Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website?
-
Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website and the methodology they used? I have a PR 5 website that lost more than 50% of the traffic in Google. I removed some of the wide site links at the best of my ability but I see little or no results so far.
-
hmmm...I went looking on your profile to see if you had listed a URL and having run your domain through Open Site Explorer, I can see that it is very likely that the bulk of your problems are coming from your site's external link profile.
Here are a few more blog posts that might help you to get a clear picture of things:
Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo by Dr Pete Meyers.
Anchor Text Distribution: Avoiding Over Optimization by Geoff Kenyon.
Bad Backlink Checking by Richard Baxter
and for something a little less intense, but that can help immensely if you are trying to get a picture of your own situation, Link Removal Flowchart by Bob Meinke.
Hope that helps,
Sha
P.S. The Google Algorithm Change History can also be very useful in checking whether changes in site traffic, rankings etc coincide with changes at Google.
-
Hi Sorin,
If your site tanked on 25th-26th April, then it is safe to presume that your site was indeed hit by the Penguin update. There was a smaller Panda update that happened on 18th April as well. If you have access to Google Analytics or rank trackers, you should be able to tell by looking at the dates whether it was Panda or Penguin.
Coming to the issue of your small website, I would agree with Sha. It would be most appropriate if you can disclose the affected URL on the forum for real helpful suggestions.
Penguin penalized everything that was on the 'over' side. It punished sites with over-optimization at each level. Be it links (internal and external both) or the covert keyword stuffing across web pages. Penguin's impact could be felt more extensively because it affected almost everything that an SEO would have done to boost site's rankings.
I guess, if you are really looking for non-generalized approach towards helping your cause, then website's url is much needed.
Best Regards,
Rajesh Dhawan
-
Hi Sorin,
There are a couple of very comprehensive blog posts that will give you some very good information on identifying and removing problem links. Both talk about issues and successes.
The first of these is Identifying Link Penalties in 2012 by Ryan Kent.
Ryan also provided some very detailed information in this Q&A thread.
The second post that provides real detail on a recovery is How W.P.M.U. Recovered from the Penguin Update by Ross Hudgens. As you will see from reading all of these, recovery will be heavily influenced by the actual elements that have contributed to the problem.
The most critical part of a recovery is in accurately identifying the issues that are contributing to the problem...one big thing to remember is that Penguin came accompanied by another Panda. I have seen instances of people making the assumption that they were hit by Penguin, when in fact Panda finally caught up with them. This is not to say that your problem is not from Penguin, but to emphasize that you need to make an informed analysis and be sure of the real issues before going down a path.
If you are unsure where to start, then you could post the site URL and those here can take a look and give you their thoughts.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
If it was panda its algorithmic, wait till Google re-crawls your site. Also keep in mind if you are removing links that you will need to not only remove them but replace them to regain rankings.
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
-
Advice for structuring hotel website
Hey guys, I am currently setting up a hotel booking website and I'm not so sure how to structure it. I have landing pages for: 1. Cities
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baresound
2. Sights
3. States The main keywords are mainly "Hotels in Cityname" or "Hotels near Sightname". What would be the best SEO friendly way of structuring the url? https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cities/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sights/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/states/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-statename Or are there better ways of structuring it or am I just overthinking it? I would greatly appreciate any advice and suggestions 🙂 Best, Max0 -
Client rebranded with a new website but can't migrate now defunct franchise website to new website.
Hi everyone, My client is a chain of franchised restaurants with a local domain website named after the franchise. The franchise exited the market while the client stayed and built its own brand with a separate website. The franchise website (which is extremely popular) will be shut down soon but the client will not be able to redirect the franchise website to the new website for legal reasons. What can I do to ensure that we start ranking immediately for the franchise keyphrase as soon as the franchise website is shutdown. We currently have the new website and access to the old website (which we can't redirect) Thanks, T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tarek_Lel0 -
SEO of blogging websites
What are the best practices of doing SEO of article/blogging websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Questions about websites coupon codes
Hi guys, i have 2 questions about my website of coupon codes: should i do redirect people of google to mywebsite, e.g. Someone is looking coupons for Sony or LG and arrive to brand Sony in my website but i show him offers for Sony in Amazon when he click in some offer, ¿that is correct? Footer images links. I saw many sites that put their logos in footer of online stores to get authority, ¿should i do that? Thank you so much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pompero990 -
Website losing rank positions after https
Hi there.. we were having a good increase in rankings since using Moz and then we purchased an ssl certificate so our website would run under https... to make sure our website is only accessed through https, we have used a method on .htaccess (appache) to make sure the website is only reached through https, using: RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mszeer
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,QSA] after doing this, from our last crawl perspective, we lost several positions that we were increasing.. what have we done wrong ? we have to fix this asap, please help us...0 -
Strategy for a large website where you only work for one business unit.
I have been tasked with improving traffic/leads to www.intertek.com. The problems we face are that I only work for one of the business units. There are many within the company and they all work independantly. The services my division offers range from ISO certification to food safety/testing to oil and gas services. They want to increase their quality content and traffic. What is the best strategy to approach working with a company this diverse and the limitation of managing 500 pages of a 15,000 page site? What are the first steps and what actions do you think would give the best results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | laura-intertek0 -
Does anybody know of a good Spanish-speaking SEO?
This would be really helpful. I need to do some SEO in Mexico and am looking to work with a good Spanish-speaking SEO but have found the pickings slim. Any recommendations and observations would go far. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theghost100 -
Website Ranking Issue
Hey All My question is specfic to a particular website. The category of the website is Kitchen Appliances. The keyword is extremely competitive. The website I am currently optimizing has loads of products and many pages as well. I am constantly building links from industry specific websites for the website as well as composing articles and leading the users back to the website with keyword rich anchor text. I have been doing this for around 3 months and I do not see the website in the first 30 pages of the SERP (for the keyword kitchen appliances - the site is a page rank 2 BTW). No bugs reported as well in Webmaster tools. My next step is to add these articles to the website (www.example.com/KitchenAppliances ) with keyword rich metatags as well as content with internal links to my product pages. I also plan on sending traffic to these pages to build the pages link popularity. Do you think I can expect better results for the article pages than my original website product pages or do you think I should continue with the link building activity I was performing originally for the website. regards Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team2