Are we being Penalized? Can someone Assess Please!
-
We have two eCommerce sites. Both the sites can broadly be divided into 3 pages
- 1. Home Page.
2. Detail Page.
3 Category Pages (Altogether our site has approx 3 Million pages each)
These are the site URLs
http://bit.ly/9tRZIi - This is targeted for USA Audience
http://bit.ly/P8MxPR - This is targeted for UK audience
The .com domain which was launched earlier in 2011 is doing okay with decent organic traffic
Precautions Taken: To avoid content being duplicate on both the sites we are using:
a. Geo-targeting through Google webmaster tools
b. rel=alternate tag on printsasia.co.uk
Problem
1. The .co.uk domain which was launched in May 2012 started gaining organic traffic slowly but then suddenly dropped to almost 0 after September 18.
2. When we use operator site:printsasia.co.uk and apply a filter on past week/month we don't see any result. While when same operator used for "any time" we see some results.
3. According to webmaster tool, Google has indexed 95% of our URLs in the sitemap
Our concern: Is our UK site penalized for some reasons? If yes, what could be the possible reason(s) for this penalty and possible steps to get out of it? Would request if experts here can review our site and help us.
-
It doesn't necessarily matter if the auto generated content is unique or not - Panda was intended to penalize low quality content (such as auto generated content), not just duplicate content.
Even if you were able to figure out a way to auto generate content that didn't get penalized, there's a good chance you'll get penalized in a future update.
-
Yes what you see through copyscape is correct as those content comes along with the book and will be true for all retailers and marketplace websites, be it amazon, bn or abebooks.
Since we could not think of any other way to come up with unique content we thought of auto generated content. I slightly differ here as these auto-generated content is unique for each page at least partially. Though I am not 100% confident if this is great way to go about it.
Yes review is something we are definitely coming up and this may help.
-
Hi Cyril,
I doubt that the rel=alternate tag will help. Copyscape shows that at least some of the content is duplicated across other sites, not just your two sites.
I also doubt that auto generated content will help avoid Panda. That's one of the things Panda was specifically created to penalize - auto generated content.
If you're getting unique reviews from users and/or writing editor reviews, that very well may help.
I realize that it is impractical to write content for 3 million pages, but you may find that is what you need to do. You may need to start with your top pages and work from there, and in the meantime block indexing of all pages without unique content. I would not take that step hastily, but it may be what you end up having to do.
~Adam
-
Thank you Adam for your time and valuable feedback. We were also thinking of being hit by Panda but thought and as correction we used rel=alternate tag on printsasia.co.uk
It's been just a few days since we implemented this we are unable to say if this is working.
2ndly to increase the content we are introducing some review program and at the same time have also generated some auto generated content since it is impossible to develop content for 3 mn and increasing pages. If you can see the last "Book Information" Section on this page http://bit.ly/QqMAFR you will understand what i mean.
This section will be there on all book detail pages. Your comment post reviewing this will be appreciated
-
According to this, there was a Panda update on Sept 18, so I suspect that's what hit your site. Panda mainly targets the content of your website - my guess would be that your site was penalized because it has a lot of "thin content" pages. In other words, all your book pages have very little (no?) unique textual content.
FYI, I would say your US site is also in danger of being penalized by Panda and/or Penguin. I see that over 1/3 of linking root domains link to you with the anchor text "<a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">buy books online". Over-use of keyword anchor text like that is strongly correlated with getting a Penguin penalty.</a>
-
Good plan. I would wait at least 4 weeks after removing the link before you decide whether or not it's worked
-
Mark thanks for your time and valuable feedback. I think you almost answered my doubt why only one site being penalized and not the other.
Mark you are right when you say "Looking at your link profile, you simply don't have sufficient volume or diversity of links, nor do you have enough links from high-authority sites within your space"
As i mentioned co.uk is just 5 months old site and its taking us sometime to build links. But we are definitely working on it.
I believe having lesser links can only be the reason of poor page rank and low rank in SERP it should not be the reason of being penalized. I hope you will agree with this.
As immediate step
1. I will first remove the sitewide link and see if this was the reason. If thinks improves over the time, we will keep the link back with changed anchor text
2. We will definitely take care of the blog comments considering the importance of it in brand reputation
-
see my answer below!
-
Thanks for your time. You mean blog.printsasia and not (blog.bookshopasia) right?
Juts a question- blog.printsasia.com is our own official blog, we have placed links for both the sites on subdomain blog.printsasia.com. If that is the reason for penalty then why our other site is not being penalized? or why only co.uk is penalized and .com is having no issues
-
I agree in part with easyrider2. There may be a problem caused by the sitewide header links from your own blog (blog.printsasia.com). These currently use the keyword-rich anchor text "Online Bookshop UK", although I suspect you previously had this as "Bookshop UK", as this is what OSE has picked up. Either way, they look like the kind of links that might be targeted by Penguin, as they don't use your brand name as anchor text.
If the blog was a subdomain of your UK site (blog.printsasia.co.uk), I don't think this would be a problem. But because it's a subdomain of a US site (albeit the same company), this could look like a spammy type of link.
Note: it may be that Google has not penalised you, but has simply decided to discount a set of links, perhaps these ones.
The good news is that as this is your company blog you can quickly change the link.
You could try one of the following:
1. Remove the sitewide link from blog.printsasia.com altogether
2. Change the anchor text to your brand name (eg Printsasia UK)
3. Remove the sitewide link and add a few more "natural" links into blog posts (as easyrider2 suggests)
Personally, I would try 1, assuming it doesn't drive significant traffic to your site. If that helps then you know you've identified a problem.
