What's the best way for SEO newbie to analyze & fix a site after being hit by Panda?
-
Hi,
I have a prospective client who was in the top 3 on Google for two of their primary keywords. They fell way back in the rankings immediately after Panda was rolled out on September 27, 2012. Two weeks ago, they were at position #118 for one keyword. After looking for them in Rank Checker today, they cannot be found in Google at all.
Here's my question. Because of the "bad links" (some pointing to Porno sites)... what's the possibility that this situation cannot be fixed?
I don't know... maybe I'm asking an irrelevant question. I'm attempting to assess the situation so I can go back and present my findings to the prospective client. I'm committed to understanding what's going on with their website so I can assess the situation properly.
Fixing their problem starts with a correct assessment.
They have a ranking problem, and I know I can fix that... IF all their site needs is white hat <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym>.
What I DON'T want is... to sell them <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> services, only to find out in 3-6 months... I made an incorrect diagnosis of the problem, and therefore sold them the wrong solution. I know I can close the sale if I can show them with reasonable substantiation that the damage is not beyond repair.
I'm familiar with the basics of <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym>, but I'm unfamiliar with how "bad linking" might effect the long-term commitment to optimizing. They're wondering if they should start over on another website. I was attempting to do an assessment to better understand if my typical approach on this site would be sufficient. Also... I wanted to get an assessment/report to show them something to substantiate my conclusion(s) about their website.
If Open Site Explorer is sufficient to do the link analysis... great. At least I know I'm working with the right tool. All I have to do is learn how to use the tool quickly. At this point... I'm not sure which tool would be helpful.
So... can you speak to the following 2 questions:
1.) How do you know when ranking problem is beyond fixing?
2.) What software/tool is ideal for doing some link analysis in order to assess the problem, and prescribe a solution?
Thanks so much!
Ramon
-
Thank you for your reply.
Ramon
-
Thanks Dave... your post is very helpful.
Ramon
-
Great point/question Chris. I was referred to them by a CPA whom I helped with his SEO. He had a most basic issue, and began to see immediate improvements. It made the introduction a no-brainer for him.
Chris... I appreciate your candor.
Ramon
-
Your first step is to understand ... "What is Panda?". "What is Penguin?"
Go learn that, be able to explain it exceptionally well, then come back here and ask questions.
You need to understand the basics before you can fix another person's website.
-
I'll tell you, I have to wonder why a company with such a major problem is requesting that a "newbie" fix it for them. Nothing against you, Ramon, but my first thought is that they're hoping to get someone to spend a bunch of time on it for cheap, which could have been what got them in trouble in the first place.
If they're coming to you for advice and they know you're new to SEO, be up front with them and say your best advise is that they move all the content (minus any low quality outbound links) to a new domain and start over. I wouldn't even redirect the old site to the new one. Unless they're going to pay you well for all the time your going to take learning everything you need to learn to make a serious effort at solving a difficult problem such as this, cut to the chase and see what they say.
If they go for that, then you can spend your time fixing the problems you know you can fix and help them build a better link profile. That's my two cents.
-
Hi Ramon,
This is a very difficult question to answer. Before I even try to answer it I'd like to point out the following:
The first Panda filter came out on Feb 25, 2011. On Feb 24, 2012 Search Engine Round Table published a survey asking how many webmasters recovered from the filter one year later. The survey can be found here. As you can see, not many were able to recover from the filter even one year later. This is by no means a conclusive study, but it's really the best we have.
To answer your questions:
1. In my opinion, it's beyond fixing if you lose rankings and you did NOT receive a warning from Google. If you received a warning consider yourself lucky. Follow Google's instructions and use a service like linkdelete.com to get the bad backlinks removed (or just do it yourself).
2. Open Site Explorer works great for identifying bad backlinks. Go through the list of exact match keyword anchor texts and you'll be off to a good start.
Finally, I'd like to plug my post on this subject:
How-To Recover From Google Penalties & Filters
It's a long one, but I include several pictures and examples to make this process easier for folks in your situation.
Good luck!
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
-
Redirects, SEO and More
Website errors remittent of Chernobyl. First of all, I ask a lot of questions of the community and I don't do a lot of answering. For that, I am sorry! I own a small SEO company and the majority of my clients are upstarts just like myself. We try to do the best we can on a very limited budget.
Moz Pro | | underdogmike
With that said, the client website in question, http://bestdefensega.com has been a struggle to rank in the metro atlanta lawyer market.
Here's the story. My client is a new solo attorney that practices criminal law and personal injury law. We launched bestdensega.com to focus on criminal defense and my client has also paid AVVO for a website as well. We recently decided to make a monster website that would have 50+ pages and be representative of all that he practices.
