Not Sure Exactly How Penguin is Effecting My Site (looking for tuff love)
-
Hello Everyone,
I own a small web design firm website. My site was for sure hit by Penguin, but not sure why they devalued my pages. I dont really do SEO or link building except for my own site. I normally turn clients down when they want SEO services. Mainly because we do web design really well, so I've chosen to invest my time doing that versus doing both.
For most of my keywords I took a 5-10 spot drop. Nothing super major, but enough that its tanking my business. I've survived all of the panda stuff, so I assumed my content writing, and link building tactics were good, but I'm wrong.
Here is my website: http://www.clikzy.com/ I will explain what I have been doing below, and I am looking for a little help/direction. I don't mind if you look at my site, links, and are brutally honest.
I do have original content ( I just ran everything through copyscape a month prior), and I occasionally get duplicate pages as my CMS tends to create them automatically, but we do a fairly good job of redirecting those pages when they occur.
My link building tactics have been a mixture of the following. I have used anchor text alot which could be my demise.
Forum postings
Blog Comments
Website Footers (roughly 20 over the course of a year)
Web Design Directories (explain below)I did start using directories in January. I would use OpenSite Explorer, and review some of my bigger competitors, and would occasionally get listed on a web design directory they were on. I think total I probably purchase 8-10 since Jan including botw, business.com, etc.
I have some local pages which I create case studies for which ranked fairly well. For instance for the term Baltimore Web Design I used to rank #1, but not I'm 5-6.
Here's the keyword: http://www.clikzy.com/reston-web-design.html
One more note: I did redirect an older website I have (12 years) to my current site (3 years) in Jan. Mainly because it ranked well for terms in NYC. I've dropped for those terms around 5 spots.
I have a few questions:
1. What would you suggest to fix something like this?
Power Content?
Better Links? (of course, we all want better links)
2. Remove links? I am not sure which ones are bad.
One thought was to just kill my local pages (roughly 15 pages) which would also kill any bad links I may have point to them.
3. If I have a bad link pointing to a internal page, could that bring down my home page rankings?
Any help would be appreciated.
I am in the process of interviewing for a full time PR person to come on staff to help us with our content, and PR. I knew I should have invested in this person a year ago! ha!
Thank you!
Pete
-
Hi Charles,
Thank you for the response. Just to clairify, as I have never had a penalty, or anything like this happen in the past.
If Google devalues my links, then I should not worry about removing them since they are not passing link juice?
I've never used a blog network, and I have not revived any messages from Google in WMT about spammy links.
I appreciate your help.
If anyone else has any repsonses, I would love to hear them!
Thank you,
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
Firstly I wouldn't remove any of your links, it looks like your links have been devalued.
This basiclly means that Google isn't counting many of your links. Most likely Website footers, blog comments and forums have all been devalued.
Watch this video by Rand for more info http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-on-googles-penguin-update
If you want to regain your ranking I would conentrate on content creation for your blog and guest blogging. It looks like you haven't added anything for awhile. Try posting each week. Also add some photos to each of your blog posts.
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
-
A semi client of mine reached out to me recently that another site scraped his whole site and traffic dropped significantly.
Someone that reaches out to me on occasion for help but is mostly an SEO DIYer recently had his site copied completely and his traffic dropped significantly immediately after. I have never had a client experience this in the past. Does anyone have suggestions or expertise on this? See his question and what he has done below. Jeremy This site scraped my credit site. Its appearance coincides with a dramatic sitewide decrease in Google traffic.I submitted a takedown request by paying this company $200. No results yet. My hosting company also placed blocks on the site HTML which pings my server for CSS and picture files. My Google Webmaster tools account shows inbound links coming from the copycat. Is there something more I should be doing? Copy Site: http://masqueros.com/Real Site: https://www.savvyoncredit.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Infinite Scrolling on Publisher Sites - is VentureBeat's implementation really SEO-friendly?