However, I don't think this is your only problem, and I'm not even convinced it is a problem. Looking at your link profile, you simply don't have sufficient volume or diversity of links, nor do you have enough links from high-authority sites within your space. So even if you "fix" this immediate problem, you still need to focus on some serious linkbuilding (by which I mean relationship building) within your industry.
I agree with easyrider2 about the spammy blog comments. These may not cause a problem with Google but they look very poor to users (and webmasters who might potentially link to your sites).
-
Looking at open site explorer for your UK bookshop I would say with 99% confidence you are being penalised because of over optimisation. Sounds like you got hit on the penguin refresh around sept 18.
Your anchor text is nearly all pointing with Bookshops UK. In fact 236 times and the nearest alternative is printasia.co.uk 4 times. Plus they are all coming from the same domain (blog.bookshopasia). You need to vary your anchor text. However, i am guess that link is the page template, although I could only see a link for "online bookshop UK" it has to be in there somewhere as OSE picks it up.
Make sure that if it is on the template, make that link no-follow and get links from different domains for different keywords.
You also need to get on top of your blog commenting. People using names such as "how to build your own iphone app" are just spam and worthless comments. Even if you disallow websites to be linked, crap content is worthless to your site.
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
-
How can improve Domain Athturitymy web site
Hi;
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tohid1363b
I have a website that had an authoritative domain of 10 but today it has reached 5. I wanted to know what the reason for these changes was.
need improve my rank in Google my goal keyword . Can you guide my servant? need +5 Domain , and over +50 Page Aithroity .. my site: خریدگیفت کارت0 -
Can we compete for both videos and text results?
Hi, We have a ecommerce website that performs very well for our brand pages on the text results including the reviews snippet. Our brand pages also include embedded videos. Until now we have always ranked poorly on video results. Our videos are hosted over youtube. In order to boost our video result we have recently submitted a video sitemap to help crawlers find out our videos. The result is the following : our brand pages are now only competing in the video results space. Instead of showing as a text result with our reviews snippet, it shows as a video in a carrousel widget. Within the video tab we are ranking top. We have experienced a drop in CTR since then. Moz have reported a drop on all our brand keywords for text search although the video widget shows our brand there. Is there a way to compete for both videos results and text results, making the choice to keey the review snippet widget? Is the video sitemap useful only to compete within the video space? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattam1 -
Can I run a successful SEO campaign for a subdomain?
My company has been around for several years now and hasn't really paid much mind to SEO or search engine rankings, so now I'm an in-house marketer with moderate SEO knowledge. We're setting up an article site with our help pages and blog under a subdomain so our writers can easily post articles without having to go through developers every time, as our root domain was set up with a custom in-house CMS. Is it possible for me to run a successful SEO campaign for our article site subdomain? I get that the root domain wouldn't benefit from any SEO authority the new site obtains, but my hands are tied.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teachbanzai0 -
How can I fix a SSL that is redirecting 3 times?
I have url that is redirecting three times. How do I fix that? I am using WP and running Really Simple SSL plugin. Is it ok to use the redirect plugin also? See here what the problem is: http://www.thepatrickmullin.com/ redirects to https://thepatrickmullin.com/ through a redirect chain. This hurts your rankings http://www.thepatrickmullin.com/ -->
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pmull
https://www.thepatrickmullin.com/ -->
https://thepatrickmullin.com/ Any help would be greatly appreciated!0 -
My website has dropped in the rankings drastically. How can I get it back up the SERPs?
I manage a website that I took over 6 months ago - the site was sitting happily on page one of google so I haven't had to do much to keep it there - other than a few onsite improvements. However, last week the site dropped off the SERPs. The site is http://www.pro-techairconditioning.co.uk/content/home.html Could someone please suggest reasons for this and ways to solve the problem? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising0 -
Can submitting sitemap to Google webmaster improve SEO?
Can creating fresh sitemap and submitting to Google webmaster improve SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chanel270 -
Is my site being penalized?
I launched http://rumma.ge in February of this year. Because I'm using a domain hack (the Georgian domain), I'd really like to rank for just the word "rummage". After launching, I was steady at around page 4/5 on searches for "rummage". However since then I've tumbled out of the first 100. In fact I can't even find the site in the first 20 pages on Google for that search. Even a search for my exact homepage title text doesn't bring up the site, despite the fact that the site is still in the index. I'm wondering if one of the following could be the root cause: We have a ccTLD (.ge)--not sure about the impacts of this, but seems like it might not be the root cause because we were ranking for "rummage" when we first launched. Tried running an Adwords campaign but the site was flagged as a "bridge page" (working on getting this addressed). I'm wondering if this could have carryover impacts into natural search rankings? We've tried doing some press and built up a decent number of backlinks over the past couple of months, many of which had "rummage" in the anchor text. This was all organic, but happened over the span of a month which may be too fast? Am I being penalized? Beyond checking indexing of the site, is there a way to tell if I've been flagged for some bad behavior? Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I'm really confused by this since I feel like I've been doing things right and my rankings have been travelling downward. Thanks!! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | minouye0 -
What if you can't navigate naturally to your canonicalized URL?
Assume this situation for a second... Let's say you place a rel= canonical tag on a page and point to the original/authentic URL. Now, let's say that that original/authentic URL is also populated into your XML sitemap... So, here's my question... Since you can't actually navigate to that original/authentic URL (it still loads with a 200, it's just not actually linkded to from within the site itself), does that create an issue for search engines? Last consideration... The bots can still access those pages via the canonical tag and the XML sitemap, it's just that the user wouldn't be able to access those original/authentic pages in their natural site navigation. Thanks, Rodrigo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlgoFreaks0