Penguin 2.0 drop due to poor anchor text?
-
Hi,
my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update, and after years of designing my website with SEO in mind, generating unique content for users, and only focusing on relevant websites in my link building strategy, I'm a bit disheartened by the drop in traffic.
Having rolled out a new design of my website at the start of April, I suspect that I've accidentally messed up the structure of the website, making my site difficult to crawl, or making Google think that my site is spammy. Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, the number 1 anchor text in the site is "remove all filters" - which is clearly not what I want! The "remove all filters" link on my website appears when my hotels page loads with filters or sorting or availability dates in place - I included that link to make it easy for users to view the complete hotel listing again. An example of this link is towards the top right hand side of this page:
http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/agganis-arena-hotels/300382?star=2
With over 6000 venues on my website, this link has the potential to appear thousands of times, and while the anchor text is always "remove all filters", the destination URL will be different depending on the venue the user is looking at. I'm guessing that to Google, this looks VERY spammy indeed!?
I tried to make the filtering/sorting/availability less visible to Google's crawl when I designed the site, through the use of forms, jquery and javascript etc., but it does look like the crawl is managing to access these pages and find the "remove all filters" link. What is the best approach to take when a standard "clear all..." type link is required on a listing page, without making the link appear spammy to Google - it's a link which is only in place to benefit the user - not to cause trouble!
My final question to you guys is - do you think this one sloppy piece of work could be enough to cause my site to drop significantly following the Penguin 2.0 update, or is it likely to be a bigger problem than this? And if it is probably due to this piece of work, is it likely that solving the problem could result in a prompt rise back up the rankings, or is there going to be a black mark against my website going forward and slow down recovery?
Any advice/suggestions will be greatly appreciated,
Thanks
Mike
-
Go to majestic SEO, type your url in. If your keywords you got penalized for are over 10% diversity you are being penalized generally, however there are a few exceptions, but not many. I analyzed 440 sites and found that the highest was 2.47 for a site that didn't have keywords in the url.
Also, I suggest you read this http://dailyseotip.com/what-other-marketing-firms-want-you-to-believe-that-isnt-true/3356/ I see that you are really focused on Onpage SEO. I think this will help you understand more.
The next thing you may want to do is start contacting admins and deleting low quality links if you have them. Use OSE and figure out low quality links. There are only a handful of directories I recommend out their. I have a message from Google telling one of my clients to get rid of their directory links, it was and example link coming from a directory site to be exact. Never use a keyword at a directory site, always use Brand name or your URL.
Make sure your Disavow is your last resort and I highly suggest you get someone to do it that has experience in it. Many have messed this up and really hurt their website.
Have a great day.
-
Hi Mat,
thanks for your reply. I'll definitely change the link, but I agree that it would be harsh if it was the sole reason for the 30% drop in organic traffic.
There are definitely some directories linking to ConcertHotels.com - at one stage I used the SEOmoz list of directories and got my website listed on some of the recommendations from the list. But my strategy for the last two years has been to approach venue's own websites and ask if they'd be interested in linking to our nearby hotels page, as a useful resource for their visitors. This strategy has worked quite well for me, and to me it sounds like a very natural, sensible link building strategy. I'll certainly work through my list of backlinks, but I would hope that the majority of them are from very relevant websites (due to the strategy I adopted). I guess there could be a percentage that I have not had any control over however, and I guess I should disavow these?
As for the directories, should I now be disavowing directory links? I didn't think that the percentage of directory links to my site would be that high -I used the directory link strategy in the past to simply enhance the number of links to my homepage - the strategy I described above is one which achieve links to specific pages throughout my website, not my homepage, so I felt the need to grow the number of homepage links.
Thanks again for your help and advice
Mike
-
That link is not ideal, but I really do not believe that it would cause the sort of drop you are talking about.
If you think you have been hit by penguin 2 then I'd start looking at your backlinks with a critical eye. I just stuck your domain into majestic seo and I hit a lot of questionable directories pretty quickly. That might be unfair - I certainly haven't analysed in any depth. However I took 10 domains at random and 9 were sites that at best are not helping you much.
If you're looking for a cause of a drop I'd say you could do worse than going through your backlink profile.
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
-
Login to see more (some text hidden by CSS height and jquery) will it ruin SEO?
Hey SEO masters! I have a website that is smashing it for SEO in Australia. In an effort to increase a user base I want to make it so only logged in users can see all the content. So today, I launched a new feature hiding content using CSS 'height:' property. The content is obviously still there and if you were a developer you could easily 'inspect element' and remove that CSS style to see everything... There are a few other tweaks i made for logged out users, but that only affects some json. Question: will this affect my SEO rankings? Here is a direct example: https://www.fishingspots.com.au/s/perth if you sign up, there is about 1400words of content.
