Redirecting over-optimised pages
-
Hi
One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site.
I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks.
My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty?
Thanks
-
Hey there...got your pm. I can understand you not wanting to share your url in public.
Take a look at your site in open site explorer and click on "anchor text". You'll see that your most common anchor text is your keyword, and it's definitely not a brand. You've got 191 links using that keyword as anchor text. Your next most common is your url and for that you've got 16 links.
That's definitely Penguin material unfortunately.
It may seem unfair, but the Google guidelines tell us not to make links for the purpose of increasing our position on the SERPS. It is very unlikely that 191 links with anchor text appeared naturally.
Unfortunately you're going to need to get the majority of those links removed in order to recover and that's likely a tough process.
If you had had an unnatural links warning in your WMT you could try to remove as many as possible and then show Google your attempts to remove the others. But, because Penguin is algorithmic, the only way to recover is to do some drastic work at getting the keyword anchors removed or possibly changed to your url.
I have found that about 10-15% of webmasters actually respond to my requests to remove links. That's just not going to work for a site hit by Penguin. If you can't get the majority of these links removed then you may need to start over with a new domain.
-
What you're describing definitely sounds like Penguin - Happened immediately after April 24th plus affects only certain pages and keywords.
No, you would not receive a link warning if this was Penguin because Penguin is algorithmic.
Care to share the url?
Penguin is almost always (as far as we know) about your backlink profile. What I have found is that most webmasters are not tough enough on themselves when looking at their backlinks. Your definition of spammy and mine could be different. If you've got a lot of keyword anchor links from directories, followed blog comments or articles then this could be the issue.
I have also seen problems where Google couldn't recognize your brand from your keyword. So, if you were trying to rank for "green widgets" and your website name was greenwidgets.com and you built a lot of links using the anchor text "green widgets" Google may look at that at a manipulation factor and not a brand thing. That's why WPMU got hit by Penguin because they had a bunch of footer links from websites that said "wordpress mu". It really was their brand but Google saw it as anchor text manipulation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
As far as redirecting goes, if you think this is Penguin I wouldn't redirect any penalized pages to new pages because you're essentially redirecting the whole backlink profile that got you penalized and the new pages will tank as well.
-
@Greg - It was enough to pretty much wipe out all keyphrase traffic. They were still ranking for their brand terms however, which obviously suggests it was not a full site penalty. The new site will be hosted on the same domain, but with some new URLs, hence my question about whether I should redirect them.
-
@Marie - The rankings drop happened on April 25th, definitely Penguin. And yes it only affected a handful of pages and keyphrases. I really can't see anything in the backlink profile that suggests the anchor texts for these pages would be regarded as spammy. About 50% of the keyphrases are brand-based. However maybe there's something I'm missing and perhaps I should cut my losses and just manually edit all the links I've created myself, which I know aren't spammy? (hope that makes sense...)
There are a couple of pages where I'd like to change the URL structure, so I can either start from scratch with these new pages or redirect the old URL there.
Ps Would I have received a bad link warning from Google if it was Penguin?
-
Are you sure it is Penguin? Penguin is usually about a spammy backlink profile and has very little to do with onsite quality. If it truly is Penguin and you redirect to a new page then you'll just be redirecting the bad links to the new page and passing on the penalty.
Do you know what day your traffic dropped on? There were Panda updates on either side of the Penguin update. What you are describing could be a Panda issue.
If it's Panda you'd notice that there was probably a sitewide drop in traffic that started April 29th or 27th. (Assuming it was near the time of Penguin that was April 25).
Penguin tends to affect one or more keywords as opposed to the whole site. And those keywords are usually the ones that you have overoptimized (i.e. built up too many anchor texted links with the keywords and anchor.)
If this is Panda, then I don't see the point of making new URLs and redirecting to them. Why not just change the current URLs?
And finally, in either case, if it's Penguin or Panda you won't recover until there is a Penguin or Panda refresh.
-
Hi,
How bad was the effect on rankings?
Is your objective to get both websites ranking?
If not, why not redirect the old site to the new one?
Redirecting the spammy/Dupe content to the clean pages wont be an issue in my opinion. (Bad link neighborhood would be a different story) but I'm not sure if this will help lift the penalty.
