Penguin Penalty?
-
The past 2 days, specific keywords Ive been ranking well for have disappeared. If I google specific with brand it still shows up. So I havent been removed from the index. Is it possible that I was hit by penguin without any type of notice in the webmaster account? Organic traffic dropped substantialy in the past couple days without any warnings.
Any help greatly appreciated!
Thank You
-
Hi Marcus! I sent you a PM
Thanks!!
-
There are three likely scenarios for this kind of plummet
1. Manual Penalty which comes with an email from Google in webmaster tools
2. Panda
3. Penguin
Penguin is unlikely, panda seems odd to have happened two days ago but based on how you describe the site, it seems the most likely of the options.
Hard to say much more without a link.
Marcus
-
If it were a link problem wouldnt google notify me via Webmaster Tools? I have a feeling it may be the content. It is a large ecom. site with custom up to 70,000 urls. I have been working on cutsom content on pages that will bring best ROI, should I be blocking the other pages that have "Default" content and only pull keywords? Could this cause the problem?
-
Hi, what about the content on your site? What about the links? Most possible Marcus have right and you got hit by the recent update...If you want to recover you will fins this very useful http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
Thanks
-
Traffic was 2 days ago, lost alot of organic traffic. Only seeing my refferals now.
-
Hey
Penguin is an algorithm and not a manual penalty so you will not get an email as such in Webmaster Tools letting you know anything but you can do some investigation yourself.
There has not been any chatter (or I have not seen any) regarding a Penguin update in the last few days so it may be something else entirely. As it happens, there was a panda update on the 18th I believe so if your traffic drop corresponds with that date then that could be your problem.
It's kind of tough to give advice without a URL and indication of just what keywords you are targeting but certainly, if you want drop those in I would be happy to give it a five minute once over if that helps?
If you want to do some digging into whether you have a penguin style link penalty this links are useful:
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/penguin-strategies/
Hope this helps and fire over a URL and will take a better look.
Marcus
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
-
Penalty for adding too much content too quickly?
Hi there, We released around 4000 pieces of new content, which all ranked in the first page and did well. We had a database of ~400,000 pieces and so we released the entire library in a couple of days (all remaining 396,000 pages). The pages have indexed. The pages are not ranking, although the initial batch are still ranking as are a handful (literally a handful) of the new 396,000. When I say not ranking - I mean not ranking anywhere (gone up as far as page 20), yet the initial batch we'd be ranking for competitive terms on page 1. Do Google penalise you for releasing such a volume of content in such a short space of time? If so, should we deindex all that content and re-release in slow batches? And finally, if that is the course of action we should take is there any good articles around deindexing content at scale. Thanks so much for any help you are able to provide. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveW19870 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Worried about keyword stuffing penalty re: URLs
I've noticed a potential problem with a mult-location business (this is an example URL - not the actual name of the business) I sense this is OK: carsdepots.com/ashford/cars But then I noticed they've added cars to location part of URL in some instances (they have 6 locations in total and have done this with 5 of them): carsdepots.com/birmingham-cars/cars So we have cars in there 3 times (that's the maximum number of times in any URL but it looks a little spammy to me) I am tempted to remove yoga from the location names, or flatten the URL structure completely - your thoughts would be welcome, or perhaps I shouldn't even be worrying?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Penguin hit Website - Moving to new domain
Hey! I am working on a Penguin hit Website. Still ranking for all brand keywords and blog articles are still being returned in Google SERPs, but the website is showing up for only 3 or 4 money keywords. It is clearly a penguin hit as it was ranked 1st page for all money keywords before latest update (3.0). We already did a link cleanup and disavowed all bad backlinks. Still, the recovery process could take over 2 years from previous experience, and in 2 years, the site will suffer a slow death. Solution: We own the .com version of the domain, currently being served on the .net. We bought the .com version about 6 years ago, it is clean and NOT redirected to the .net (actual site). We were thinking about moving the whole Website to the .com version to start over. However, we need to make sure Google doesn't connect the 2 sites (no pagerank flow). Of course Google will notice is the same content, but there won't be any pagerank flowing from the old site to the new one. For this, we thought about the following steps: Block Googlebot (and only googlebot) for the .net version via robots.txt. Wait until Google removes all URLs from the index. Move content to the .com version. Set a 301 redirect from .net to .com (without EVER removing the block on googlebot). Thoughts? Has anyone went over this before? Other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
Microsite as a stand-alone site under one domain and sub-domained under another: duplicate content penalty?
We developed and maintain a microsite (example: www.coolprograms.org) for a non-profit that lives outside their main domain name (www.nonprofit-mainsite.org) and features content related to a particular offering of theirs. They are utilizing a Google Grant to run AdWords campaigns related to awareness. They currently drive traffic from the AdWords campaigns to both the microsite (www.coolprograms.org) and their main site (www.nonprofit-mainsite.org). Google recently announced a change in their policy regarding what domains a Google Grant recipient can send traffic to via AdWords: https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/1657899?hl=en. The ads must all resolve to one root domain name (nonprofit-mainsite.org). If we were to subdomain the microsite (example: coolprograms.nonprofit-mainsite.org) and keep serving the same content via the microsite domain (www.coolprograms.org) is there a risk of being penalized for duplicate content? Are there other things we should be considering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marketing-iq0 -
What Does Penguin Recover Look Like?
Is a recovery from Penguin immediate once Google recognized that you've fixed the problem or is it a slow and steady recovery? I think we may have fixed our issue which is why we're seeing an immediate spike in traffic from Google organic search results. Our daily traffic was up more than 100% in a single day. Is this a recovery? At which speed have other sites you manage recovered? EoZJDZ2.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | voicesdotcom0 -
Penguin Recovery Problem - Weird
I had an old URL and the link profile of this URL wasn't good - I had been using article syndication and Penguin threw me to the wolves. I decided to start over with a new URL and build a new natural link profile. I specifically did NOT do a 301 redirect to the new URL and did not make any request to Google to transfer domain as I didn't want old site being associated to the new one. To redirect our old users, I put a link on the old URL index page (nofollowed) that say that we have moved. I was very surprised to find that in GWT all the links of the old URL have now been associated to the new URL....why is that? I started over to have a clean natural profile and follow Google guidelines.Has anyone heard of this before? All I can guess is that Google itself "decided" to do its own pseudo-301, since the site was the same, page for page.This has Major implications for anyone attempting a "clean start" to recover from Penguin.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | veezer0 -
Multi-language, multi-country localized website with duplicate content penalty
My company website is multi-language and multi-country. Content created for the Global (English-language only, root directory) site is automatically used when no localization exists for the language and country choice (i.e. Brazil). I'm concerned this may be harming our SEO through dupe content penalties. Can anyone confirm this is possible? Any recommendations on how to solve the issue? Maybe the canonical tag? Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTreviranus0