Phantom Update?

[Citybase]

Hi All,

I know this is a long while back but I think we started to lose our organic traffic after the Phantom update back in May 2013.

We have two websites, one offering serviced apartments in London only and one website offering serviced apartments across the world.

The apartments we feature in London are the same on both sites - although they have different product descriptions, meta data etc.

I read that the Phantom update hit websites which were owned by the same company.

Do you think we are still being penalised for this?

Any thoughts at all would be greatly appreciated !

Thanks,

Laura

[Citybase]

Hi Matt,

Thank you for your response.

I'm not sure what duplicate content you are referring to?

We are in the process of cleaning up our link profile.

[MattAntonino]

• Duplicate content on most every page of your site. Basically nothing unique = why would Google rank you?

• 56% anchor on your main keyword in Ahrefs. This seems quite high.

• Majestic shows 50,000 backlinks from 3200 referring domains from only 1600 subnets (usually a sign of buying links & spam).

Backlinks from:

• slavic-escorts.com

• slavic-companions.com

And other spam/porn sites. You also have a ton of EDU & GOV links - more than seems normal. Definitely needs a disavow.

I don't think you have an owner problem. That's way too meta for this. Your content isn't unique and you have tons of link spam.

[RyanPurkey]

That's really difficult to say without looking at more precise details, although my hunch is that other marketing efforts should have been able to overcome an algorithmic change like ownership tags. More than ownership though Google has been moving towards offering a diversity of results so if the two websites are on the same domain that could be at play. Also increasing during that period of time are localization and personalization with the results so global competition could be gaining on your sites while yours remains unchanged.

To really break it down you'll want a professional looking at:

• Analytics - What referral trends have been at play, what wins have not been replicated recently
• Webmaster Tools - Any warnings that have gone addressed? Are we responsive? Mobile?
• Diversity of results - Are some of our big past traffic generating results no longer showing up? Maps? Images? Video? etc.

And many more.  I think really having success with just a couple of those aspects would get you plenty of organic results.