Can't seem to get traffic back post Panda / Penguin. WHY?
-
I have done and am doing everything I can think of to bring back lost traffic after the late 2012 updates from google hit us. I just is not working.
We had some issues with our out of house web developers which screwed up our site in 2012 and after taking it in house we have Eden doing damage control form months now. We think we have fixed pretty much everything.
- URL structure
- filling up with good unique content(under way. Lots still to do)
- making better category descriptions
- redesigned homepage.
- Updated product pages (CMS is holding things back on that part otherwise they would be better. New CMS under construction)
- started more link building(its a real weak spot on our SEO as far as I can see)
- audited bad links from dodgy irelavent sites.
- hired writers to create content and link bait articles.
- Begun making high quality video's for both YouTube (brand awareness and viral) and on site hosting (link building and conversions) (in the pipeline not online yet).
- Flattened out site architecture.
- optimise internal link flow (got this wrong by using nofollows. In the process of thinking of a better way by reducing nun wanted Nav links on page.)
i realise its not all done but I have been working ever since the drop in traffic and I'm just seeing no increase at all.
I have been asking a few questions on here for the past few days but still can't put my finger on the issue.
Am I just impatient and need to wait on the traffic as I am doing all the correct things? Or have I missed something and need to fix it.
you anyone would like to have a quick look at my site and see if there is an obvious issue I have missed It would be great as I have been tearing my hair out trying to find the issues with my site. It's www.centralsaddlery.co.uk
Criticism would me much appreciated.
-
We didn't get an instant hit. It was a 50-60% drop spread from aug to end of feb in a pretty steady downward slope. It has been pretty level from feb until now. That's why I'm a bit unsure of the reason for the drop. I havlocal ready cross referenced the google updates and there is a rough coronation between the updates and the start of the declin but nothing concert.
-
Check SEOMoz's Google algo change history:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
If you were hit by Panda or Penguin, you should see a cliff-like drop on or within a day of the dates listed in the document. Panda & Penguin are completely different penalties, so recovering from them requires knowing which one it was.
Of course there could be other issues with your site as well, it's hard to say without more info.
-
I'm not sure exactly but I think it's more Panda as we have not had the best content in the past. If we just keep on slogging through with more content is that the best plan? If so I'm happy to do so. I just need to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. would also like to be sure that everything else a pout our site is as good as can be.
-
Is it Panda or Penguin you've been hit with? With Penguin it's necessary to submit a reconsideration request after you've removed your low quality links. Your rankings may not immediately recover because you removed links that were previously benefiting you, so it's necessary to build new links.
Panda is a lot trickier to recover from. Only a small percentage of sites that were hit by Panda have recovered. Mainly the penalty hit sites with massive amounts of thin content, so if you have a lot of low quality or duplicate content, you need to replace it with unique, original content. There are no real shortcuts here, but you can work with 3rd party content brokers to help you with process.
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
-
My keywords aren't performing for my Umbraco site
A client of mine has just redesigned their site which was pretty small (homepage, about us page and contact us page) and now it includes homepage, about us page, 3 services pages, 5 blog posts and a contact us page. their domain authority is 5, so that gives you an idea of their size. We updated their key pages with keyword optimised content and added the keyword to their meta title and meta description. they're in the process of adding the alt tags and also they need to enable meta tags for the blog posts. Everything is quite in the process at the moment and their organic traffic is low. But I believe that some of the keywords should start moving places for the pages that have been optimised and they haven't. Is there any reason for this? I believe the services pages which have meta tags should have started ranking at least in very low position for the selected keywords. Is there something I'm missing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Wright0 -
Is it still true that 3xx redirects don't cause you to lose any ranking?
In this: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo it says that simply redirecting - provided you don't change anything on the page - isn't going to cost you rankings. Is this still true, or is there any new data/case studies that have been done since? I haven't seen anything updating it and just want to make sure because it's from 2016. We want to do simple 301 redirecting without any changes to the page. Or has anyone had an opposite experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngieJohnston1 -
Can't support IE 7,8,9, 10\. Can we redirect them to another page that's optimized for those browsers so that we can have our site work on modern browers while still providing a destination of IE browsers?
Hi, Our site can't support IE 7,8,9, 10. Can we redirect them to another page that's optimized for those browsers so that we can have our site work on modern broswers while still providing a destination of IE browsers? Would their be an SEO penalty? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dspete0 -
Knowledge Graph Quick Answer Box: Is there anything we can do to get our content to appear there?