Perhaps someone else can comment on that?
Greg
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
-
301 Redirects
Looking for the best way to do the following. Business has changed its name, and has also become a corporate store. The old domain name is now no longer needed as a website page has been created inside the main corporate site. Obviously i dont want to loose all the traffic that we had and want to redirect them but there is a problem, that im unable to redirect the old domain to the new one due to office 365 installed on the hosting platform, and the old emails will need to run for another 6 months. I can remove the old site and put a landing page up, but i still need to redirect all the pages to the new site, and there is approx 50+ of them. My main question is i currently have atleast 50+ redirects already in there due to seo changes over the years, some would go back atleast 5 years, whats a safe amount of time that i can remove the older redirects And am i going about this the right way so i dont loose all the hard work on rankings etc
Technical SEO | | Dunjoko0 -
Page redirected too many times
Hello, How can we solve the following error : This page isn't working ** redirected you too many times.** It's very frustrating. I have cleared the cookies. Still, the problem persists. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Johnroger0 -
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
Redirect Question
We have a client that just did a redesign and development and the new design didn't really match their current structure. They said they didn't want to worry about matching site structure and never put any effort into SEO. Here is the situation: They had a blog located on a subdomain such as blog.domain.com - now there blog is located like domain.com/blog They want to create redirects for all the old the blog urls that used to be on the subdomain and not point to the domain.com/blog/post-name What is the best way of doing that - Through .htaccess?
Technical SEO | | Beardo0 -
Why is the Page Authority of my product pages so low?
My domain authority is 35 (homepage Page Authority = 45) and my website has been up for years: www.rainchainsdirect.com Most random pages on my site (like this one) have a Page Authority of around 20. However, as a whole, the individual pages of my products rank exceptionally low. Like these: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/products/copper-channel-link-rain-chain (Page Authority = 1) http://www.rainchainsdirect.com/collections/todays-deals/products/contempo-chain (Page Authority = 1) I was thinking that for whatever reason they have such low authority, that it may explain why these pages rank lower in google for specific searches using my exact product name (in other words, other sites that are piggybacking of my unique products are ranking higher for my product in a specific name search than the original product itself on my site) In any event, I'm trying to get some perspective on why these pages remain with the same non-existent Page Authority. Can anyone help to shed some light on why and what can be done about it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | csblev0 -
Page Over-optimized?
I read over this post on the blog tonight: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730 & it's got me concerned that I might be having a similar issue on our site? Back in March & April of last year, we ranked fairly well for a number of long tail keywords, here is one in particular 'Mio Drink' for this page: http://www.discountqueens.com/free-mio-drink-from-kraft-facebook-offer The page is still indexed, but appears back on page #3 for the search term. During this time we had made a number of different updates to our site & I can't seem to put an exact finger on what might have caused the problem? Can anyone see any issues that might have caused this to drop? Thanks, BJ
Technical SEO | | seointern0 -
Redirecting According to the occasion
We have loads of different departments that relate to specific occasions (e.g. Christmas, mothers day, father day etc), they all have good PR and inbound links etc and most of them rank well for the specific occasion. What I was thinking is that I could redirect all of the occasions that aren’t in use and send the traffic to the valid occasion live at the moment. So I would 301 all the Christmas pages to our valentine’s day main page. Then once valentines is gone I will redirect Christmas and valentines to the mothers day main page and so on. So this would be constantly switching as different occasions come along. Can you see any possible negative problems? Is there any chance that if I redirect Christmas for example, and then when Christmas comes we remove the redirect, could it harm the Christmas page?
Technical SEO | | steliosp210 -
301 Redirects
Last year we merged 3 websites into 1 website and launched the new site in February. When developing the new site I created 301 redirects for all the pages from the old sites to the new site. Unfortunately when the new website was created the URLs were not optimised for search engines. I now need to optimised the page URLs. In theory I need to create new 301 redirects from this existing pages to the new optimised URLS. I am concerned that in a few years I might end up with a string of 301 redirects and if I break some links I might loose some ranking. How many redirects will link juice work for? I hope I'm clear here, if not I've attached a image showing what I'm doing. Thank you. unledfh.jpg
Technical SEO | | Seaward-Group0