Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
-
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up.
She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way.
I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty.
First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it?
(We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content.
Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit.
Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing?
We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month.
So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course.
So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.)
Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option?
Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course).
Brad & Martha Novacek
-
Hi Brad and Martha,
You've asked a lot of questions which likely why you haven't got a lot of responses. It could take a few hours to answer all of those questions and really to answer completely someone would need to have a very close look at your site and your analytics.
I have a few thoughts for you though. The graphic you showed was interesting. Your drop that starts in March does not coincide with any known algorithm update so it is not due to Penguin or Panda. You do have a drop that coincides with the Penguin rollout of April 24 but your backlink profile is not really typical of a Penguin hit site. Sure, you've got your keyword as your top anchor, but according to ahrefs there are only 12 domains linking to you with that phrase. I would be surprised if you were severely affected by Penguin. I'm not saying it's impossible, but if it were Penguin it should be something not too hard to recover from.
I think there is likely a site issue. I only had time to spend a few minutes but I found that these two pages on your site contain content duplicating each other:
http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/
http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/index3.html
http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/index1.html
The second contains odd characters and I'm guessing it is not meant to be in the Google index, but it is.
It's possible that if you clean up the duplication on your own site you may rank much better.
-
Hi Brad,
Penguin and Panda are completely different issues. In brief, Penguin suppresses rankings for sites which have built manipulative links. Panda suppresses rankings for sites with various content issues.
I have not examined your site but based on your description, it seems likely your issue is Penguin. You have talked about building numerous links to the site using perfect match anchor text, which is the primary mechanism Penguin uses for detecting manipulation.
On a general level, you have two options: clean up the backlinks or move to a new site. Cleaning up the backlinks is a lot of work. For a hobby site, your best bet is likely moving to the customcarequilts.com site and shutting down the other site.
There is no reason to use yet another domain related to quilting. Clearly the topics discussed all relate to quilting.
Best Regards
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
-
SEO benefits/drawbacks of physical address on site.
Simple question - how much of an SEO impact does NOT having a physical address on your site make? I run a photography business based from home. For security reasons I don't really want our home address easily available to the public. I have a Google Maps listing (actually seem to have two at the moment, but that's a different matter) and the full address is logged there but is not viewable publicly - just the surrounding area. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
SEO Strategy - Content/Outreach/Links
Hi everyone I'm trying to prioritise my tasks for 2018 & wondered if anyone had any useful templates they use? In terms of SEO tasks, my priority was going to be content/outreach/links - Focusing on user guides/blogs onsite Then outreach articles/some PR that doesn't go against Google guidelines offsite. My struggle with the onsite content/blogs we produce is we have no real social media plan/manager so my content outreach always seems hampered by this. I've tried taking on some of the social stuff, but this ends up being too much for just me to do. I wondered if there were any other SEOs who face this issue and who have found some good solutions? I'm stuck in a bit of a rut and can't seem to effectively push forward with outreach/content writing. Thank you Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site once this happens?
Hi, we will be moving a clients’ site address from one domain to another and will of course be doing 301 redirects and notifying Google of the site address change in WMT. The problem is, that at some point in the future (say 3-6 months), the old domain will be going live with a new site as the current client does not own the domain and the owner will be wanting it back unfortunately. How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site (new domain) once this (old domain with new site) happens? Will the site address change be enough to keep the rankings but it will lose backlink traffic? Or will rankings go down since the 301 redirects will in essence no longer be in affect? Many thanks for your help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSIDW0 -
Should I "NoIndex" Pages with Almost no Unique Content
I have a real estate site with MLS data (real estate listings shared across the Internet by Realtors, which means data exist across the Internet already). Important pages are the "MLS result pages" - the pages showing thumbnail pictures of all properties for sale in a given region or neighborhood. 1 MLS result page may be for a region and another for a neighborhood within the region:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
example.com/region-name and example.com/region-name/neighborhood-name
So all data on the neighborhood page will be 100% data from the region URL. Question: would it make sense to "NoIndex" such neighborhood page, since it would reduce nr of non-unique pages on my site and also reduce amount of data which could be seen as duplicate data? Will my region page have a good chance of ranking better if I "NoIndex" the neighborhood page? OR, is Google so advanced they know Realtors share MLS data and worst case simple give such pages very low value, but will NOT impact ranking of other pages on a website? I am aware I can work on making these MLS result pages more unique etc, but that isn't what my above question is about. thank you.0 -
Should you bother with an "impact links" manual action
I have a couple sites that have these, and I have done a lot of work to get them removed, but there seems to be very little if any benefit from doing this. In fact, sites were we have done nothing after these penalties seem to be doing better than ones where we have done link removal and the reconsideration request. Google says "I_f you don’t control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google’s perspective, the links already won’t count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you’re able to get the artificial links removed, submit a reconsideration request__. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action._" I would guess a lot of people with this penalty don't even know they have it, and it sounds like leaving it alone really doesn't hurt your site. If seems to me that just simply ignoring this and building better links and higher quality content should help improve your site rankings vs. worrying about trying to get all these links removed/disavowed. What are your thoughts? Is it worth trying to get this manual action removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Google ranking for the term "locum tenens"
Hello- My company is having a very difficult time performing well for the term "locum tenens". This term literally defines our industry and target market (temporary physician staffing, essentially) and is by far the most searched term in our industry (30k / month, give or take). For us, “locum tenens” is like “ice cream” is to Ben & Jerry’s. Of course, there are other keywords we're concerned with, but this is by far the most important single term. We've moved up to page 3 a few times since launching our redesigned site in April, but seem to continuously settle on page 5 (we've been on page 5 for many weeks now). While I didn’t expect us to be on page 1 at this point, I having a hard time understanding why we’re not on at least 2 or 3, in light of the sites ahead of us. We have a ton of decent, optimized content and we’ve tried not to be too spammy (every page does have locum tenens on it many times, but it describes our service – it’s hard not to use it many times). We are working on developing backlinks and are avoiding any spammy backlink schemes (I get calls every day from companies saying they can give me 400 backlinks a month, which I have a hard time believing is a good long term strategy). It just sort of seems like our site is cursed for some reason that I can't understand. We are working with a competent SEO firm, and still have not made much progress for this term. So, I’m hoping maybe the community here might have some helpful advice. Our site is www.bartonassociates.com. Any insight you guys may have would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance and have a great day. Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ba_seomoz0 -
Where does "Pages Similar" link text come from?
When I type in a competitor name (in this case "buycostumes") Google shows several related websites in it's "Pages Similar to..." section at the bottom of the page:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costumeMy question, can anyone tell me where the text comes from that Google uses as the link. Our competitors have nice branded links and our is just a keyword. I can find nothing on-page that Google is using so it must be coming from someplace off-page, but where?
0 -
Question about "launching to G" a new site with 500000 pages
Hey experts, how you doing? Hope everything is ok! I'm about to launch a new website, the code is almost done. Totally fresh new domain. The site will have like 500000 pages, fully internal optimized of course. I got my taticts to make G "travel" over my site to get things indexed. The problem is: to release it in "giant mode" or release it "thin" and increase the pages over the time? What do you recomend? Release the big G at once and let them find the 500k pages (do they think this can be a SPAM or something like that)? Or release like 1k/2k per day? Anybody know any good aproach to improve my chances of success here? Any word will be apreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | azaiats20