Website has been penalized?
-
Hey guys,
We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010.
Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that.
Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly.
Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central.
We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly.
Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz.
The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links.
Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
-
The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much?
I agree with you. That's a very small number and unlikely to be the problem.
The duplicate content issue is fixed.
Excellent!
I have removed the link exchange script.
Good....
Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords?
Yes, you'll want to keep a number of links out there with your keyword anchor text, as that still has a high effect on ranking for a particular term. But you'll want to present a link profile that has a more natural "mix" of keywords and your domain to avoid getting flagged as spammy.
-
The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much?
The duplicate content issue is fixed.
I have removed the link exchange script.
Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords?
-
Sure looks like either a penalty or a massive discounting of links to me. You're not banned, but you're way back in the results given your link profile. I took a quick look at your robots.txt and it looks fine.
If Google is still seeing 13,000 pages as duplicate content, this could be the issue as well, as Google's internal "quality score" on your site is not going to be pretty. But giving the number of inbound links you have, I'm much more inclined to think that Google has identified your link exchange script and discounted all links related to that.
There's some discussion out there also on whether you can get dinged for over-optimizing your anchor text. See this article. While that case study is a pretty small number of sites, if Tim's findings are accurate, you're definitely at risk. Both your internal and external links to your home page are virtually 99% "watch movies online" and "watch free movies online".
So here's what I would do:
#1 solve the duplicate content issue
#2 see what you can do to change the link exchange process to make it less recognizable to Google
#3 go vary your anchor text, adding new links and changing a few old ones like this profile link to use www.freemoviedb.com as the anchor text.
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
-
Website crawl error
Hi all, When I try to crawl a website, I got next error message: "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal cookie name" For the moment, I found next explanation: The errors indicate that one of the web servers within the same cookie domain as the server is setting a cookie for your domain with the name "path", as well as another cookie with the name "domain" Does anyone has experience with this problem, knows what it means and knows how to solve it? Thanks in advance! Jens
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
SEO for a a static content website
Hi everyone, We would like to ask suggestions on how to improve our SEO for our static content help website. With the release of each new version, our company releases a new "help" page, which is created by an authoring system. This is the latest page: http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015/help-en/ I have a couple of questions: 1- The page has an index with many links that open up new subpages with content for users. It is impossible to add title tags to this subpages, as everything is held together by the mother page. So it is really hard to for users to find these subpage information when they are doing a google search. 2- We have previous "help" pages which usually rank better in google search. They also have the same structure (1 page with big index and many subpages) and no metadata. We obviously want the last version to rank better, however, we are afraid exclude them from bots search because the new version is not easy to find. These are some of the previous pages: http://kilgray.com/memoq/2014R2/help-en/ http://kilgray.com/memoq/62/help-en/ I would really appreciate suggestions! Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
How to inform Google to remove 404 Pages of my website?
Hi, I want to remove more than 6,000 pages of my website because of bad keywords, I am going to drop all these pages and making them ‘404’ I want to know how can I inform google that these pages does not exists so please don’t send me traffic from those bad keywords? Also want to know can I use disavow tool of google website to exclude these 6,000 pages of my own website?
Technical SEO | | renukishor4 -
How to Remove a website from your Bing Webmaster Tools account
I have a site in Bing Webmaster Tools that I no longer work on. I can't seem to find where to delete this website from my webmaster tools account. Anyone know how (there doesn't seem to be anything obvious under Bing Help or on a Google Search).
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
403 forbidden error website
Hi Mozzers, I got a question about new website from a new costumer http://www.eindexamensite.nl/. There is a 403 forbidden error on it, and I can't find what the problem is. I have checked on: http://gsitecrawler.com/tools/Server-Status.aspx
Technical SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
result:
URL=http://www.eindexamensite.nl/ **Result code: 403 (Forbidden / Forbidden)** When I delete the .htaccess from the server there is a 200 OK :-). So it is in the .htaccess. .htaccess code: ErrorDocument 404 /error.html RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^home$ / [L]
RewriteRule ^typo3$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^typo3/.$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^uploads/.$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^fileadmin/.$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^typo3conf/.$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule .* index.php Start rewrites for Static file caching RewriteRule ^(typo3|typo3temp|typo3conf|t3lib|tslib|fileadmin|uploads|screens|showpic.php)/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^home$ / [L] Don't pull *.xml, *.css etc. from the cache RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^..xml$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^..css$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.*.php$ Check for Ctrl Shift reload RewriteCond %{HTTP:Pragma} !no-cache
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Cache-Control} !no-cache NO backend user is logged in. RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !be_typo_user [NC] NO frontend user is logged in. RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !nc_staticfilecache [NC] We only redirect GET requests RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} GET We only redirect URI's without query strings RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ We only redirect if a cache file actually exists RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/typo3temp/tx_ncstaticfilecache/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/index.html -f
RewriteRule .* typo3temp/tx_ncstaticfilecache/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/index.html [L] End static file caching DirectoryIndex index.html CMS is typo3. any ideas? Thanks!
Maarten0 -
Two company websites - should 1 be nofollow?
We are an automotive dealership that is required to keep a manufacturer appointed website. It's pretty terrible so we are having a new site developed in addition to that. We plan on transferring our current domain name to the new site but I am not sure what to do with the older, less useful site. Should I try to have both sites appear in the search results to capture more traffic? Or is that inefficient? Should I make the new site no follow?
Technical SEO | | kylesuss0