Was I hit by panda or penguin?
-
My site, graciousbridal.com was hit pretty hard by google at the end of April. I actually noticed our traffic decreasing around February, then towards the end of April, it got really bad. Our sales this may were half of what they were in may 2011. We have never done any black or gray hat seo, wouldn't even know how to. I know in the past we did blog commenting, but changed up our keywords so it wasn't all the same, maybe we didn't change it enough?? We have another very similar site that I'm now wondering if we were penalized because they are too similar. We always have changed up the copy, but they have most of the same products. This second site barely gets traffic or sales and has about half of the items graciousbridal does. But, I'm wondering now if it's to similar and that is why we were penalized. I can't figure out what we did wrong to have this big of a drop. I really need help with this as this is supposed to be our busiest season of the year. Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated..
-
Hi James, Thanks for responding. We hired an SEO person to help us at the beginning of last year, that ended up not working out. I know she was working on link building, and it seems like she must have left comments on irrelevant blogs.. What do you recommend in this situation, focus time on getting high quality links or trying to get the bad ones removed? And is blog commenting still okay to do on blogs that are relevant to our industry, or does google see that as spammy? Thanks! Audrey
-
I had a quick look over your link profile, I feel you have been hit by Penguin.
I notice you have been doing some ok link building in terms of using varied anchor text in your link profile,
But I also notice you have been targeting some lower quality directories for your dedicated page "<a class="clickable title link-pivot expanded" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">personalized wedding favors"</a>
For example I notive you have a link on this directorie: coloradosph.org
http://coloradosph.org/index.php?s=A&c=363&p=17
Google has totally de indexed the URL for this low quality directory, If you take a similar sample accross more of these directories I see more like this.
Also in regards to your "Blog Comments" I notice some poor quality links from this area example:
this looks like it is a blog comment on a link network [comment made 28th Feb 2011), I mean their are 100s of other spammy comments this isn't really going to do any thing apart from have a negative impact on your SEO.
http://mommies.genuineinteractive.com/blog/post/Connecting-with-Alpha-Moms.aspx
To future proof your strategy you need to target higher quality link building strategies and do not let the lower quality stuff work.
Google has been very harsh after the last update, work done by agency's 5 years ago can get hit I have seen it over and over, from my experience "Quality" will be the winner in the end
-
Penguin was released on April 24th 2012. If you GA show a decrease on that date, then it's Penguin.
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
-
Do we take a SEO hit for having multiple URLs on an infinite scroll page vs a site with many pages/URLs. If we do take a hit, quantify the hit we would suffer.
We are redesigning a preschool website which has over 100 pages. We are looking at 2 options and want to make sure we meet the best user experience and SEO. Option 1 is to condense the site into perhaps 10 pages and window shade the content. For instance, on the curriculum page there would be an overview and each age group program would open via window shade. Option 2 is to have an overview and then each age program links to its own page. Do we lose out on SEO if there are not unique URLS? Or is there a way using metatags or other programming to have the same effect?
Algorithm Updates | | jgodwin0 -
Site has disappeared since Panda 4 despite quality content, help!
Our site www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk has lost over 20 first page rankings since the end of May. I assume this is because of Panda 4.0. All content on the site is high quality and 100% unique, so we did not expect to get penalised. Although I read somewhere that if Google can't read particular js anymore they don't rank you as high. The site has not been blacklisted as all pages are showing in Google's index and there are no messages on webmaster tools. We have not taken part in any link schemes and have disavowed all low quality links that were pointing there just in case (after the penalty). Can anybody see anything on www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk that may have cause Panda update to affect it so negatively? Would really appreciate any help.
Algorithm Updates | | search_shop0 -
Big hit taken on Google Search in Jan - Any Ideas?
Hello, I manage a news site that gets new items posted daily. We had had a pretty even keel with Google search and ranking for some time now only on the 9th Jan we took a massive drop and have no recovered except for one big spike on the 29th January. The only think we had done differently was not post as much over Christmas for about a week as people were on holiday but if this was the reason for it the posting is back to normal now and has been since the 6th Jan and nothing has recovered. The site is wjlondon.com - any ideas greatly appreciated. Thank you
Algorithm Updates | | luwhosjack0 -
Penguin 2.0 - Any signs yet?
I'm waiting, probing and analyzing and haven't seen any signs of a Penguin change. I am seeing some of my head terms bounce around the last couple of days. Mostly bouncing up and then back down again. I'm not sure if these are signs of an algo change starting, and working through Google's servers. Has anyone seen anything yet?
Algorithm Updates | | tdawson090 -
Lost and confused after Penguin!
