Will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text attract Penguin’s wrath?
-
I'm working on a site for a serviced apartment site http://www.alcove.co.in/ which offers apartments in 9 cities in India. Site was ranking in 1st page of Google for “serviced apartment + city” for 7 cities until sometime in Jan 2013.
However organic traffic has been gradually falling since sometime in September 2012 (40% fall this month over same period last year). There’s been no sudden fall in traffic which we may link with any Penguin update. There have been no warning messages in Google WMT.
Even today the site ranks in 1st page for 3 cities; however ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’ which was the biggest revenue earner, is not ranked in first 5 pages.
My questions are whether
-
will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text will attract Penguin’s wrath,
-
does Google makes allowance for case when company's name includes keywords. In our case, company name is Alcove Service apartments,
-
could there be some other reason for fall in ranking/traffic?
The distribution of anchors (external links, multiple links from same domain are counted) is :
percent
Keywords 34%
brand+keywords 43%
Natural 4%
only brand 11%
URL 7%For the above,
-
Brand = ‘Alcove Service apartments’ or ‘Alcove Serviced apartments’
-
brand+keywords = various combinations of ‘alcove’ + [‘guest houses’ or ‘hotels’ or ‘accommodation’] + city1 + city2…
Intriguingly, Open Site Explorer analysis of domain metrics (Domain Authority, Followed Linking Root Domains, etc) ranks Alcove higher than all but one site appearing in 1st page of Google for ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’. Most of alcove’s links are from article directories (no spun articles were used), directories and link exchanges with relevant sites.
Any suggestions and guidance on what we could do to remedy the situation would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
-
-
Honestly, given that you currently have relatively few cities, consolidating might not have a big impact. I'd be cautious going forward, if you were going to expand into hundreds of markets or started having a ton of results under every market, but for now it probably makes more sense to improve your link profile and try to get some content on the site that isn't entirely search results.
-
Thanks, Dr. Peter. That's exactly the sort of inputs I was looking for.
Yes, as you notice, we have started links clean-up : deleting, changing anchor or disavowing.
It is hard to develop great content for a list of service apartments in a city. At my suggestion, client agreed to add 1 page for each property ( you will see more details... link below tariff table for each apartment) in April 2013.
Do you think we should combine all cities (e.g. http://www.alcove.co.in/tariff-bangalore.html )into a single page with a search form?
-
I was referring to the Nike back link as an example of what a "natural" anchor text profile would look like.
The majority of their links are Branded or URL (Nike).
Almost all the links contain the word "Nike" In It
A few contain their specific product keywords only (not Nike)
Its a great example to see percentage ratios compared to a spammy back link profile
-
My gut reaction is that this sounds much more Panda-like. We've seen many sites with geo-targeted pages and searches gradually lose ranking and traffic over the past couple of years. The problem is that Google has just generally started frowning on spinning out long-tail phrases just to target keywords, and in situations like "serviced apartments + city" I'm afraid that the content quite often ends up being thin.
In your case, though, I'm only seeing about 400 pages in Google's index, so it doesn't look like there are very many variations or that it's enough volume to trigger Panda-scale problems. I don't think these pages are very strong, as they're basically search results with minor variations in the copy/title/etc., but I'd be surprised to see a sudden ranking drop because of these pages.
Your link profile does seem to be populated with a lot of low-value directories and you're using long, exact-match anchor strings. It may not be the branded text so much as a lot of text that just looks unnatural. I also notice, though, that some of the links we have in OSE appear to be gone now:
http://impulsesdirect.org/detail/link-3883.htm
You may have started removal - I'm not sure. You could remove some of these, but frankly, you won't be left with a lot. Anything you do moving forward is going to have to involved building or attracting higher quality links and developing content that is more than just directory-style pages. Google just doesn't value niche directories the way they used to, and I think that attitude is here to stay, unfortunately (I have a former client in the same boat).
-
Karl,
I too feel that studying Nike's anchor profile would be frustrating because small businesses like ours cannot achieve that. Further, I am not sure that my site was hit by Penguin.
'serviced apartments bangalore' constitutes only 0.6% of total links. But combinations of this with other cities and terms was what I pushed most. 'Bangalore' occurs is 47% of links along with brand 'alcove' and other keywords (not all 47% of anchors have serviced apartments).
If articles' content is good and are posted on Article directories with PR > 1, can they do harm?