Hi everyone, The quick answers box can be really helpful for searchers by pulling through content which answers their question or provides a clear description of an item or entity. Our client appeared in the quick answer box for a period of time with their description of a product, but have since been replaced by one of their competitors. Previously, the answer was provided by Wikipedia. Is there anything we can do to help get our client's content back in there? We've been looking at possible structured data we can use but haven't found anything. Also suggesting our client ensures they have a paragraph within their copy which is a clear, concise description of the product that Google can pull. Can anyone give any suggestions? Thanks Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
How to get a site out of Google's Sandbox
Hi I am working on a website that is ranking well in bing for the domain name / exact url search but appears no where in Google or Yahoo. I have done the site search in Google and it is indexed so I am presuming it is in the sandbox. The website was originally developed in India and I do not know whether it had some history of bad backlinks. The website itself is well optimised and I have checked all pages in Moz - getting a grade A. Webmaster Tools is not showing any manual actions - I was wondering what I could do next?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AllieMc0 -
Can't get auto-generated content de-indexed
Hello and thanks in advance for any help you can offer me! Customgia.com, a costume jewelry e-commerce site, has two types of product pages - public pages that are internally linked and private pages that are only accessible by accessing the URL directly. Every item on Customgia is created online using an online design tool. Users can register for a free account and save the designs they create, even if they don't purchase them. Prior to saving their design, the user is required to enter a product name and choose "public" or "private" for that design. The page title and product description are auto-generated. Since launching in October '11, the number of products grew and grew as more users designed jewelry items. Most users chose to show their designs publicly, so the number of products in the store swelled to nearly 3000. I realized many of these designs were similar to each and occasionally exact duplicates. So over the past 8 months, I've made 2300 of these design "private" - and no longer accessible unless the designer logs into their account (these pages can also be linked to directly). When I realized that Google had indexed nearly all 3000 products, I entered URL removal requests on Webmaster Tools for the designs that I had changed to "private". I did this starting about 4 months ago. At the time, I did not have NOINDEX meta tags on these product pages (obviously a mistake) so it appears that most of these product pages were never removed from the index. Or if they were removed, they were added back in after the 90 days were up. Of the 716 products currently showing (the ones I want Google to know about), 466 have unique, informative descriptions written by humans. The remaining 250 have auto-generated descriptions that read coherently but are somewhat similar to one another. I don't think these 250 descriptions are the big problem right now but these product pages can be hidden if necessary. I think the big problem is the 2000 product pages that are still in the Google index but shouldn't be. The following Google query tells me roughly how many product pages are in the index: site:Customgia.com inurl:shop-for Ideally, it should return just over 716 results but instead it's returning 2650 results. Most of these 1900 product pages have bad product names and highly similar, auto-generated descriptions and page titles. I wish Google never crawled them. Last week, NOINDEX tags were added to all 1900 "private" designs so currently the only product pages that should be indexed are the 716 showing on the site. Unfortunately, over the past ten days the number of product pages in the Google index hasn't changed. One solution I initially thought might work is to re-enter the removal requests because now, with the NOINDEX tags, these pages should be removed permanently. But I can't determine which product pages need to be removed because Google doesn't let me see that deep into the search results. If I look at the removal request history it says "Expired" or "Removed" but these labels don't seem to correspond in any way to whether or not that page is currently indexed. Additionally, Google is unlikely to crawl these "private" pages because they are orphaned and no longer linked to any public pages of the site (and no external links either). Currently, Customgia.com averages 25 organic visits per month (branded and non-branded) and close to zero sales. Does anyone think de-indexing the entire site would be appropriate here? Start with a clean slate and then let Google re-crawl and index only the public pages - would that be easier than battling with Webmaster tools for months on end? Back in August, I posted a similar problem that was solved using NOINDEX tags (de-indexing a different set of pages on Customgia): http://moz.com/community/q/does-this-site-have-a-duplicate-content-issue#reply_176813 Thanks for reading through all this!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rja2140 -
Why do I get India, Pakistan, Turkey traffic mostly?
Hi there, I've been wondering. Why do I get most of the traffic from these countries? My sites are english, I host in USA. I don't target a thing for those countries traffic, yet I get huge amounts of traffic from these countries. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melbog0 -
Being Outranked But Don't Know Why!
My client, Comprehensive OBGYN of the Palm Beaches, is being outranked by two sites that have lower DA/PA and seemingly inferior on-page work for the term "palm beach obgyn". https://www.google.com/search?q=palm+beach+obgyn&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Our site is comprehensiveobgyn.net The two sites beating us are "obgynpalmbeach.com" and "obgynspb.com" My only thought is the exact match domain factor may be coming into play a bit, but It doesn't seem like it should make THIS much of a difference. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0