Web Design | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
Questions in regard to putting 2-3 keywords in a title tag.
Hi all, Here is the situation. There are two services A and B in the page. B is more like a complement to A (they have something in common). C is the umbrella term over A and B. However, our company focuses more on A (70%) than B (30%). Questions: 1. Can I rank the keyword A for the page, while the page has B? (e.g. A | brand name) Will it hurt the seo, with B being in the page? 2. If I write the title tag this way: A | B | brand name . Will A and B dilute each other? 3. How about this: **A | C | brand name **(the idea behind this: We focus on A, but also include C because we have B in the page.) Does this make any sense? I am a newbie to SEO and I realize that could be confusing. Thank you for any support and explanation.
Web Design | | Raymondlee0 -
Hidden Text w/ Java Script _ Is it Bad?
Just came across an article that stated that Google is looking negatively at sites that attempt to hide text or use javascripts to expand text on websites. We are about to launch our new website and believe we are using this technique but im not certain if what we are doing will hurt us. Our website tends to be a little heavy on the text so used a "read more" scrpit that will expand when clicked on. Three sections that use this on the new website Take a look and let me know your thoughts http://joomplateshop.com/demos/catdi.com/
Web Design | | ChopperCharlie0 -
Requirements for mobile menu design have created a duplicated menu in the text/cache view.
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the main menu has been duplicated. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.trinitypower.com&strip=1 Our coder tells me he created one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Duplicating the menu cannot be good for on page SEO. With that said, I have had no warnings reported back from Moz. Maybe the moz bots are not tuned to looks for such a duplication error. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. I did not like the look and feel of the responsive version created based on the desktop version. Hi solution to this problem is to convert the Mobile version menu into ajax. what do you guys think? Thanks, Jarrett
Web Design | | TrinityPower0 -
Google text-only vs rendered (index and ranking)
Hello, can someone please help answer a question about missing elements from Google's text-only cached version.
Web Design | | cpawsgo
When using JavaScript to display an element which is initially styled with display:none, does Google index (and most importantly properly rank) the elements contents? Using Google's "cache:" prefix followed by our pages url we can see the rendered cached page. The contents of the element in question are viewable and you can read the information inside. However, if you click the "Text-only version" link on the top-right of Google’s cached page, the element is missing and cannot be seen. The reason for this is because the element is initially styled with display:none and then JavaScript is used to display the text once some logic is applied. Doing a long-tail Google search for a few sentences from inside the element does find the page in the results, but I am not certain that is it being cached and ranked optimally... would updating the logic so that all the contents are not made visible by JavaScript improve our ranking or can we assume that since Google does return the page in its results that everything is proper? Thank you!0 -
Is it cloaking/hiding text if textual content is no longer accessible for mobile visitors on responsive webpages?
My company is implementing a responsive design for our website to better serve our mobile customers. However, when I reviewed the wireframes of the work our development company is doing, it became clear to me that, for many of our pages, large parts of the textual content on the page, and most of our sidebar links, would no longer be accessible to a visitor using a mobile device. The content will still be indexable, but hidden from users using media queries. There would be no access point for a user to view much of the content on the page that's making it rank. This is not my understanding of best practices around responsive design. My interpretation of Google's guidelines on responsive design is that all of the content is served to both users and search engines, but displayed in a more accessible way to a user depending on their mobile device. For example, Wikipedia pages have introductory content, but hide most of the detailed info in tabs. All of the information is still there and accessible to a user...but you don't have to scroll through as much to get to what you want. To me, what our development company is proposing fits the definition of cloaking and/or hiding text and links - we'd be making available different content to search engines than users, and it seems to me that there's considerable risk to their interpretation of responsive design. I'm wondering what other people in the Moz community think about this - and whether anyone out there has any experience to share about inaccessable content on responsive webpages, and the SEO impact of this. Thank you!
Web Design | | mmewdell0 -
Domain Authority Drop After Website Relaunch
Prior to my website redesign and relaunch on July 10th, our domain authority was 33. 301 redirects were implemented properly. Out or 600 pages, about 200 URLs were modified. Domain authority has dropped to 28. Rankings are terrible. Conversions are awful. What does the domain authority drop mean? I have noticed in the past that a drop in domain authority tends to coincide with more a drop in ranking and a drop in the quality of visitors. The site is www.metro-manhattan.com Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Can google crawl text in jquery sliders?
We are redesigning our website and want to present a fair amount of text within jquery sliders. Will google crawl this text or is it treated the same way as actual script? Perhaps there is a way to just have the text as plain html but use jquery to display it?
Web Design | | Netboost0