Panda and Penquin Fall - Could HTML Design an Issue?
-
Hi,
We were hit hard by Panda 3.4 on March 23rd 2012. Then Penguin came along and slapped us down a little farther on April 24th. White hat SEO for 13 years on the site.
I have been trying to discover the reason we got hit so hard, to date 90% down. We ae wiped. I have a couple of keywords still #2 and #3 and we see up and down changes in Google webmaster tools, i.e. a keyword is supposedly up 50 points then another down 50. All other 150 keywords that we used to rank on the first page for are not even showing up.
I have a person that is about to do a full link analysis but since we never went after links I just never had the feeling that is where our problem is at, but definitely going to explore it.
The reason for my post is that last night I spoke with an SEO person that has some pretty good credentials (9 years experience and works currently at large online marketing company with seo with clients like Honda) and he was nice enough to just take a quick look at the site.
He said he saw nothing really wrong and did not think that we were hit for any of the normal issues people are listing, i.e. duplicate content, backlinks. His first impression was that we were knocked down because the site is "hard to index". He said the site still uses tables and a lot of our Doc Statements were for HTML 4.01 from 1999.
As we all know, there are 'many' experts in this industry. So I wanted a little feedback from the community.
Our main site was built in Dreamweaver using tables. We do have a Wordpress blog that is very small and just now posting to add fresh content. (posts seem to rank pretty good, this is why I thought, you know he may be right)
Would an older site be penalized like this for using tables?
What would you do at this stage if you had a site that is not recovering? I have now reached panic mode and have to do something, just not sure of the next step.
I will be happy to post the URL if anyone wants to help with advice.
Thanks,
Force7 -
Thanks for the comments Cyrus, I think your post is making me rethink my strategy
I guess I am just tyring to fix the wrong items, I was focusing on other areas because I never really went after backlinks to any degree so I thought how in the world could I be demoted for links.
We have a small online directory where we offered backlinks but we only allowed links that really was a benefit for our customers. Mostly translators who did a service we did not offer.
I think where we got in trouble is we had it set up with a sample link with a keyword in it so they would put a link to us in hopes we would exchange but they were never accepted but they did not remove the link to us.
Our directory only has 65 links after panda/penquin, we had 100 before.
Again thanks, I will focus on the backlinks more now.
Never thought we would be hit by negative seo :-(. So much for doing White Hat all these years.
Force7
-
Sorry to hear you got hit by both Panda and Penguin - were there particular keywords that got hit harder than others?
Looking at your backlink profile...http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.translationsoftware4u.com%2F
... I see a number of high quality links. Unfortunately, I also see a huge number of low-quality directory links. For example (I purposely didn't include hyperlinks)
- http://www.premiumsites.org/business/business_services/
- http://www.link-city.com/reciprocal_links/Education.htm
Many of these appear to have been de-indexed in the past few months. I might look for a message in Google Webmaster about unnatural linking activity.
Directory links like these were completely natural a short time ago, but Google has been particularly harsh on them lately, along with article distribution sites, which also make up a significant portion of your backlink profile.
If you can:
- Try to clean up as many of these types of links as possible
- Document everything
- Submit a reconsideration request with Google
- Wait for their response.
Once you submit a reconsideration request, Google should be a little more specific (although not much) about what they would like you to address. In the meantime, continue to build high quality, authoritative editorial links that your competitors can't match.
Hope this helps, best of luck with your SEO!
-
We did not receive anyGoogle messages. We did have some blog duplicates where tags created extra copies but those pages still ranked after the Panda/Penquin strikes. Seems it liket he Wordpress area where we have a very small attached blog.
-
many websites got penalized for small duplicated content paragraph , fix all duplicate content and the website will be back , however if you receive any webmaster tools messages , chances that your website will ever recovery are very small. Google just did a wrong step, his search quality is much lower now , I started to use bing more times per day because google is not able to provide me the best results , they block to many websites to be able to show best results.
-
Check webmaster tools again today , it seams that many messages are just sanded today from google.
-
I did check manually more sentences from your content
probable are more problems like this , you can check for this more
-
Oh, how did you find that so quick? I do see a site where it looks like even though they backlinked they 'scraped' sentences from many different websites to create one page. This is the type of backlink that concerns me, we never ask them for a link, so seems a site like that would be considered unfavorable.
-
I can easily reduce these.
-
I did notice some duplicate content
this also can be a problem
search on google for
"I bought your European language pack and I'm pleasantly surprised to see what your software can do. I'm an interpreter who speaks 4 languages fluently. While a computer will never replace a human's interpretation and translation skills, it can certainly be a great aid. Of all the different kinds of software I have seen, yours is definitely the best!"
