Can You Help Confirming That 1stWebDesigner Was hit by Panda 4.0 and PayDay Loans 2.0,3.0?
-
Hello, really hoped for your feedback here.
So my site is http://www.1stwebdesigner.com
I just used http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/ - and came to realization, that indeed we might have been hit by famous Panda 4.0 update. Here is screenshot from Barracuda tool - https://www.evernote.com/l/AELGaZ6nyxBE1aK7oQJVHBPKJuwjUh5JWk8 and in attachment there is Google Analytics screenshot for that time - especially May, 2014.
Can you please help me confirm that we indeed have been hit with the Penalty? It has been 1.5 years already and since then, the traffic never has grown more.
Before May, 2014 our site received 1.5 million pageviews/mo, after it..until this moment traffic has never been more than 600,000 pageviews/mo. Now if I look back even more with Barracuda tool, I can see it was also affected by Top Heavy 1.0 update,Thu Jan 19 2012. Even back then before all these updates site grew to 2.5 million pageviews/mo.
What is the painful part I always focused on time-consuming link building. Submitting links to design news sites, leaving quality comments under related articles and always have written unique quality content on site for years.
Can you tell based on screenshots and confirm we indeed have penalty. And maybe suggest what are the actions to take now? I have ahrefs pro subscription and started using Disavow tool to prepare for submission to Google. Would love to hear feedback on this..it has been painful throughout years.
Update: here is one more screenshot from Barracuda looking from 2012 year to traffic - https://www.evernote.com/l/AEIX6iP4USBGtbyRLZ1oTmcACgBtXHBP2rw
-
You're very welcome.
OK, so if we can see that the drop happened May 20, 2014, then there is a high possibility that Panda has affected your site. We can't always say that with certainty though. I remember the week following that date, I had three separate sites that came to me saying that they had been horribly hit by Panda. One of the sites had done a redesign and launched May 19. The redesign changed all of the title tags and the urls, so it was not Panda's fault that they dropped in rankings. Another site had also redesigned and the developer forgot to put the Google analytics tracking code on the site. So, rankings didn't change but it looked like traffic plummeted. And the final site had accidentally noindexed 90% of their site. I'm not kidding!
Still, a big drop on May 20 (give or take one day) means that there are on-site quality issues to address. While it's never wrong to audit your backlinks I'd spend more time reviewing on page factors. When Panda first came out I spent a lot of time looking at thin and duplicate content. While that stuff, especially thin content is still important, there are a LOT more factors that go into Panda. I firmly believe now that Panda is Google's way of figuring out what users prefer seeing. As such, I focus on three things:
-
Improving technical SEO.
-
Removing or vastly improving thin content. (And yes, redirecting to an appropriate page or category page is fine.)
-
Figuring out how the site can be the best of its kind for users. This involves looking at competitors' sites with a non-biased eye and also looking at analytics data to see if there are pages in the index that users are not happy with (i.e. they consistently bounce or spend very little time on the page compared to others.)
Here is more on my approach to Panda:
https://moz.com/blog/have-we-been-wrong-about-panda-all-along
Best of luck!
Marie
-
-
Wow, definitely helps, Marie! Didn't expect to receive a helpful hand from such an SEO expert as you
Thank you so much!
First of all, on Webmasters there is no manual action.
Thank you for bringing attention to on-site issues, that's actually what I am doing now, over 8 years we had more than 2000 published articles and right now I am cleaning them out after seeing that 20% of articles receive 80% of the traffic.
By any chance can you suggest the best way to deal with deleted posts? Right now I am redirecting them all with 301 Redirect to related similar post, or if none is suitable I redirect to home page, trying not to leave 404. What would you recommend doing?
Really good points, well, I never syndicated posts, lots of link building included submitting it to related web design news websites (pligg, digg voting type sites or where news appeared in sidebar).
I did exchange blogroll links maybe with 10 max friends sites, but nothing massive.
And regarding May 20, it indeed happened then. Comparing Tuesday, May 20 to Monday, May 19.
Actually after research..and following your disavow article how to work with massive amounts of links in spreadsheets and trying out Detox tool, I found, there are certainly links i would want to disavow, but it's not as significant as I thought. I really think, that what you are saying is right - that simply Google stopped counting some links and that' why rankings did drop.
Action plan is clear at least, first focus on fixing everything possible on-site before touching Disavow tool. Really, really appreciate your helpful reply and taking time to give such an insightful feedback to simple guy like me
Thank you again, Marie!
-
First off, thank you Peter for the recommendations of my articles.
It looks like there are a number of issues with your site. I wouldn't focus so much on just one algorithm, but rather, spend time looking at the entire site and its issues.
