The primary search keywords for our news release network have dropped like a rock in Google... we are not sure why.
-
Hi,
On April 11th, a month after the farmer update was released for U.S. users of Google, the primary keywords for ALL our sites significantly dropped in Google. I have some ideas why, but I wanted to get some second opinions also.
First off, I did some research if Google did anything on the 11th of April... they did. They implemented the farmer update internationally, but that does not explain why our ranks did not drop in March for U.S. Google users... unless they rolled out their update based on what site the domain is registered in... in our case, Canada.
The primary news release site is www.hotelnewsresource.com, but we have many running on the same server. EG. www.restaurantnewsresource.com, www.travelindustrywire.com and many more.
We were number 1 or had top ranks for terms like ¨Hotel News¨, ¨Hotel Industry¨, ¨Hotel Financing¨, ¨Hotel Jobs¨, ¨Hotels for Sale¨, etc... and now, for most of these we have dropped in a big way.
It seems that Google has issued a penalty for every internal page we link to.
Couple obvious issues with the current template we use... too many links, and we intend to change that asap, but it has never been a problem before. The domain hotelnewsresource.com is 10 years old and still holds a page rank of 6.
Secondly, the way our news system works, it´s possible to access an article from any domain in the network. E.G. I can read an article that was assigned to www.hotelnewsresource.com on www.restaurantnewsresource.com... we don´t post links to the irrelevant domain, but it does sometimes get indexed. So, we are going to implement the Google source meta tag option.
The bottom line is that I think we put too much faith in the maturity of the domain... thinking that may protect us... not the case and it´s now a big mess.
Any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Do you think it was farmer or possibly something else?
Thanks,
Jarrett
-
I have a client who saw big drops beginning the 11th even though they're U.S. based. A portion of their visits come from international sources. We're still in evaluation mode though because the site had no significant drops on the initial Panda update here in the U.S.
Preliminary checks of other data show it might partially be a Panda issue, but not completely - oddly enough beginning on the 11th they also had a serious lag time in content loading due to advertiser scripts, which I'm thinking is a big factor as well.
Something that I have been speculating on with several new clients is the gradual degradation concept. My theory is many of their links coming from other sites that got hit has caused a rolling drop effect. Since none of my longer term clients have seen any significant drop though it's a more difficult assessment.
-
Did you see any cases where the Panda update went live, but it did not impact a given site till later on... like 30 days plus, which is our case? I do see a downward trend in analytics starting the day Panda was implemented, but it was´t until the 11th of April did it really drop.
-
That's your biggest challenge - to find the best ways to monetize enough to justify the editorial uniqueness. Yet it's that uniqueness that will ultimately bring you back. Be aware though - I have yet to hear of a single site that's bounced back significantly. All the sites I've audited that were hit by the Panda update require tremendous changes, especially in the unique content aspect, and in building quality links to category level and deep internal pages.
-
Thanks Alan,
Yes, the number of ads is another issue I intend to address... that will be a tough one to overcome.
Yes, it appears that every site hosted on our server has suffered... even the non related news websites like www.2casarealty.com, which does not have any news stories posted on, but is in the same IP range as the news sites and does have links to it from the news websites.
I would say 50% of the paid releases sent to us are first distributed in our network and then filtered down to other relevant websites... some of whom use widgets to link back to the full story, others use our API and then there are the content scrapers of course.
We have around 50 niche news release sites in our network as well as a number of websites we have launched to further monetize our business... E.G. hospitalityexpos.com, hotelsupplyresource.com
Yes, I full intend to implement that source meta tag and assign credit to the most appropriate site in out network. Not sure what to do with stories that have come to us after the customer posted on their site or another news release network first. I suppose the safest method is to find out where it was posted first and give them credit.
I was thinking we could balance the daily submissions with more editorial content that is written by us. That will help I´m sure.
Part of the problem is the business model itself... paid news release submissions haven´t necessarily hit our service first.
J
-
Jarrett
There are potentially several other factors as well, beyond what you've already pointed to yourself.
Panda/Farmer issued in a new era where many old "rules" were tossed by the wayside. Some of these were already questionable, as the seedlings of Panda were planted with last year's May Day update. if any single site in your network saw significant drops but not the others, it might well have been something else that caused it. Given the breadth and severity, this clearly does sound like Panda.
Taking a brief look at some of your content, site structure and duplicate content issues gives me even more confidence that's the cause.
Example 1: Duplicate content severity
I randomly picked one article and searched Google. Found a dozen sites where the same article shows up, including the site that's currently #1 in organic rankings in my result, which is the actual author's own site (Daniel Edward Craig). http://www.google.com/search?q=In+this+post+I+discuss+how+newly+available+reputation+metrics+are+paving+the+way+for+the+integration+of+the+online+reputation+management+and+revenue+m&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
How many sites are in your network where you share the content? So that begs the question - do you intend to find a way to give credit to the original news source for articles shared across sites? That's a big recommendation.