I recently put a temporary redirect on bestdefensega.com and pointed it to the avvo website while I was rebuilding the website. I did this using a plugin.
This morning I decided that I wanted to remove the redirect, so I deactivated and deleted the plugin. The redirect is still in effect. I suspect that this may be a cacheing scenario.
How do I undo a redirect?
Also, I noticed that the AVVO site has all of a sudden shot up to the top of the search results and bestdefnesega.com has dropped past the 3rd page for our keywords. Have I lost all of bestdefensega.com's link juice? Also, bestdefensega.com has a spam score of 7. Why? There are no shady links and everything I do is on the up and up. Also Open Site Explorer says that bestdefensega.com doesn't have any inbound links.
Google WebMaster Tools says that the site has of 500 inbound links.. Frustrated, Thanks0 -
Why can't I see last week's stats?
Can see stats week ending May 1st but nothing after that- and it's May 9th!?
Moz Pro | | locumhunter0 -
Open Site Explorer and link numbers
I know this question has been asked many times in this forum but I still can't work it out. Why does this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.bookpal.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0 Which is showing all links, external, to pages "on this sub domain" show 1,935 external links but this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.bookpal.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=follow&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0 which is exactly the same but this time shoing followed + 301 links, says "showing 1 - 50 external links) but won't show the total links (and I know the mouse-over on the question mark says it's won't show the total links, but I don't understand why it can't show the total links when it could show the total links when I requested to see "all links" instead of just "followed+301" links.) but it actually lists 700 links (14 pages, 50 results each page). I know the link list is limited to 25 links per domain but then it means you can NEVER know the total link count unless you download the full report. This makes using OSE to know numbers of links (internal, external, or otherwise) impossible. And if anyone uses the API, why the API (external+follow) returns 1,451 links? I'm sure it's an ongoing issue with people trying to get their head around all of this and I've never really been able to. Any insight would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | eatyourveggies0 -
I know our business listed in Yahoo and medranks.com (for example). But my open site explorer report doesn't show those. however on their sites, I see the listing. Why is this?
I know our business listed in Yahoo and medranks.com (for example). But my open site explorer report doesn't show those links on the inbound report. however on their respective sites, I see the listing when I search for us. And the link does work..... Why is this? Why don't I see it on the open site report?
Moz Pro | | cschwartzel0 -
Best Keyword Difficulty Tool?
Hi All, I'm a bit frustrated with the fact that I can only enter 5 words at a time into SEOmoz's keyword difficulty tool. Does anyone know of a better way (or tool) to analyze keyword difficulty for hundreds of keywords?
Moz Pro | | nicole.healthline0 -
Penguin hit
my website hit by penguin update on april; i check my anchor text and found that i had 1790 anchor links for " air conditioning nyc" i erase them almost a month ago but it still shows on the website report. how long it take seomoz see the changes and what about google. if someone have any idea how can i bring my site back to the top pages. www.breeze-air.com
Moz Pro | | eoberlender0 -
Settings to crawl entire site
Not sure what happened but I started a third campaign yesterday and only 1 pages was crawled, The other two campaigns has 472 and 10K respectively. What is the proper setting to choose in the beginning of campaign setup to have the entire site crawled. Not sure what I did different and I must be reading the instructions incorrectly. Thanks, Don
Moz Pro | | NicheGuy210 -
Your opinion on this opportunity's difficulty?
I'm building a tool for mechanical engineers, and I'm trying to find 10 low-competition keywords to target in my first few content marketing efforts. I've got a lot of maneuvering room, so (with a bit of expert advice) I bet I'll be able to find some low-hanging fruit. Here's what I've found: Most keywords are seem to have about 40% difficulty. What's the highest level of SEOmoz "keyword difficulty" that a new website should reasonably try for? Some ranking high-authority pages are don't appear to be targeted at the term Is it fair to say that I could beat any page with less than a 'C' ranking for on-page optimization? (Assuming I target the term with general best practices)* Thanks! If you're interested, here is my current process: Go on engineering blogs for keywords Use Wordstream's Keyword Suggestion Tool for ideas around it Use Google Keyword Tools for keywords above 50 searches in direct match Use SEOmoz Keyword difficulty report, looking more deeply at keywords under <50% If I can find a top 10 page that's less than 30PA and less than 40DA, or has less than 'C' ranking for on-page optimization, I consider the keyword achievable within 3mo, using general best practices. *Except for YouTube/Wikipedia/etc
Moz Pro | | 49wetnoodles0