What phrases are you trying to rank for? Your title tag on your home page says, "The Community of Web Design Professionals" which I am guessing is not your money keyword. Keywords in the title tag (without stuffing), especially at the front of the tag are very important.
Next, I would get rid of the huge full page popup. It could possibly cause the page layout algo to affect your rankings. It can also cause people to quickly bounce away and look for another site which can be a signal to Google that users don't enjoy your site.
The Google pagespeed insights tool gives you a very low score. Improving on pagespeed could make a significant difference.
You've got 1490 pages in Google's index. Do you really have 1490 high quality pages? Is it possible that there is some content indexed that doesn't need to be? For example, when I take text from this article: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/find-qualified-designer/ and search for it on quotes on Google I see 27 results. The only pages that you want from your site in Google's index are high quality, unique and compelling articles and resources. With that said, if you wrote this article and other people copied it, I wouldn't be worried. But, if you purposely syndicated it, then it could be an issue.
It's hard to say whether links are the issue. It doesn't seem like any of your drops coincided with a Penguin date so I am guessing that Penguin is not suppressing you. (Can't say for sure without having a deep look). But, it is possible that you were previously getting some benefit from self made links that now, Google can determine are self made as opposed to truly earned and they may be discounting those links. You mentioned that you had created a lot of links on your own. As Google gets better and better at figuring out which links are truly earned as opposed to self made, it may be that you've lost significant pagerank that used to come through these links.
With that said, have you checked Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual actions to make sure there is no manual action there? I see a lot of blogroll links and sometimes if there has been excessive link exchanging going on a site can get a manual action.
Now, back to the algo stuff. Can you tell via Google analytics if the big drop in May happened on May 20, 2014? If not, it's not Panda. If it is exactly on this date though, then I'd be spending more time looking at on-site issues than links.
Hope that helps!
Marie
-
@Peter - I read everything and was in the process of doing the audit, but Google Sheets keeps crashing, site has around 1 million backlinks and formulas just keep crashing when working with even 100,000 links from only webmaster. Any tips?
-
Thanks Peter, on my way then, excellent help, really appreciate it..will let you know how it goes, if you will be interested
-
So you need to get all links from:
- SearchConsole
- Ahrefs
- Moz OSE
- Majestic - you need to verify your domain and then you can download fresh list for free. For historical you need to paying account.
- WebMeUp - free with some limitations. Paid version also available
Once you get everything you need to compose mega sheet in Excel (or Google Sheets) and then you can do "link profile audit".
But you also need to make "panda audit". And this is little bit weird because you need to read almost everything from many authority persons. From all of them i can recommend Glenn Gabe and Josh Bachynski. First can be found on http://www.hmtweb.com and second http://themoralconcept.net/pandalist.html Of course they also wrote for other sites like Moz, SEL, SEJ, etc. Of course this doesn't mean that there isn't other authors like:
https://moz.com/blog/have-we-been-wrong-about-panda-all-alongSo let's go back on Panguin tool. You need very depth inspection in Analytics on your dates and dates of releasing algos.:
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
and make detail analysis of your situation. IMHO there is also huge chance that you're hit with both algos. -
-
Thank you so much Peter for your helpful reply. PSD2HTML is a new for me, already read about WPMU crazy moves and disavow guide..started working on it yesterday..just friend of mine who works at Ahrefs still convinced that I shouldnt go Disavow path.
Alright, working on audit then, thank you for links already!
What other tools you would recommend, if you say it isnt enough with Ahrefs?
-
-
First definitely there is some kind of "algo filter" on your website.
Second you need to make audit on website because there can be crossing updates:
https://moz.com/blog/the-danger-of-crossing-algorithms-panda-update-during-penguin-3
And that's why only with some interactive chart can't be sure what filter is applied to your site. Now Panda and Penguin works much quick in filtering and need refresh to escape filtering.About disavowing. I strongly recommend to read Marie Haynes articles:
https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool
https://moz.com/blog/5-spreadsheet-tips-for-manual-link-audits
(also check other artciels about this)
https://moz.com/blog/my-story-how-psd2html-worked-to-have-a-manual-penalty-revoked
https://moz.com/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
https://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing <- this is continuing of prev. article.https://moz.com/community/q/disavow-straightaway-urgent <- just check question and mine second answer, it's long just to be paraphrased here. But only with Ahrefs you can't pass you also need other tools.
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
-
Link backs from same IP? Can it hurt?