Obviously just this factor alone shouldn't necessarily cause bottoming out. News articles from major wire services routinely spread across the net in massive numbers every day.
Yet it's just one indicator to now consider. Especially when considering other major factors. Like the sheer volume of ads on pages. Too many ads is a big factor now. Amount of content that's unique to each site is a big part of the puzzle. If most of the content is duplicated across all sites, what makes each site uniquely valuable?
I could go on, but those are some high level areas for consideration.
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
-
Is there any proof that google can crawl PWA's correctly, yet
At the end of 2018 we rolled out our agency website as a PWA. At the time, Google used Chrome (41) headless to render our website. Although all sources announced at the time that it 'should work', we experienced the opposite. As a solution we implement the option for server side rendering, so that we did not experience any negative effects. We are over a year later. Does anyone have 'evidence' that Google can actually render and correctly interpret client side PWA's?
Web Design | | Erwin000 -
Do SEOs really need to care about trend in increase of voice search?
Hi all, Just browsing through the articles like "SEO trends in 2108"....I can see everyone mention about increase in voice search and attributing same to the SEO at top. But there is very less information on how to optimise for voice search....May be, they don't know what SEOs have to do exactly with voice search. Basically the input method is going to change on search and else remains same. This must be leading to increase of long tail searches and more search snippets to give an instant voice answer. What else has to be optimised to favoured in voice search? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz2 -
Google Search Console Block
Am new to SEO. My clients site was completed using Yoast premium and then used Google search console to initiate the crawl. Initially setup an http:// property and all seemed good. Then i removed that under search console an created an https:// did the render and it appears google has put a block and placed their own robots.txt file which basically has rendered the site useless. Feedback most appreciated.
Web Design | | BoostMyBiz0 -
Curious why site isn't ranking, rather seems like being penalized for duplicate content but no issues via Google Webmaster...
So we have a site ThePowerBoard.com and it has some pretty impressive links pointing back to it. It is obviously optimized for the keyword "Powerboard", but in no way is it even in the top 10 pages of Google ranking. If you site:thepowerboard.com the site, and/or Google just the URL thepowerboard.com you will see that it populates in the search results. However if you quote search just the title of the home page, you will see oddly that the domain doesn't show up rather at the bottom of the results you will see where Google places "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed". If you click on the link below that, then the site shows up toward the bottom of those results. Is this the case of duplicate content? Also from the developer that built the site said the following: "The domain name is www.thepowerboard.com and it is on a shared server in a folder named thehoverboard.com. This has caused issues trying to ssh into the server which forces us to ssh into it via it’s ip address rather than by domain name. So I think it may also be causing your search bot indexing problem. Again, I am only speculating at this point. The folder name difference is the only thing different between this site and any other site that we have set up." (Would this be the culprit? Looking for some expert advice as it makes no sense to us why this domain isn't ranking?
Web Design | | izepper0 -
Fetch data for users with ajax but show it without ajax for Google
Hi, We have a thematic footer which shows similar pages links relevant to the search criteria made on a page. We want to fetch those footer similar links through ajax when users search on site but the links will be shown without using ajax when Google fetches those pages. We want to do this to improve our page load time. The links content & count will be exactly same in both cases whether Google fetches the search pages or user fetches those pages. Will this be treated as negative by Google, Can this have any negative affect on our rankings or traffic. Regards,
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
New Google SERPS design - What's Changed?
Has anyone noticed any fall out from the recent redesign of SERP pages by Google? I noticed that there appears to be one less organic result "above the fold" now, so if you were possibly in third or fourth position maybe slight dip in traffic? Any noticeable shift in click through rate with the new bigger font? Also, has anyone noticed if the new design has caused any shift in best practices for on-page meta data like Title tag and description tag counts? I know the Title tag was previously driven by the pixel width of the title in Google SERPS, just curious if that has changed with this redesign.
Web Design | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Advice needed: Google crawling for single page applicartions with java script
Hi Moz community,we have a single page application (enjoywishlist.com) with a lot of content in java script light boxes. There is a lot of valuable content embedded but google can not crawl the content and we can missing out on some opportunities as a result. I was wondering if someone was able to solve a similar issue (besides moving the content from the java script to the HTML body). There appears to be a few services sprouting up to handle single page applications and crawling in google.http://getseojs.com/https://prerender.io/Did anyone use these services? Some feedback would be much appreciated!ThanksAndreas
Web Design | | AndreasD0 -
Google Analtyics Conversion Tracking for Wordpress Life Coaching Site
Hello, How do I do conversion tracking for Google Analytics for this site: debidonner(dot)com She has a 'Thank You' page after you return from Paypal Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0