Slowly recovering from algorithm penalty
-
Hi ,
over the years a website we took over was hit by an algorithm penalty (a combination of penguin and panda).
We managed to bring rankings back (after 6 months) from page 5/6 to page 2 after we used the google disavow tool.
now for the past 9 months we have been stuck on page 2..
is there anything you think can be done to bring it back to page 1?
- we are building quality links now and moved away from low quality links other link builders were making. We are managing the process much closer and ensuring we maintain good standards of links.
- also making the pages flatter and merging short page content to larger content pages
- now we are looking at site structure and creating structured internal link flow
is there anything we should be aware of and any recommendations to get back on page 1..
this is a tailor-made travel related website with a small selection of destinations
-
hi thanks for the reply
I also believe panda may have hit the site.. do you think just removing this kind of content is good enough to rank the site better.. we have gone to the extent of removing pages we found high duplicate ratios.. hoping that will help.. also we are merging page content to make them larger, more in-depth rather than multiple pages for small subtopics..
cheers
Ram
-
These are tough to comment on without actually seeing some of the links. These might all be ok, but I could see any of these having the potential to be unnatural links. I wish I could offer more but I do think it's possible that current link building activities are bringing you down.
Another thing that I see commonly is that sites can still be slightly suppressed by Penguin if they have not done a thorough enough disavow. Again though, that's tough to comment on without digging in quite a bit deeper.
It's also possible the site has other things holding it down such as Panda.
And then another possibility could be that this is just where Google wants to rank the site. Travel is a very competitive niche. It used to be that anyone could be top 10 for any subject if you could get enough links, but these days Google wants to show websites that users want to see and I would imagine that there are a lot of big brand travel websites that you are competing with.
-
hi
we are aiming at travel related websites which their own link profile is for travel sector.
Our online marketing is a combination of travel directories, some business directories, some link exchanges, guest blogs where appropriate, press releases and UK based PR in national publications.
All are checked for their neighbourhood, trust flow and relevance where they are not national household brands
thanks
-
OK, that's good. Sometimes ahrefs reports old links as new ones.
Can you give some examples of the types of new links you are building?
-
Yes these are bad links we have disavowed .. our disavow was very thorough.. In fact we suspect maybe too thorough for short terms gains but more a long term strategy that has currently redduced our domain authority but cleaned up our link profile immensely
-
This is a question that's tough to answer without spending a couple of hours digging in to the site. But, I had some thoughts.
we are building quality links now
That makes me uneasy. If you are building links then there is a good chance you're still doing things that are against the quality guidelines. There are a few self made links that can be acceptable such as valid industry directories. But, in most cases any link that you can build on your own is not a natural one.
Here are some new links that I see according to ahrefs:
http://www.expatfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/p=94262/ - a link from a forum profile. Not natural.
http://medranks.com/travel/packages/page-1.html?s=A - Ouch. Hopefully this is an old, disavowed link that ahrefs picked up.
http://www.huludirectory.com/computers_and_internet/discussion_forums/reference/acronyms_and_abbreviations/shopping/major_retailers/ - same as above.
Now it's possible that those are old links that you have disavowed, but my first concern would be how you are going about getting links to the site now. Again, if you're building them yourself rather than doing things to attract them then you're probably doing more harm than good.
-
hi, if anyone would be amazing enough to want the url to help us i can repost it for you.
thanks
-
It'd be super helpful if you could share your site URL, then our community can get even more specific with answers.
-
Hi,
I can't answer you anything very confidently that If you do follow set up strategy then your site will come up from page 2
page 1 . There is a very recent post on this published by Neil Patel on search engine Journal, he suggested some good
strategy that can help you in this situation.
A Tactical Guide to Making Old Pages Rank in Google Again @ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/tactical-guide-making-old-pages-rank-google/124575/
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
-
Ranking penalty for "accordion" content -- hidden prior to user interaction
Will content inside an "accordion" module be ranked as non-hidden content? Is there an official guide by google and other search engines addressing this? Example of accordion element: https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/collapse/#accordion-example Will all elements in the example above be seen + treated equally by search engines?
Technical SEO | | houlihanlokey1 -
Is it good practice to update your disavow file after a penalty is removed.
I was wondering if you could use the disavow file by adding to it - even after your site has recovered from a partial site penalty. As a recurring SEO procedure, we are always looking at links pointing to our Website. We then ascertain those links that are clearly of no value. In order to clean these up, would it be good practice to update your disavow file with more of theses domains. Is the disavow file just used for penalty issues to alert google of the work you have done? (we have had penalty in the past but fine now) Would this method help in keeping high quality links to the fore and therefore removing low quality links from Googles eyes? I would welcome your comments.
Technical SEO | | podweb0 -
How Long To Recover Rankings After Multi-Day Site Outage?
Hi, A site we look after for a client was down for almost 3 days at the start of this month (11th - 14th of May, to be exact). This was caused by my client's failure to verify their domain name in accordance with the new ICANN procedures. The details are unimportant, but it took a long while for them to get their domain name registration contact details validated, hence the outage. Very soon after this down time we noticed that the site has slipped back in the Google rankings for most of the target keywords, sometimes quite considerably. I guess this is Google penalizing this client for their failure to keep their site live. (And they really can't have too many complaints about this, in my opinion). The good news is that the rankings show signs of improving again slightly. However, they have not recovered all the way to where they were before the outage, two weeks ago. My question is this ... do you expect that the site will naturally re-gain the previous excellent rankings without us doing anything? If so, how long do you estimate this could take? On the other hand, if Google typically penalizes this kind of error by 'permanently', is there is anything we can do to help signal to Google that the site deserves to get back up to where is used to be? I am keen to get your thoughts, and especially to hear from anyone who has faced a similar problem in the past. Thanks
Technical SEO | | smaavie0 -
How to Recover from the Exact Match Domain Update last weekend?
Hi, Our main website a geo exact match city dot com domain which is 18 years old got all its rankings washed away from top ten to 300th to 400th position plus on Google. We are still top 10 on Yahoo and Bing for the City term. The site is Dmoz listed , has quality updated daily content and no paid advertising or links of any kind. I joined seomoz today and noticed I via the page optimiser that the main keyword for the city which is the exact match domain was over optimised but its hard to talk about events and news in a city without mentioning the citys name lol Looking at the backlinks in the open site explorer tool I noticed alot of spammy links from chinese website and weird domains that were not related and am beginning to think I was the victim of a negative seo campaign. I submitted a re-consideration request with Google and they replied in the space of a few days saying that it was not a manual penalty and that it was down to there algorithm changing or perhaps I changed cms or made changes. There was no unatural links warning either. Funny thing is the website is wordpress based and we changed to a new theme 2 weeks ago and also moved to a new server. Just wondering people views on what my next move shoud be to try and regain our rankings on Google I already toned down the use of the city keyword on the homepage. Regards Tom
Technical SEO | | glenanail0 -
Ads above the fold penalty. Should I request reinclusion?
HI! My site has been losing traffic slowly for about 18 months. But it was in January 19 that was hit big time. My site has a lot of ads, including two 300x250 above the fold ads that were very lucrative for me. After January 19, I decided to remove only one ad of those two, but no change was reflected in the traffic. It is obvious that I needed to remove the other ad, but I didn't do it for two reasons. I still earn money from that ad and removing it would result in serious problems. A webmaster friend of mine that was hit too by this penalty, removed the ads and tried all sort of stuff to regain the lost traffic with NO LUCK in several months. He has unique and excellent content. So, after seeing his experience I didn't want to touch my biggest source of income and leave it as it is. My site has other problems that concerns Panda and maybe Penguin, and since yesterday I've been starting to fix them. Is it a good idea to request a reinclusion to check if I was manually penalized, without being previously notified by GWMT of any problem in my site? Thanks in advance, Enrique
Technical SEO | | enriquef0 -
Strategy for recovering from Penguin
I have a web site that has been hit hard by the penguin update. I believe that main cause our problem has been links from low quality blogs and article sites with overly optimized keyword anchor text. Some questions I have are: I have noticed that we still have good ranking on long tail search terms on pages that did not have unnatural links. This leads me to believe that the penalty is URL specific, i.e. only URL with unnatural linking patterns have been penalized. Is that correct? Are URLs that have been penalized permanently tainted to the point that it is not worth adding content to them and continuing to get quality links to them? Should new contact go on new pages that have no history thus no penalty, or is the age of a previously highly ranked page still of great benefit in ranking? Is it likely that the penalty will go away over time if there are no more unnatural links coming in?
Technical SEO | | mhkatz0 -
How to recover after blocking all the search engine spiders?
I have the following problem - one of my clients (a Danish home improvement company) decided to block all the international traffic (leaving only Scandiavian one), because they were getting a lot of spammers using their mail form to send e-mails. As you can guess this lead to blocking Google also since the servers of Google Denmark are located in the US. This lead to drop in their rankings. So my question is - What Shall I do now - wait or contact Google? Any help will be appreciated, because to be honest I had never see such thing in action until now 😄 Best Regards
Technical SEO | | GroupM0 -
Duplication Penalty through Specs?
I am trying to figure our how to correct a recently incurred duplication penalty on a partner site. I didn't see any posts on this yet specific to my problem. The site used to be ranked on page 1 of Google for all important keywords but now we ran into the situation that many pages were bumped to pos 100 or lower due to duplication issues. This is an aviation site, discussing airplanes and each page discusses a different model but each page also has the specs of the plane and while the data parts are different for each plane the specification terms are the same ,see here: Primary Function:
Technical SEO | | WizardHQ
Crew:
Engine:
Thrust:
Weight Empty:
Max. Weight:
Length:
Wingspan:
Cruise Speed:
Max.Speed:
Climb:
Ceiling:
Range:
First Flight:
Year Deployed: Is there an easy way to get Google to stop including these terms (not the data in the 2nd column) from the page anaysis to prevent this causing the duplication issues we are are seeing due to this? Thanks in advance!0