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
-
My client redesigned their site. Once it went live, ALL of their rankings disappeared. Even branding. Help?
Does anybody know why this might happen? When we made the new site, we just changed the skins. The source code was the same, the content was the same. Even when I search their brand name and their city, their URL won't show up. When I search their URL into Google, it won't even pull up their homepage: it only pulls up /contact-us and some other subpages. Any tips on what I should be looking out for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaylorRHawkins1 -
How to know website is hit with panda or penguin?
My Website traffic and keywords dropped day by day. How can I know website is hit with panda or penguin. Website is - 24hourpassportandvisas. com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Site Not Ranking- No Reason Why
I have a client with a HUGE website who should be ranking for it's competitive keywords. No penalties, or bad links. Old domain. Not ranking for anything. Client has a huge AdWords spend and my theory is that it's not ranking organically because of the AdWords spend. I can't think of anything other reason. Anyone? Thanks. The keywords I'm trying to rank this client for aren't even competitive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
I need help!
Please select best theme for me, from the below themes. I want to create printing website. I select these themes after long research. http://us-themes.com/demo/?theme=ImprezaWP http://themeforest.net/item/salbii-responsive-multipurpose-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/6265876 http://themeforest.net/item/codeus-multipurpose-responsive-wordpress-theme/full_screen_preview/6906054
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
Following Penguin 2.0 hit in May, my site experienced another big drop on August 13th
Hi everyone, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May. This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame. On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google. At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction. So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner. However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs : Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added. As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!! I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached. In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs. So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business. However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions) My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process. I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design. I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My website is ConcertHotels.com. Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Duplicate Content Help
seomoz tool gives me back duplicate content on both these URL's http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/index.php I want to use http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ as this just look nice & clean. What would be best practice to fix this issue? Kind Regards Eddie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780