An Unfair Content related penalty :(
-
Hi Guys,
Google.com.au
website: http://partysuppliesnow.com.au/We had a massive drop in search queries in WMT around the 11th of september this year, I investigated and it seemed as though there were no updates around this time.
Our site is only receiving branded search now - and after investigating i am led to believe that Google has mistakingly affected our website in the panda algorithm. There are no manual penalties applies on this site as confirmed by WMT.
Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results. This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.
Typing a products full name into Google (tried a handful) our site is not in the top 100 or 200 at times, i think this further clarifies that we are penalised.
We would really appreciate some opinions on this. Any course of actions would be great. We don't particularly want to invest in writing content again.
From our point of view it looks like Google is stopping our site from ranking because it's getting mixed up with who the originator for our content is.
Thanks and really appreciate it.
-
Hey Jarrod,
I'm afraid there isn't anything you can actually do to tell Google you are the original author of your content, other than the tips Remus mentioned.
However, there is a service that you can use to help you identify sites that are duplicating your content. It's called Copysentry and it automatically scans the web to check for content duplication. You could use this, in conjunction with DMCA take down requests (as mentioned in Remus's post) to help to defend against this in future.
-
Hi guys,
Thank you all, for your kind advices. We have planned to re-write our content (product descriptions). Now, we will write 2 types of descriptions. 1 for our site and 1 for our affiliates (who promote our products). We hope Google won't confuse it this time.
As we are going to write the content again. I am still afraid, it could be stolen again. So, is there a way that we could tell Google that we are the originator of this new content???
If there isn't any solution, I think, we would lose our ranking again. Right??? I don't wanna lose our efforts again. So, can you suggest any concrete solution???
thanks again guys
Jarrod -
Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results.
I saw the same thing. There is your problem.
This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.
Although google says that they are "pretty good" at attributing content to the creator the truth is that the suck at it.
Lots of people have this problem. Guard your content so it doesn't get out to affiliates and shopping engines. This means strongly enforced rules for your affiliates and blocking crawlers from your site - but allowing google in.
-
In addition going forward you should always ensure you have two types of content. A set of content you use on your site, and another set of content that you supply to affiliate sites and any other sites you supply products too.
I know this isn't much help now, but its something you should do in future to prevent such issues.
-
Hi Jarrod,
You are in a very complicated situation. I hope you can find a solution.
This video posted by Matt Cutts a wile ago might help you with a few additional tips:
How can I make sure that Google knows my content is original?
- DMCA request: http://www.google.com/dmca.html
- Google News source attribution metatags: link here
- Or even spam report like Matt Cutts suggests.
-
Hi Jarrod,
The first thing I noticed, a lot of pages in your site don't contain a rel=canonical tag. For example, this one: http://www.partysuppliesnow.com.au/view-products/96/LED-Furniture
We know that Google is not particularly good at identifying the original source of a content. So, you can report the sites that scraped your content to Google (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en). That'll let Google know about the issue and hopefully lift the penalty off your site and penalize the other site.
Another issue could be the Authorship setup on product pages. It's considered as Authorship abuse. Generally, you don't want to link a Google+ profile with a site's homepage and other generic pages.
I've had some experience with Panda. I can say no-indexing is very effective in fighting Panda. If you know about a significant number of low-quality pages in your site, that you wouldn't prefer to open as a searcher, you should add a meta no-index tag in the section of those pages. It takes some time to get out of the Panda box.
Regards,
Rohit
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
-
No Index thousands of thin content pages?
Hello all! I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc. The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd." These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders. Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street". Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd? What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages? Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them? Thanks for any input. Ken
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Responsive Content
At the moment we are thinking about switching to another CMS. We are discussing the use of responsive content.Our developer states that the technique uses hidden content. That is sort of cloaking. At the moment I'm searching for good information or tests with this technique but I can't find anything solid. Do you have some experience with responsive content and is it cloaking? Referring to good articles is also a plus. Looking forward to your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxaro.nl0 -
How to improve visibility of new content
What are best SEO practices to improve visibility in SERP for new content apart from meta data.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aliciaporrata10090 -
Apps content Google indexation ?
I read some months back that Google was indexing the apps content to display it into its SERP. Does anyone got any update on this recently ? I'll be very interesting to know more on it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoomGeek0 -
Does Google see this as duplicate content?
I'm working on a site that has too many pages in Google's index as shown in a simple count via a site search (example): site:http://www.mozquestionexample.com I ended up getting a full list of these pages and it shows pages that have been supposedly excluded from the index via GWT url parameters and/or canonicalization For instance, the list of indexed pages shows: 1. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff 2. http://www.mozquestionexample.com/cool-stuff?page=2 3. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?page=3 4. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?mq_source=q-and-a 5. http://www.mozquestionexample.com?type=productss&sort=1date Example #1 above is the one true page for search and the one that all the canonicals reference. Examples #2 and #3 shouldn't be in the index because the canonical points to url #1. Example #4 shouldn't be in the index, because it's just a source code that, again doesn't change the page and the canonical points to #1. Example #5 shouldn't be in the index because it's excluded in parameters as not affecting page content and the canonical is in place. Should I worry about these multiple urls for the same page and if so, what should I do about it? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Content per page?
We used to have an articles worth of content in a scroll box created by our previous SEO, the problem was that it was very much keyword stuffed, link stuffed and complete crap. We then removed this and added more content above the fold, the problem I have is that we are only able to add 150 - 250 words above the fold and a bit of that is repetition across the pages. Would we benefit from putting an article at the bottom of each of our product pages, and when I say article I mean high quality in depth content that will go into a lot more detail about the product, history and more. Would this help our SEO (give the page more uniqueness and authority rather than 200 - 250 word pages). If I could see one problem it would be would an articles worth of content be ok at the bottom of the page and at that in a div tab or scroll box.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Canonical Related question
I have a site where we have search and result pages, google webmaster tool was giving me duplicate content error for page 1 / 2 / 3 etc etc so i have added canonical on these pages like http://www.business2sell.com/businesses/california/ Is this is correct way of using canonical ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | manish_khanna0 -
Cross-Domain Canonical and duplicate content
Hi Mozfans! I'm working on seo for one of my new clients and it's a job site (i call the site: Site A).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
The thing is that the client has about 3 sites with the same Jobs on it. I'm pointing a duplicate content problem, only the thing is the jobs on the other sites must stay there. So the client doesn't want to remove them. There is a other (non ranking) reason why. Can i solve the duplicate content problem with a cross-domain canonical?
The client wants to rank well with the site i'm working on (Site A). Thanks! Rand did a whiteboard friday about Cross-Domain Canonical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday0