Hit by a penalty? But which one?
-
Hi guys,
First off, thanks for reading my post! My site, www.doctorloanusa.com suffered a massive drop in Google rankings and traffic on September 27. For the past 4 years, I've ranked in spots 1-3.
My main keywords are physician loans and doctor loans.
-
I had a competitor copy almost ALL my text. In early October, I filed a DMCA takedown and had the infringing site removed from the SERPS. I also made text changes to my site. I thought this duplicate content was the problem, but I have yet to see any improvements 2 months later.
-
My site isn't particularly deep content-wise, but it's competitive with others in my niche. I have relatively few links but others in the SERPS have very similar link profiles.
-
I tried to clean up a few questionable links and used the disavow tool.
-
I have used the SEOmoz on-page tools to grade my site. Typically, I receive grade A reports.
-
I still rank for my website URL, and still rank 1 in both Yahoo and Bing.
-
My bounce rate is 43%.
If anyone could provide insight, I would be very grateful. I need to get this site ranking again, as this property is my main source of income.
Is the site over-optimized? Is it my anchor text profile?
Thank you very much in advance!
-
-
Hi Moosa,
The only thing is, I don't rank at ALL on Google for my keywords. Not even in the top 1000. That leads me to believe it is some type of penalty.
What were the small problems you saw?
Thanks so much.
-
Thanks!
-
Thanks for your response, Hampig! See below for answers:
1. where do you rank currently for Physician Loans and Doctor Loans on google? Not in the top 1000!
2. when did you use the Disavow tool. The day after it came out.
3. Did you get a questionable link email from google webmaster tools? No
I'll look into the citations, and I know I need a blog. I have one but it's on a different domain and honestly it's only 4-5 pages. I plan to write more content for it. I also plan on doing some social media, I just haven't had time yet.
-
Google rolled out Panda and Exact-Match Domain (EMD) updates on September 27th. As one of your keywords almost exactly matches your domain the EMD penalty could be a possibility. I don't know enough about the EMD update to be certain, but your link profile still doesn't look perfect either - it'd look more natural if more of your links had your URL as the anchor text, but be careful about where you get links from.
I Googled some of your text and it was duplicated on other sites (e.g. experts123), so Panda could be a possibility too.
The homepage doesn't look too bad; perhaps the title tag looks a bit spammy and you use "doctor loan" an awful lot in alt text; including the alt text there are 17 occurences of "doctor loan" on your homepage, so I would definitely reduce that. I'm not sure if that sort of keyword usage ties in with EMD, so have a look if some trusted resources have advice on it. I haven't read through it but this looks useful: http://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340
-
I checked your site and see some really small problems here and there and i don’t really think this is any penalty or something... I think all you need is an in-depth on-page analysis and with time you might receive everything back at least in terms of rankings...
-
I would do the quiz at http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/
-
A few questions.
1. where do you rank currently for Physician Loans and Doctor Loans on google?
2. when did you use the Disavow tool
3. Did you get a questionable link email from google webmaster tools?
I would try to put more content on the page. you dont have much . ie: Blog.
A few things missing:
* Citation on every page. You need to make sure you have your address and phone number on every page. ( Site wide footer can do the job )
* Citations across the web. Check out Getlisted.org and make sure all the local search directories have all your information. You can also use yext.com ( The best tool out there right now but it will cost you )
* No Blog? why?
* No Social Media . why?
is this your facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Doctor-loan-usa-reviews/103958646433000
After you get that in order and rankings don't improve my best guess is there is a link that is pointing to your site thats bad link and you havent removed it. I would contact Webmaster tools and try to get more help from them ?
But let me know the answers to my questions
Best wishes,
Hampig M.
BizDetox
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
-
Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.
Back in October 2014 last year, a site we are working with had a significant drop in organic traffic. This coincided with Google's algorithmic update. The side in question uses filters extensively and at the time did not have any canonical tags in place. The lions share of these filter pages had little or no written content just products. The website now has canonical tags throughout and content has started to be added to the top level categories and we will continue to add more, however there is still a large amount of pages with little or no content. Webmaster tools shows that there are large amounts of internal links (for instance 42,000+ to the homepage) which must be due to the filtered pages. I am looking for advice on what is the best way to proceed. Do I edit robots.txt, start adding no follow tags or something else entirely?
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
How can I get Google to forget an https version of one page on my site?
Google mysteriously decided to index the broken, https version of one page on my company's site (we have a cert for the site, but this page is not designed to be served over https and the CSS doesn't load). The page already has many incoming links to the http version, and it has a canonical URL with http. I resubmitted it on http with webmaster tools. Is there anything else I could do?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Robots.txt | any SEO advantage to having one vs not having one?
Neither of my sites has a robots.txt file. I guess I have never been bothered by any particular bot enough to exclude it. Is there any SEO advantage to having one anyways?
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
One hosting plan for multiple websites?
I use one Godaddy shared Linux hosting account for 4 separate websites. In Google Webamster Tools, specifally "Sitr Errors," I noticed that inner pages from another site are being listed as a broken link in the original unique-now-shared site. I checked and the files are not mi-installed. My question is, should each of the four sites have a unique hosting plan and/or static IP? Thanks, Eric
Technical SEO | | monthelie10 -
Any one worked on a sites.google.com/ website ?
Hi I have a client that has a sites.google.com/ website, Has anyone ever used one ? or had to do SEO on one ? Any help would be very much appreciated Thanks
Technical SEO | | tempowebdesign0 -
What do I do with an old site when a new one is built?
I have a customer that has a PR 4 website with over 3000 pages of content. He decided to build a brand new website with a new domain and it now has a PR of 2. Our question is, what do we do with the old site? Do we migrate all the content over to the new site and do redirects on all the pages? Do we keep the old site up and put links over to the new site? He was just planning on shutting it down but that seemed like a complete waste of PR and SEO. What is his best course of action? Thanks for your replies.
Technical SEO | | smartlinksolutions0 -
Penalty for many domains pointing to the same URL?
I've searched around on the Google forums, and other sources (including the Q&A!), but haven't seen a solid answer on this one. I've recently discovered that throughout the years we've had several hundred domains pointed to our homepage. These are our domains and are related to our niche. I believe they were pointed for the purposes of attracting type-in traffic. Before last month I knew at least some existed, but I didn't realize the extent until last week. I know there isn't any positive SEO effect to doing this (except perhaps if any of the domains have links to them, and a few do), but is there any negative SEO effect? I realize that there are legitimate redirects for type-in traffic, like misspellings and such, but most of these are just exact-match-domains. It just screams unnatural to me, but perhaps I'm just a little paranoid. 🙂
Technical SEO | | tncomseo0 -
301 redirects & merging two sites into one
We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | Gmorgan0