages are relevant and that you don’t have too many. No webpage should have more than 100 links, and even that is pushing it. I would say that a total of 70 should be the most that you use. As well as this, make sure that the anchor text isn’t just a blatant use of an unrelated keyword; Google will notice this.
_ - _Find out who is linking to your website to ensure that they have not been punished for carrying out ‘black-hat’ activities. This will only drag you down with them so use a utility like Open Site Explorer to check where you are getting links and check them out.
_ - Make sure that you aren't keyword stuffing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have your keyword in your content 100 times (which would be a very obvious instance of keyword stuffing), but it can also be much more acute. With the use of more specific, long-tail keywords, try to refrain from putting them into text when they are not relevant, or just hiding them under image ‘alt’ attributes.
Hope this helps guys,
Matt.
- _Make sure that your webpage titles make sense and are relevant to the webpage content. For example, don’t have your webpage title as ‘New Shoes, Running Shoes, Sports Shoes – Sport Shoes Ltd’. This kind of title looks spammy in itself and will certainly not help with your click-through rate. Try something more along the lines of ‘Sport Shoes Ltd – High Quality, New Running Footwear’. You will have got in pretty much all of your keywords there but without the chance of being penalised.
-
I think your problem is crappy links. You will need to build some high quality content that people will want to link to. And get rid of the crap links if you can.
-
Greetings..I was coming on to ask a question with the exact same thing!
What I have done is made a full copy of my old/spammier site and now I am actively going through and taking out as many keyword/spammy type stuff from my live pages to see what happens.
I am really trying hard to edit each page from a non-SEO perspective...specifically with regard to alt tags, title tags, etc..
One additional question I might ask to anybody is: If you remove the spammy stuff and Google recrawls the site....will the penalty go away or do you thin it will stay with the site for awhile? Thoughts?
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
-
How do you 'close down' a website?
Hello all, If a company acquires a smaller company and 'absorbs' its products and services into its own website, what is the protocol with closing down the smaller company's site? So far we added our branding to the site alerting their visitors to the imminent takeover, and 301 redirected certain pages - soon we'll be redirecting all the pages to their counterparts on the main website. Once that's done, should we noindex the old site? Anything else? Thanks, Caro
Technical SEO | | Caro-O0 -
Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization?
Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization? Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization?
Technical SEO | | SalSantaCruz0 -
Why is Google not indexing my site?
I'm a bit confused as to why my site just isn't indexing on Google. Even if I type in my brand name, my social channels rank and there's no evidence of my website. I've followed all of the advice I've read and gone into webmaster tools and got the Wordpress yoast plug-in but nothing seems to be making a difference!One thing I've noticed, in Google Webmaster Tools it says "Couldn’t communicate with the DNS server." in site errors. I've called GoDaddy and they said that everything is fine. A bit frustrating. Trying to work out what my next steps should be but feeling a bit lost to be honest! Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Technical SEO | | j1066s0 -
HTML Site for Speed
I have a few small sites and landing pages on Wordpress that I want to load a lot quicker than they do. It occurred to me that if there is not a lot of content management necessary, I should simply make the static web pages straight html instead of trying all the modifications necessary to get some Wordpress sites and themes to load quicker. I have noticed the html sites I have load lighting fast on slow hosting service. Is this a good idea, can anyone think of drawbacks to it? Security? Responsiveness? SEO? And what about taking some company's sites with blog straight html so the home page loads quick, and then using Wordpress for the blog?
Technical SEO | | phogan0 -
Walking into a site I didn't build, easy way to fix this # indexing problem?
I recently joined a team with a site without a) Great content b) Not much of any search traffic I looked and all their url's are built in this way: Normal looking link -> not actually a new page but # like: /#content-title And it has no h1 tag. Page doesn't refresh. My initial thought is to gut the site and build it in wordpress, but first have to ask, is there a way to make a site with /#/ content loading friendly to search engines?
Technical SEO | | andrewhyde0 -
Does a CMS inhibit a site's crawlability?
I smell baloney but I could use a little backup from the community! My client was recently told by an SEO that search engines have a hard time getting to their site because using a CMS (like WordPress) doesn't allow "direct access to the html". Here is what they emailed my client: "Word Press (like your site is built with) and other similar “do it yourself” web builder programs and websites are not good for search engine optimization since they do not allow direct access to the HTML. Direct HTML access is needed to input important items to enhance your websites search engine visibility, performance and creditability in order to gain higher search engine rankings." Bots are blind to CMSs and html is html, correct? What do you think about the information given by the other SEO?
Technical SEO | | Adpearance0 -
Mobile site rank on Google S.E. instead of desktop site.
Hello, all SEOers~ Today, I would like to hear your opinion regarding on Mobile site and duplicate contents issue. I have a mobile version of our website that is hosted on a subdomain (m instead www). Site is targeting UK and Its essentially the same content, formatted differently. So every URL on www exists also at the "m" subdomain and is identical content. (there are some different contents, yet I could say about 90% or more contents are same) Recently I've noticed that search results are showing links to our mobile site instead of the desktop site. (Google UK) I have a sitemap.xml for both sites, the mobile sitemap defined as follows: I didn't block googlebot from mobile site and also didn't block googlebot-mobile from desktop site. I read and watched Google webmaster tool forum and related video from Matt Cutts. I found many opinion that there is possibility which cause duplicate contents issue and I should do one of followings. 1. Block googlebot from mobile site. 2. Use canonical Tag on mobile site which points to desktop site. 3. Create and develop different contents (needless to say...) Do you think duplicate contents issue caused my mobile site rank on S.E. instead of my desktop site? also Do you think those method will help to show my desktop site on S.E.? I was wondering that I have multi-country sites which is same site format as I mentioned above. However, my other country sites are totally doing fine on Google. Only difference that I found is my other country sites have different Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop site, but my UK mobile site has same Title & Meta Tag comparing to desktop. Do you think this also has something to do with current problem? Please people~! Feel free to make some comments and share your opinion. Thanks for reading my long long explanation.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
Site Disappeared off of Search
A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking. I did some checking and can't see a problem. She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install. I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either. When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well. She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated. This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible. Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland
Technical SEO | | kdaly1000