I own an EMD which was hit by google penguin. I lost my #1 position to Google US SERP and went to #5 for the keyword which applies to the EMD. What I have tried so far is deleting the exact anchor text links from the footers of my c-block sites. That did not seem to help because i did not gain any position from that change. I also altered my meta title, description and keywords because they were spamming a bit. Things did not improved. My Links w/ Exact Anchor Text is at 5%, Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text at 3% The web pages that are above me are to 0% to both categories because they are not showing up with their main page. What is going on? The thing that confuses me the most is that i am also targeting for two other markets, Australia and Canada. In Canada I have maintained my #1 and to Australia I lost my first position falling to #2. I did not receive any message to my webmaster tools account and never made any black hat link building. Is the EMD fact the problem, but why not for other markets except US? Penguin has run to other markets(CA, AU) as well becuase i have seen a drop to other keywords and also to my traffic. Really what do you think?
Algorithm Updates | | Tz_Seo0 -
Can AJAX implementation affect the rankings in Google Panda?
Hi there, I have the following situation with one of our job sites. We migrate the site to a new application, which is better from design point of view and also usability. For this we use a lot AJAX especially in searches. So every time a user is filtering down their search new results will be shown on the page, at the same url and with no page load. But, having this implementation. affected Bounce rate - which increased from 38% to nearly 60%, PI/visits - which are now half, at 3 and also Avg Time on Site is half that is used to be coming to 2,5 min from nearly 6 min. From Rand post, it is clearly that the content is very important in Google Panda, and all of these parameters we should consider, as it is telling the quality of the content. So, my question will be, can this site be hit by Panda updates (maybe later on) because Bounce Rate, PI/Visits and Avg Time on site, decreased in such way? At the moment we don't measure the Ajax impresion, but as I understood that we can do that though virtual pages in GA, does anyone of you have the experience how to handle this? Won't be this an artificial increase? Thanks, Irina
Algorithm Updates | | InformMedia0 -
When Panda's attack...
I have a predicament. The site I manage (www.duhaime.org) has been hit by the Panda update but the system seems fixed against this site’s purpose. I need some advice on what i'm planning and what could be done. First, the issues: Content Length The site is legal reference including dictionary and citation look up. Hundreds (perhaps upwards of 1000) of pages, by virtue of the content, are thin. The acronym C.B.N.S. stands for “Common Bench Reports, New Series” a part of the English reports. There really isn’t too much more to say nor is there much value to the target audience in saying it. Visit Length as a Metric There is chatter claiming Google watches how long a person uses a page to gauge it’s value. Fair enough but, a large number of people that visit this site are looking for one small piece of data. They want the definition of a term or citation then they return to whatever caused the query in the first place. My strategy so far… Noindex some Pages Identify terms and citations that are really small – less than 500 characters – and put a no index tag on them. I will also remove the directory links to the pages and clean the sitemaps. This should remove the obviously troublesome pages. We’ll have to live with the fact these page won’t be found in Google’s index despite their value. Create more click incentives We already started with related terms and now we are looking at diagrams and images. Anything to punch up the content for that ever important second click. Expand Content (of course) The author will focus the next six months on doing his best to extend the content of these short pages. There are images and text to be added in many cases – perhaps 200 pages. Still won't be able to cover them all without heavy cut-n-paste feel. Site Redesign Looking to lighten up the code and boiler plate content shortly. We were working on this anyway. Resulting pages should have less than 15 hard-coded site-wide links and the disclaimer will be loaded with AJAX upon scroll. Ads units will be kept at 3 per page. What do you think? Are the super light pages of the citations and dictionary why site traffic is down 35% this week?
Algorithm Updates | | sprynewmedia0 -
Penalty or Algorithm hit?
After the Google Algorithm was updated my site took a week hit in traffic. The traffic came back a week later and was doing well a week AFTER the algorithm change and I decided that I should do a 301 redirect to make sure I didn't have duplicate content (www. vs. http://) I called my hosting company (I won't name names but it rhymes w/ Low Fatty) and they guided me through the supposedly simple process.. Well, they had me create a new (different) IP address and do a domain forward (sorry about bad terminology) to the www. This was in effect for approximately 2 weeks before I discovered it and came along with a subsequent massive hit in traffic. I then corrected the problem (I hope) by restoring the old IP address and setting up the HTACESS file to redirect all to www. It is a couple weeks later and my traffic is still in the dumps. On WMT instead of getting traffic from 10,000 keywords I'm getting it only from 2k. Is my site the victim of some penalty (I have heard of sandbox) or is my site simply just lower in traffic due to the new algorithm (I checked analytics data to find that traffic only in the US is cut by 50%, it is the same outside the US) Could someone please tell me what is going on?
Algorithm Updates | | askthetrainer0