Penguin 3.0 hit caused by Pinterest?
-
I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. My URL is: http://www.weplann.comHello there,Since 10/24 we've seen a critical impact in organic results in our site. At first, only taking a look at the date of when it all started made us think about a Penguin 3.0 hit and then we went to take a look at our linking data to find we had more than 14,000 links from Pinterest (significantly more than any other source). Then, another thing that made us think about that dramatic organic drop is the anchor text: an exact match (www.weplann.com) is at #1 in our anchor text ranking but we're not 100% sure if this could affect our organic results because of the Penguin update.So our questions are:- A lot of Pinterest links could affect dramatically our organic results (understanding that Google may find that huge difference between linking sources as a bad practice)?- The anchor text exact match could really affect our ranking? If none of this points could cause that drop, then what would be causing it? We're sure it has to do with the Penguin update.Thank you very much in advance for your help!!
-
To my knowledge, Pinterest is a very high quality linking source. Having several links back and forth should mean that you have an equal amount of images, products and/or pages. No matter how good the source is, when you over use something it doesn't look natural.
From what I understand, Penguin 3.0 really targeted linking "neighborhoods". This means that you could see an effect because of link associations that your linking sources have. That could be Pinterest, but my gut tells me that it is probably some other source. These social media sites are pretty safe and usually have ways to prevent bad associations.
Have you used Open Site Explorer to compare what you have in GWT? I would just take a look and see what the quality of your links are and if there is any low hanging fruit you should disavow. You want to find high quality linking sources, these are the safest. I would try to eliminate links from low ranking domains with not a lot of root links behind them.
You might be suffering the effects of someone else's bad links. Have you received any manual notices in GWT?
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
-
Rankings appear mixed up causing huge drop in organic
Hi, Our top page appears to have dropped out of the index. The core keyword "business ideas" is still showing us at the top but it's a different post and it's lost all the long-tail. Whats even stranger is that it's not even directly relevant to the topic of business ideas. Looks like something fishy happened here – perhaps due to the recent algo updates. We've always seen a significant increase in organic when anything Panda related updates (c.20%+ growth every time) yet this has compeltely killed us. We spent a long time building this post up, eventually outranking Entrepreneur.com. It's been #1 for Google.co.uk for months. Any help would be MASSIVELY appreciated! ikvJVrq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | entrepreneurhandbook0 -
Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.
We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site. We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this? We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue; adding "no index" to all filtered pages making the filters uncrawble using javascript Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream0 -
Penguin Footer Links - Penalty or Devaluation?
One of customers provides IT Support for a municipality. The municipality's website (1000+ pages) has a footer link with the anchor text "IT Support" linking to our customer's site. The link is there for employees to get help. In mid summer, our customer's rankings tanked for "IT Support". It looks like a hit by Penguin. The question is, could removing the links bring the rankings back? Does Google's penguin algorithm penalize you for the footer links, or are they simply de-valued? Should we pull them down or no-follow them? If they aren't truly hurting their rankings, we would just leave them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill1 -
Optimized page titles post penguin
Just a quick question to hear a few opinions on page titles in a post penguin/panda world. For example, we are working on a large downloads portal that offers Addons for games called FSX and FS2004... Page titles are currently as follows: Concorde for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
British Airways Boeing 747 for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads
Quants Airbus A380 for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads I thought it would be beneficial to remove the boilerplate "Civil Aircraft Downloads" to stop the template effect in the titles. Yay or nay? Good idea or bad idea? Other ideas? Also, after removing that the titles would be as follows: British Airways Boeing 747 for FSX We still will have "for FSX" boiler plate text...is this okay? Perhaps we should remove the "for" and just have the title as "FSX Concorde" or "Concorde FSX" -what do you guys think? Are there any other title suggestions you guys can recommend? Your thoughts, tips and suggestions are very much appreciated.0 -
Why was I hit by the above the fold algo?
I cannot find any decent information on this update. Everybody appears to reiterate what Matt Cutts posted. I understand what the update was 'supposed' to combat and achieve. I also understand what those abusing ads above the fold, are supposed to do. But I need to know what to do, when you don't have too many ads above the fold. One of my websites was hit. Several professionals have tried to convince me it was Panda, that was released on 18th January. But I am now 99.9% certain it wasn't. I'm in the UK, traffic on the 18th was normal, little better than expected actually. Traffic on the 19th was normal until around 10pm GMT and there as a noticeable dip, compared with previous days and weeks. January 20th continued this decline and at the end of the day, there was a 25% loss. I have 1 Google ad, that is above the fold. Most of the pages have no ads at all. No affiliates or anything else. I have always prided myself in keeping my website clean and ad free. We also have the lowest bounce rates in the niche, by a mile, as far as I can tell, from speaking to other webmasters. I cannot remove this 1 ad, the servers alone, cost a couple of grand. The advertising supports the website. Nothing I can find online, gives me any indicators, as to what might be tripping this filter. But I need to figure it out, as traffic has now reached a 50% loss, which equates to about 15,000 visitors per day. I have tore my pages apart, removed functionality, added functionality and yet traffic has continued to decline. Can anybody shed light on this? I worry that perhaps Google is seeing the images on my website as ads. The images open a bigger preview in lightbox, but with JS turned off, opens a new page, with nothing but the image on it. I am at my wits end. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0 -
Who is beating you on Google (after Penguin)?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google. I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this.
The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories. 1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering. Now it is not the homepages that are beating me. In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do. 2) Nobodies. Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old. Has anybody else noticed this? I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web. Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO? If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building. But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.| Thanks!0 -
Is the Penguin algorithmic penalty on a page basis or a site basis?
Just wondering if there has been any clarification of whether the Penguin algorithmic penalty is on a Page basis or a Site basis? In other words, is it all or nothing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darkgreenguy0 -
Consolidating 3 regional domains
We recently took the decision to consolidate 3 domains for .com.au, .eu and .us. This decision was made before I arrived here and I'm not sure it's the right call. The proposal is to use a brand new .co (not .com isn't available) domain. The main reason is in terms of trying to build domain strength towards one domain instead or trying to grow 3 domains. We re-sell stock simlar to hotel rooms (different industry) and our site is heavily search based. So duplicate content is an issue that we hope improve on with this approach. One driver was we found for example that our Autralian site was outranking out european site in european searches. We don't want to only hold certain inventory on certain sites either because this doesn't work with our business rules. Anyway if we are to go about this, what would be the best practise in terms of going about this. Should we suddenly just close one of the domain and to a * 301 redirect or should we redirect each page individually? Someone has proposed using robots text to use a phased approach, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with robots.txt, thought a phased individual page 301 using htaccess may be possible? In terms of SEO is 1 domain generally better that 3? Is this a good strategy? What's the best 301 approach? Any other advice? Thanks J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solas0