-
It seams that you have the same problem , I know that many people from here will not agree with me , but your generic anchor texts are missing , the generic anchor text are anchors like this : "click here" "read more" "check this out" "source" , I did make a lot of investigations over penalized websites and the single difference is this problem. I recommend you add about 30 generic backlinks, and your website will came back in about 3 weeks.
-
I usually keep an eye on this and we do not see any duplication.
Site is at www.TranslationSoftware4u.com
The video on the front is going to be replaced with a jquery slider, I have had people say that videos that automatically play are annoying.
Thanks so much for taking the time to comment!
-
Tables are ok , they will not create you problems , are you sure that your content is not stolen ? try to search some of you content on google using quotes "sentence here" and if you will see some other websites listed in front of your website than you know that you have "duplicate content penalty". If this is not the case you can write your URL here so more people will take a look.
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
-
HTML and XML sitemaps for one website.
Hi all, First, we have created a HTML sitemap for our wordpress website. Then we again generated XML sitemap and submitted same in search console. It's been more than a week and still new XML sitemap has not been indexed yet. I can still only see HTML sitemap for search results "company sitemap". Also search console do have only XML sitemap. Both sitemaps are accessible but only HTML has been indexed. Is there anything wrong having 2 sitemaps? Why XML sitemap not been indexed? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Are these doorway pages or not? Concerned due to Panda 4.0
For a new site we're building, the Products team wants the header (let's call this Product-Header) to have links to every subsection of every section on every page. Since this is a bad idea, I want Product-Header to be coded in such a way that it doesn't appear in the code or the links are nofollow, noindex. I want to instead create static versions of these pages without the Product-Header. The homepage links to the static URL section pages, those main section pages link to static subsection pages, and so on. It's one nice silo. I am concerned though that Google won't like this due to these static pages are being created specifically for search engines. Users could click through to this static parallel site from the homepage, or they could use the dynamic URL site. This is similar to what etsy.com is doing where you can search Google for "mermaid bridal" and get this page https://www.etsy.com/market/mermaid_bridal but the dynamic version of the page does not show up. However you can search on etsy.com for " mermaid bridal" and get https://www.etsy.com/search?q=mermaid bridal&ship_to=US. Could these static versions that show up in search engines be seen as doorway pages? I know ebay.com got spanked for doorway pages and I don't want to do anything that would get this site penalized.
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
New Google SERPS design - What's Changed?
Has anyone noticed any fall out from the recent redesign of SERP pages by Google? I noticed that there appears to be one less organic result "above the fold" now, so if you were possibly in third or fourth position maybe slight dip in traffic? Any noticeable shift in click through rate with the new bigger font? Also, has anyone noticed if the new design has caused any shift in best practices for on-page meta data like Title tag and description tag counts? I know the Title tag was previously driven by the pixel width of the title in Google SERPS, just curious if that has changed with this redesign.
Web Design | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Responsive design or mobile website for SEO
Because domains with a mobile version have better rankings in Google then domains with only a deskop version we're considering a mobile website. My web developer says that a m.domain.com is duplicated with the domain.com, and he recommends a responsive design. What is better for SEO positions in mobiles devices. A m.domain mobile website or a responsive design. What are influential factors?
Web Design | | remkoallertz0 -
Looking for quality, cheap web design company recommendations
Does anyone have any recommendations of a very cheap web design company from India or other countries where the work is also high quality? I can project manage the development and provide a set of web standards such as to use valid code, no meta keyword tags, no flash, etc etc. I am looking for companies I can trust to perform the actual work. The web is full of companies but examples of quality work with WordPress, Joomla and particular ecommerce platforms is very thin or non-existent. If you can share any companies which you have personal experience with, I would appreciate it.
Web Design | | RyanKent0 -
Landing Page/Home Page issues
Hi. I was speaking with my designer last night (we are setting up a new website) and we were discussing the design of our homepage, now the designer said he wanted the first page of the website to be a sort of landing page page were the visitor has to click and enter, im sure everyone has all come across these before. However, I am concerned as to the SEO implications of this? Any help guys?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
Footer Links for Design Shops - Do They Help or Hurt?
I work on SEO for a number of clients at our agency, including our in-house SEO for our own website. I use Open Site Explorer all the time to analyze my competition in the SERPs and try to gain links from this insight. However, I've noticed a number of agencies and design shops that place a link in the footer of websites they've designed and created. For example "Site design by ABC Agency (hyperlinked to the agency's home page). Or I've seen small logos or graphics that link to the designer's site and use the "alt tag" to get stronger anchor text. From a design perspective, I don't care for this, but as a SEO...I can see why. We've designed a number of websites and have more in the pipeline, but have not used this tactic before. It seems like an irrelevant link from a content/user standpoint, however, it seems to work for a lot of agencies and design shops. Any input from the SEOmoz community would be great. Is it a short-lived strategy? Does it help or hurt your link-building and "rapport" with Google, Bing, Yahoo? Thanks everyone.
Web Design | | PHDL0