We host several client sites on our VPS host. We'd like to add a link back to the footer, however cautious as these are all on the same IP. Will this hurt our SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | idlwebinc
Will Google ignore these link backs?0 -
Internal Duplicate Content - Classifieds (Panda)
I've been wondering for a while now, how Google treats internal duplicate content within classified sites. It's quite a big issue, with customers creating their ads twice.. I'd guess to avoid the price of renewing, or perhaps to put themselves back to the top of the results. Out of 10,000 pages crawled and tested, 250 (2.5%) were duplicate adverts. Similarly, in terms of the search results pages, where the site structure allows the same advert(s) to appear under several unique URLs. A prime example would be in this example. Notice, on this page we have already filtered down to 1 result, but the left hand side filters all return that same 1 advert. Using tools like Siteliner and Moz Analytics just highlights these as urgent high priority issues, but I've always been sceptical. On a large scale, would this count as Panda food in your opinion, or does Google understand the nature of classifieds is different, and treat it as such? Appreciate thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers1 -
Site Migration of 4 sites into 1?
Hi Guys, I have a massive project involving a migration of 4 sites into 1. 4 sites include: **www.MainSite.com ** www.E-commerce.com www.Membership.com www.ResearchStudy.com Goal of this project is to have 1-4 regrouped into Main Site I will be following the best practice from this post https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos which has an awesome checklist. I am actually about to start Phase 3: URL redirect mapping. Because all of these sites have hundreds of duplicates, I figured I should first resolve the Main Site dup issues before creating the URL redirect mapping but what about the other domains (2,3,4) though? Should I first resolve the Dup issues on those ones as well or it is not necessary since they will be pointing into the Main Site new domain? I want to make sure I don't overwork the programming team and myself. Thanks For sharing your expertise and any tips on how should I move forward with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Can 410 links trigger a penalty?
Hi! This is a follow on question from my other post - http://moz.com/community/q/site-dropped-after-recovery. As mentioned there, I've ad a manual penalty revoked for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com/. This came after the forum was hacked and some poor quality SEO was done. We've managed to clean a large amount of links, but ones such as http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html (anchor is "microsoft") are still being found and indexed. My question is that although the forum is now 410'd, can these junk links still be causing any harm? A huge amount have been disavowed, and many others taken down after a manual outreach campaign, but still others are appearing. The site is performing poorly in search despite having a much better domain authority, driven by largely great links from national newspapers, than its competitors, as well as solid user metrics such as a bounce rate of 30% and few on-site issues. This makes me think it must be the link profile. Any advice would be much appreciated. S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Magento Help - Server Reset
Good Morning, After rebooting a server, a magento based website reset itself going back to December 2013. All changes to the site and orders dating up until yesterday (6/19/14) have disappeared. There are several folders on the root of the server that have files with yesterday's date but we don't know how to bring everything back and restore. Any Magento or server experts out there ever face this issue or have any ideas or potential solutions? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Help! Why did Google remove my images from their index?
I've been scratching my head over this one for a while now and I can't seem to figure it out. I own a website that is user-generated content. Users submit images to my sites of graphic resources (for designers) that they have created to share with our community. I've been noticing over the past few months that I'm getting completely dominated in Google Images. I used to get a ton of traffic from Google Images, but now I can't find my images anywhere. After diving into Analytics I found this: http://cl.ly/140L2d14040Q1R0W161e and realized sometime about a year ago my image traffic took a dive. We've gone back through all the change logs and can't find where we made any changes to the site structure that could have caused this. We are stumped. Does anyone know of any historical Google updates that could have caused this last year around the end of April 2010? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shawn810 -
Help! Is rel cononical impacting me?
Hi there. My personal site www.adamlewis.info has higher Domain Authority and Moz rank and more linking domains than the top ranking site for my name "Adam Lewis" My landing page /adam-lewis has an A Grade. Yet I am still on page 2 behind what appear to be weaker domains. The on-site report says I am not making appropriate use of Rel Cononical. This is a bit techy for me. Can anyone explain how this might or might not be affecting my ranking for "adam lewis"? Thanks guys! Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adamlewis100 -
Need help identifying why my content rich site was hurt by the Panda Update.
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4) which has been heavily impacted by the Panda update. Honestly I have no idea why my Google rankings dropped off. I've hired 2 different SEO experts to look into it and no one has been able to figure it out. My link profile is totally white hat and stronger then the majority of my competitors, I have 4000+ or so pages of unique, high quality content, am a Google News source, and publish about 5 new unique articles every day. I ended up deleting a 100 or so thin video pages on my site, did some url reorganization (using 301s), and fixed all the broken links. That appeared to be helping as my traffic was returning to normal. Then the bottom dropped out again. Since Saturday my daily traffic has dropped by 50%. I am really baffled at this point as to what to do so any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thanks, Mike jamescrayton2003@yahoo.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeATL0