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
-
Do Google Penalties Always Follow a Redirects to New Domains?
I have a couple sites that were penalized by Google for hosting content that made Google look bad. After a major newspaper showcased what was going on they suddenly took a major hit as if someone at Google flipped a switch and told their system not to rank the content for anything other than their brand names. The article made Google look bad because the newspaper highlighted a lot of unverified user generated accusations the reporters assumed not to be true in the context of "these accusations are mostly false, but they still show up on the first page when people search Google." I was thinking one way to fight this would simply be to host the content at a different domain, but I am concerned about the new domain being penalized as well. I don't want to completely shut down all of the original sites because some of them have brand recognition. The oldest domain is 12 years old with backlinks from several news outlets which is why the content ranked so well, but after the penalty that is only the case on Bing. I've read various articles about this tactic. Some say that you will almost always pass the penalty to the new domain if you do a 301 redirect, but the penalties at issue in those articles were for things like buying links or other black hat tactics. This is somewhat different in that I wasn't doing anything black hat, they just decided not to let the site rank for political reasons. I was hoping that maybe that type of penalty wouldn't follow it, but right now I am leaning towards simply creating a second site to syndicate articles. It will need to attribute the articles to their sources though, so they will need either no followed links or possibly a redirection script that bots cannot follow. I would really like it if I could simply change the first site to its .net or .org equivalent and 301 everything though.
Technical SEO | | PostAlmostAnything0 -
Building a new website post penalty and redirects
A website I'm working on is clearly algorithmically penalised. I've spent a lot of time mass disavowing spammy links, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. We have been planning to build a new website anyway since we are rebranding. 1. Is it possible to tell which pages are most likely to have a penalty applied? 2. If the website as a whole has a penalty, will redirecting certain pages to the new website carry the penalty? 3. Our website is structured as sales pages and blog content. It is the sales pages that have the spammy links, yet most of the blog content does not rank either. Would it be a good strategy to only redirect all the blog posts (which have natural links pointing to them) to the new website and not the sales pages? 4. The homepage has a mix of spam and very good editorial links. If I have disavowed links and domains, can I safely redirect this page?
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Is this a Penguin hit; how to recover?
Our site is: www.kibin.com Our organic search traffic has dropped significantly in the last few days (about 50%). Although we don't have a ton of traffic coming in via organic search, this is a huge blow. We we previously the top spot for keywords like 'edit my essay', 'fix my paper', and 'paper revision'. These kw phrases linked to smaller services pages on our site such as: kibin.com/s/edit-my-essay kibin.com/s/fix-my-paper kibin.com/s/paper-revision We no longer rank for these keywords... at all. My first question/concern is... is this a Penguin penalty? I'm not sure. Honestly, I know we have some directory links, but we've never been aggressive on the backlink front. In fact, in the last few months we've been investing quite a bit into content: kibin.com/blog If this is a Penguin penalty, how should I best go about cleaning this up? I'm not even sure what links Google would be considering spammy, and again... we really don't have that extensive of a backlink profile. Please help, this is a real blow to our business and it's got me a big freaked out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Kibin0 -
Similar Websites, Same C Block: Can I Get a Penalty?
One of my website has been heavily hit by Google's entire zoo so I decided to phase it out while building a new one. Old website: www.thewebhostinghero.com
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
New website: www.webhostinghero.com Now the thing is that both websites are obviously similar since I kept the branding. They also both have content about the same topics. No content has been copied or spinned or whatever though. Everything's original on both websites. There were only 3 parts of both websites that were too similar in terms of functionalities so I "noindexed" it on the old website. Now it seems that Google doesn't want you to have multiple websites for the same business just for the sake of occupying more space in the search results. This can especially be detected by the websites' C block. I am not sure if this is myth or fact though. So do you think I'm in a problematic situation with this scenario? It's getting ridiculous all you have to watch for when building a website, I'm afraid to touch my keyboard in fear my websites will get penalized! Sorry for my english btw.0 -
How to remove a thin site penalty
Wondering if anyone could help out. A while back I made an affiliate store using wordpress and merchants products feeds. I didn't get found to adding any unique content to the site and, as was to be expected, I gained a penalty and my search traffic died. A few months back I redesigned the store, still using merchant csv but now with 98% unique content on each page. However, try as I may I still cannot get anywhere in the engines. The domain doesn't even rank for it's own name!! I have submitted reconsideration request but they have replied saying no penalty on the site. The domain is www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk. While the domain isn't massively strong I would prefer not to have to start again as I feel it is a very good domain name. Any advise would be most gratefully received. Thanks Carl
Technical SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Delayed Penalty...
I received the 7/23/12 Unnatural inbound links warning but nothing changed, if anything my traffic and rankings improved well over the next 2 - 3 months. But last week a couple of the better (maybe slightly over) optimized pages suddenly dropped out of the rankings completely, is it possible that these two events are related but three months apart? A change I made close to the time of the rankings dropping was completely overhauling the homepage. I realized this would impact the internal "link juice" flow but never expected the kind of drop in rankings I received. I have restored the homepage to its former glory but it hasn't helped get my slightly over optimized pages ranking again. Any ideas? Suggestions? Exact date of drop in rankings is 18 - 19 October (site has lost roughly 50% of its organic search traffic)
Technical SEO | | Stan_C0 -
No improvement from Google penalty despite a lot of work
Hi Everyone, i hope someone can help. Our site www.danbro.co.uk suddenly dropped across all keyphrases and even our brand name on 12th April. We receieved a notification of unnatural link building and so the problem was obvious. Since then we have removed a number of old blog links, forum links that we have built up over a number of years. Once removed we sent a reconsideration. There are still a number of links we are trying (but sometimes to no avail) to remove. It is quite frustrating as we do have a number of high quality links on really relevant sites and we do update our content on a regular basis. Does anyone have any other solutions of what we can be doing? changing the domain name is not an option as it is the brand name. any help is much appreciated
Technical SEO | | Townpages0 -
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