I've just begun a new project auditing the site of a news publisher. In order to increase pageviews and thus increase advertising revenue, at some point in the past they implemented something so that as many as 5 different articles load per article page. All articles are loaded at the same time and from looking in Google's cache and the errors flagged up in Search Console, Google treats it as one big mass of content, not separate pages. Another thing to note is that when a user scrolls down, the URL does in fact change when you get to the next article. My initial thought was to remove this functionality and just load one article per page. However I happened to notice that VentureBeat.com uses something similar. They use infinite scrolling so that the other articles on the page (in a 'feed' style) only load when a user scrolls to the bottom of the first article. I checked Google's cached versions of the pages and it seems that Google also only reads the first article which seems like an ideal solution. This obviously has the benefit of additionally speeding up loading time of the page too. My question is, is VentureBeat's implementation actually that SEO-friendly or not. VentureBeat have 'sort of' followed Google's guidelines with regards to how to implement infinite scrolling https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html by using prev and next tags for pagination https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en. However isn't the point of pagination to list multiple pages in a series (i.e. page 2, page 3, page 4 etc.) rather than just other related articles? Here's an example - http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/11/facebooks-cto-explains-social-networks-10-year-mission-global-connectivity-ai-vr/ Would be interesting to know if someone has dealt with this first-hand or just has an opinion. Thanks in advance! Daniel
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Daniel_Morgan1 -
Exact match domain - should i use one
i have the domain "region"familyholidays.co.uk for an upcoming site. i was pleased as its memorable and tells the user what its about. i am targetting keywords such as: region family holidays region family hotels region famliy cottages region family campsites is it something i should avoid because of potential penalties. i will be adding plenty of good content and doing all the offsite things but dont want to start with a handicap with an emd? thanks neil
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | neilhenderson0 -
Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?
Hi! My site seems to be the target of negative SEO (or some ancient black hat work that's just now coming out of the woodwork). We're getting traffic from keywords like "myanmar girls" and "myanmar celebrities" that just started in late June and only directs to our homepage. I can't seem to find the source of the traffic, though (Analytics just shows it as "Google," "Bing," and "Yahoo" even though I can't find our site showing up for these terms in search results). Is there any way to ferret out the source besides combing through every single link that is directing to us in Webmaster Tools? I'm not even sure that GWT has picked up on it since this is fairly new, and I'd really love to nip this in the bud. Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 199580 -
Can links from an old site raise DA for other site? Or just unethical?
So this may be an odd question. So a competing company went out of business. Their domain name is now available. So just for research purposes, would you ever or would it be unethical for a person to buy an expired competing domain name, and point it to another site to collect their link juice? The site was only a DA of 10, but not sure if one - its bad to buy a competing companies expired domain - and two - even though in the same industry, this would be bad to point it to another site or create a site from it. Just curious your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | asbchris0 -
How to fix doorway site
Hello, This client has a one page doorway site that is a copy of a category of his main site. It looks like the main site and has over 100 links to the site. We're cleaning things up to be white hat and we're wondering how to capture this traffic and link juice (this doorway has no backlinks though, it is an EMD) without a ton of money and effort. My thought so far is to put a uniquely designed paypal cart on there with top products and one link to the main site that says something like: To pay by credit card or to see more products, visit mainsite.com Would that be squeeky clean white hat or is that still a doorway headed for an update? What's best to do here on a low budget?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Penguin link removal what would you do?
Hi Over the last 4 months I have been trying to remove as many poor quality links as possible in the hope this will help us recover. I have come across some site's that the page our back-link is on has been de-indexed, goggle shows this when I look at the cached page... 404. <ins>That’s an error.</ins> The requested URL /search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGNI_enGB482GB482&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fforom.eovirtual.com%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D4%26t%3D84 was not found on this server. <ins>That’s all we know.</ins> If goggle is showing this message do I have to still try to remove the link, or is it a case goggle has already dismissed the link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0 -
We seem to have been hit by the penguin update can someone please help?
HiOur website www.wholesaleclearance.co.uk has been hit by the penguin update, I'm not a SEO expert and when I first started my SEO got court up buying blog links, that was about 2 years ago and since them and worked really hard to get good manual links.Does anyone know of a way to dig out any bad links so I can get them removed, any software that will give me a list of any of you guys want to do take a look for me? I'm willing to pay for the work.Kind RegardsKarl.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0