Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?
-
Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action.
I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings. If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index?
The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update. The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text. As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update.
One last question: The page completely dropped from the search index. If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position?
If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?
-
Yes I think it was a Penguin drop. There is one other thing about the page that dropped. It is using a 301 re-direct. I had updated the page url a while ago, but nearly all of the links to the page are to the old page. So this penalty might be a combination of signals that collectively have tagged that page.
I'm working on cleaning up the link profile right now. I think that Penguin is a very imperfect animal. But I cant change the beast, so I will just have to make some changes here.
-
It's unlikely the canonical is to blame here, if I'm understanding it correctly. If you tried to canonicalize Page B to Page A, and they were clearly different, one of two things should happen:
(1) Google will just ignore it.
(2) Google will follow it anyway, and drop Page B from the index.
Now, it's theoretically possible that, if Google thought you were using the canonical tag inappropriately to benefit Page A, they could punish Page A, but I've honestly never seen that happen (I've seen it with 301-redirects). Typically, Page B would also have to have a lot of links that you were trying to "clean" (think money laundering). Since Page B is new, this seems very unlikely.
If you're hitting exact-match (or close to it) anchor text hard on Page A, it's certainly possible Penguin came into play, especially if Page A is pushing keywords a bit too hard. It's been tough to confirm Penguin cases, but most of the verified ones I've seen are sudden drops. It's not a subtle, gradual impact.
You could wait for the next Penguin data update, but I suspect you may have to do some link clean up. If there's anything that's not only exact-match anchor text but is sitewide (especially footer links), I'd start there. They seem to be major targets of Penguin. Truthfully, though, we're still collecting data on it.
-
Thanks for the reply!
What happened was that I added a new page and accidentally used the canonical for the page that was ranking well for search terms on that new page.
So to state it a different way - I added a new Page B to the site, but instead of using the canonical for that page, I accidentally used the canonical for Page A. Page A is the page that previously had ranked well for search terms. On Saturday night or Sunday, Page A dropped out of all of the search terms that it ranks for. However, I did a little more research and Page A is still in the index, it just doesnt rank for any of the search terms it used to. Page B is also in the index, but since it is a new page, it does not really rank for any terms. Obviously, I have fixed the canonical on Page B and Google already has the new page in its cache.
As far as over-optimization penalties, Page A has nearly all the inbound links with anchor text that is only a slight variation of the search term. It is the page on the site that I would have expected to have got hit by Penguin. There are some other pages that have lost a little bit of ranking, but nothing drastic.
I am just surprised that if it is a Penguin penalty, it would completely lose ranking on the terms in a single day, rather than moving down the rankings to maybe the third or fourth page. Do you find that Penguin penalties usually result in a lower ranking, or completely losing rankings?
Either way, I'm going to go in and clean up the link profile, but it would be nice to know how aggressive I should be to try to recover that page.
-
I've seen some reports of sites being hit by the Penguin data update ("Penguin 1.1") on Friday night, but I'm not clear on the severity. If it's just one page, though, and it was completely de-indexed, that's pretty unlikely.
It is definitely possible for a bad canonical tag to drop a page from the index. I'm a little confused on what you're saying about the two pages. Are they both canonical'ed to a third page, or to each other? Could you give an example (maybe show us two tags that are similar to what you have, but with the exact details changed)?
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
-
Could another site copying my content hurt my ranking?
Earlier this week I asked why a page of mine might not be ranking locally. (https://moz.com/community/q/what-could-be-stopping-us-from-ranking-locally). Maybe this might be part of the answer – another firm has copied huge chunks of my website copy: **My company: **https://idearocketanimation.com/video-production-company/ The other company: http://studio3dm.com/studio3dm-com/video/ Could this be causing my page to not rank? And is there anything I can do about it, other than huff and puff to the other firm? (Which I am already doing.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagster0 -
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
No-index pages with duplicate content?
Hello, I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers. It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have. Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages? Thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for. We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user. Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pasware0 -
How to resolve duplicate content issues when using Geo-targeted Subfolders to seperate US and CAN
A client of mine is about to launch into the USA market (currently only operating in Canada) and they are trying to find the best way to geo-target. We recommended they go with the geo-targeted subfolder approach (___.com and ___.com/ca). I'm looking for any ways to assist in not getting these pages flagged for duplicate content. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jyoung2220 -
Duplicate page content errors stemming from CMS
Hello! We've recently relaunched (and completely restructured) our website. All looks well except for some duplicate content issues. Our internal CMS (custom) adds a /content/ to each page. Our development team has also set-up URLs to work without /content/. Is there a way I can tell Google that these are the same pages. I looked into the parameters tool, but that seemed more in-line with ecommerce and the like. Am I missing anything else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Duplicate Content Warning For Pages That Do Not Exist
Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here. I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around. Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go. Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption url 1: / url 2: /about/who-we-are I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear The second one I am getting is the following: /services/57/ /services/ Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools. If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this. Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | southcoasthost0 -
Will implementing a 'Scroll to Div Anchor' cause a duplicate content issue?
I have just been building a website for a client with pages that contain a lot of text content. To make things easier for site visitors I have created a menu bar that sticks to the top of the page and the page will scroll to different areas of content (i/e different Div id anchors) Having done this I have just had the thought that this might inadvertently introduce duplicate content issue. Does anyone know if adding an #anchor to the end of a url will cause a duplicate content error in google? For example, would the following URLs be treated as different:- http://www.mysite.co.uk/services
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor1
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor2
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor3
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor4 Thanks.0