Was my site hit by Panda or Penguin? Looking for diagnosis help
-
My URL is: www.westlakedermatology.com
Hello Mozers,
I'm looking for some help or guidance as to why my site fell off the "rankings cliff" on 9/5. In the forums I hear a lot of others with a similar issue, and some speculation it is due to a Panda refresh. However, looking at our site we have unique content with each page having over 300-400 words (so it's not light or duplicate content). We get a lot of leads that verbally tell us our content helped answer some of their questions so I'm pretty confident its good for users. Can anyone see an issue with the content on our site?
In terms of Penguin, I think our backlink profile is clean, our physicians do take part in providing content to various high quality and relevant websites/blogs. But we do not buy links or do anything in violation of Google's guidelines.
In terms of brand, we are the biggest dermatology and plastic surgery group in the Austin area. So any brand implications to search should be on our side.
Just looking for some sort of guidance or help, any suggestions would be great!
Thanks,
Adam Paddock -
Take a look at the Panguin Tool - http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
This tool uses the organic traffic from your GA account and overlays the dates of major Google updates. You can then see if a Google update resulted in a sudden drop in your organic search traffic. Once you know this you can look at what changed as part of that update and check this against your live site.
-
I think your brand name could be mistaken as it is quite long, but I don't think that would make much difference with your link profile. It just isn't natural.
I guess branding is built from a number of signals, such as social media, domain names etc. Those anchors differ from your domain and your facebook.
I suspect Google is more likely to see your brand as "Westlake Dermatology".
-
Hi Yiannis, thanks for the great feedback. Our actual brand name is Westlake Dermatology & Cosmetic Surgery (and some people commonly refer to us as Westlake Dermatology as we started off just in dermatology). So do you think it's a case of Google seeing it as over optimized anchor text when in fact it is our brand name?
-
Hi Christopher,
I think the answer is pretty obvious,the rule applies to anchor texts of specific keyphrases that are non branded. Google allows a higher threshold of brand name anchor texts because that's how people would naturally link to you. High percentage domain/brand match anchor text is generally a very good SEO practice (way before Penguin release).
In the case of our friend here we have an EMD and 80-90% of his overal link profile with exact and contextual anchor text links. Also the exact key phrase he down-ranked is around 10% of the profile. I am pretty sure that there is not a rule set in stone with % for NON-branded keyphrases but **from my experience (thus not necessarily a rule) **in the sector I work at when I had to deal with penalised sites this was one of the common features I dealt with.
Again, the answers are within his data!
Regards
-
Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much
I've seen comments like this before but I've never been clear on what it means. Does this rule apply to anchor text with brand names or the name of the website? For example, isn't it natural for the anchor text "Nike" to be frequently used for the URL nike.com?
Best,
Christopher -
Hi Jonathan, thank you for your response, I totally thought most of those site wide links you are referring to were no follow (at least they were no follow the last time I checked). But I just popped them in opensiteexplorer and it does seem to be follow now. I'll get that cleaned up and see if that helps
-
I recently had to deal with an identical case but I would never be able to tell you for sure unless I have a look at your google webamsters and google analytics data. Go and have a look at your site impressions, visits per and avg.position drops. Make sure that you have comparison on so you can see how your pages and keywords respond to last months.
Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much (have seen web sites with more not being penalised so this is not a rule) and it would be good to keep it a bit lower around 5-6%. That goes for your contextual anchor text links which in your case seems to be 80-90% of your profile.
All these ofcourse are guesses and speculation based on my experience, only your data will tell what happens but what Jonathan suggests above wont harm you, quiet the contrary it will improve your link profile.
-
I have had a quick look at your site via opensiteexplorer. It would seem you are a featured site for allaboutthepretty, which is generating huge numbers of unnatural links pointing at your site with identical anchor text.
My first port of call would be reviewing your link profile, and removing these spammy links. I suspect the 1139 links with "westlake dermatology cosmetic surgery" as anchor text is contributing to a penguin penalty.
There are some other spammy links as well such as "face list austin tx" 2138 links. You should try to avoid site-wide sidebar links from other sites that generate huge numbers of links. For instance mommypr site has alot of image links, and 3boysandadog site too.
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.westlakedermatology.com
Edit: Just to add, you don't have to remove good links that provide traffic, but do make sure they add rel="nofollow" to the sitewide links such as mommypr.
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
-
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Penguin or coincidence?
We have several country specific sites set up as folders of our main domain. We use hreflang tags to get the relevant site served in each country, with mixed success. In about 60% of searches the US site appears. Beginning in late October our rankings for the US have slowly, but reasonably steadily dropped. Each week we'll see 10 or so keyword rises and 15-30 keywords drop. Generally by 1-3 places. This is much more movement than we were seeing in the months prior to this. Is this a result of penguin, or just coincidence? The US subfolder is the only one which has seen drops overall, the rest have actually improved slightly during this time period. I would expect any impact due to Penguin to effect the whole domain? I've been checking through our backlinks and we do a have a handful of bad links, along with a 100 or so which look a little odd and not completely relevant. I have contacted sites and had some of these removed, and created a disavow list with the worst of the rest. I haven't asked for the site to be re-considered yet. We haven't had any message in webmaster tools re: bad links or similar. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahyde0 -
Website hit by something, but not sure if penguin or panda?
Hi my site was doing ok, last week, humming along and increase in traffic. We felt that all the work removing bad links had worked. then all of a sudden, bang traffic dropped and is still dropping day by day. The strange thing as well is all the social media, bing and yahoo traffic has also dried up! Has anyone else had something smiler?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Penguin & Panda: Geographic Penalities?
Has anyone ever come across information about a website appearing strongly in SERP's in one region, but poorly in another? (ie: great in Europe, not so great in N. America) If so, perhaps it is a Panda or Penguin issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Site comparison - what is wrong with me?
www.bcspeakers.com/ vs www.psbspeakers.com/ with the search term "speakers" why does BC speakers show up in around #50-60 and PSB is not in the top #1000? From all metrics on seomoz PSB kicks BC in every area by a large margine! can anyone see why BC is listed for that keyword and PSB is not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevin48030