Thanks
-
Whilst Cesar is right than Nike has a perfect link profile, they don't really need to do much link building because they get it all done naturally for them. 99% of companies don't have the social interaction (or the budget!) that Nike does so it isn't really that helpful to study their linking profile.
Saying that, the majority of your links should be branded because when people are talking about you they are unlikely to link your website via an anchor text keyword. You need to create some linkable assets so, for example, content based around the cities you have apartments in and create some content that bloggers will want to have on their website.
Was "service apartments Bangalore" the keyword you pushed the most by any chance? Article directories have been seriously devalued and directories haven't been worthwhile for years now (unless they are really good!). I suggest looking through your backlink profile on OSE and Webmaster Tools and start to get rid of the article links because they will be doing you more harm than good.
-
Look at this and study it
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.nike.com
That's what it should look like
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
-
What to do when on your keyword there are no questions ?
Let me give me you an example. For example for the keyword title tag (let's imagine) I would want to rank on that. I go to the keyword explorer or related searches at the bottom of google there are many questions people have.. I find expressions (with the same user intent) such as "title tag length", "title tags generator", " "why are title tag importants" (I found this one using the are questions drop down menu of the keyword explorer). With this in hand I can create a page where I answer all those questions. I would have all those expressions being an H2 and answer the questions using related phrases and context word that I will find with the keyword explorer in my paragraph below. Let now take one of my keyword "Sicily bike tours". If I type this expression int he keyword explorer...the only related phrases (with the same user intent) that I find are "Sicily bike tour", "Sicily cycling tours", "Sicily bike trips"... (first thing I noticed is that it is just variation of my main expression not really question...). If I look at questions I find "what is the highest elevation in Sicily" or "How safe is Sicily for tourists". I don't imagine on a page that sells bikes tours in Sicily having h2 tags that answers those questions... and this is not what people that rank do, they describe their tour and this is what is confusing to me. Let's now take a secondary related keyword to main keyword. Let' s take "Sicily cycling tours" (it is a secondary related keyword to "Sicily bike tours". Based on the keyword explorer, the secondary related phrases to "Sicily cycling tours" are "tour of Sicily". "trips to Sicily".... ( isn't that going to be boring and look unnatural to use all those expressions ? ). There are all synonyms of my expression but not really different which is my worry ? Or can I use an expression such as "Sicilian villages" or "Sicily maps" even though they don't have the same user intent) as my secondary related keyword "Sicily cycling tours". Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Penguin 2.1\. Bad links removed - do I need to wait for next Penguin upgrade to see recovery?
Hi - I have read conflicting advice about this issue - after taking action and removing bad links following a Penguin 2.1 hit, will the site need to wait for the next Penguin upgrade before the link clean-up has any effect? Or will the cleaning of the links be acknowledged and "rewarded" with a ranking improvement before that (assuming all bad links were cleared out)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevieD0 -
Getting out of Google's Penguin
Hi all, my site www.uniggardin.dk has lost major rankings on the searchengine google.dk. Went from rank #2-3 on important keywords to my site, and after the latest update most of my rankings have jumped to #12 - #20. This is so annoying, and I really have no idea what to do. Can it cause bad links to my site? In that case what will I have to do? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xpeztumdk
Christoffer0 -
Changing keyword target on home page? Will it work?
I have a site that is in the financial services niche and has around 20 pages talking about different services. I want to change the goal of the site and now just target Insurance. The current home page is a simple introduction to the website, I was going to change this to target the insurance keyword and put around 500 words content on the front page. I was also going to change the Page Title, Description and H1 tags too. My question is will the front page then rank for that keyword once google recrawls the site? Could I damage the PR of the site or any other factors from changing the front page. Here are some stats about the site 11 years old PR 3 Page Mozrank 5.58 Page Moztrust 5.61 Domain Mozrank 2.29 Domain Moztrust 3.17 Thanks for your help guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Making anchor text look more natural
Hi there, I have recently been approached by a company looking to do some SEO work for them, having had a look at their link profile, they had being using a lot of exact match anchor and have seen a drop in the rankings, no surprise there. I was thinking of asking the website where they have placed these links and changing them, so there is a mixture of exact, phrase, brand etc, what do you think? would this be best practice? or just leave these as they are and start building fresh links? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Who is beating you on Google (after Penguin)?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google. I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this.
The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories. 1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering. Now it is not the homepages that are beating me. In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do. 2) Nobodies. Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old. Has anybody else noticed this? I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web. Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO? If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building. But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.| Thanks!0 -
Will blocking google and SE's from indexing images hurt SEO?
Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0