Did we get hit by Panda? What do we do?
-
Hello,
here's our site:
nlpca(dot)com
We had a big drop in rankings, going from about 19th to about 43rd for our main keyword and having significant drops in other keywords. This happened roughly 6 weeks ago
We thought it was being caused by either:
- Placing keywords in titles before we had them in the content.
or
- Trying to rank for Utah keywords - we're the NLP Institute of California and we are in both places now, but the site talks about mainly California.
We changed both these things, and we're still at the low rankings.
Will we move back up?
What do we do?
Will a backlink campaign be effective at this point?
-
We found out that we had 2 other domains that were duplicates of our site. Could that be a problem?
-
This is very helpful William, I'm still working on this.
-
Great Points webfeatseo,
I went to the website and at first blush I did not see what I expected to see such as scraped content or duplicate content. I did not get too deep but one suggestion would be to review all of your page content and use something like plagium checker as well SEOMOZ tools such as the On-Page Report Card tool also maybe run the SEO Web Crawler to find any possible issues.
I did run a quick scan with Copyscape and it did find your content on other sites but not too bad but it maybe work getting the pro version to check deeper
http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nlpca.com%2F
Also I ran a test with Xenu site scan and it found a lot of broken links with 403, 301, 302, 404 Errors.
It also looks like you have a lot of outbound links from this domain.
Other items found:
Broken page-local links (also named 'anchors', 'fragment identifiers'): http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#null anchor occurs multiple timeshttp://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#US not found
Again this is just a quick review I hope this helps....
-
Don't think you were hit by panda. That is more so for scraping and content issues. Are you doing any of that? And keyword placement in titles will not have a big impact like that on its own.
Your main page title tag has 4 keywords in there which could be causing some confusion on what the page is about. Try to target only 1 or 2 per page and target other words on other pages. On just a quick look your site does not really seem well optimized with on page factors.
Try using the seomoz on page grader tool to increase your page relevancy.
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
-
Non-indexed or indexed top hierarchy pages get high PageRank at Google?
Hi, We are creating some pages just to capture leads from blog-posts. We created few pages at top hierarchy like website.com/new-page/. I'm just wondering if these pages will take away more PageRank. Do we need to create these pages at low hierarchy like website.com/folder/new-page to avoid passing more PageRank? Is this is how PR distributed even now and it's same for indexed or non-indexed pages? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Hit by an unnamed Google update on November 30th - Still suffering
Hi, Moz Community. Just decided to sign up for a free trial because I'm absolutely at my wits end here. Here's my site: cheapgamesguru.com I run a small PC gaming blog monetized by affiliate marketing. I do all the writing, SEO, etc. myself. The content I write is, from what I can tell, fully complying with Google's guidelines, and in and of itself is pretty informative and high-quality. My site was started in December of 2015, and it was doing very well for a good 10 or 11 months - until late November of 2016. Then something happened. My traffic started plummeting - I went from getting nearly 300 organic users a day (Not sessions - actual unique users) to 80, then 40, and now I'm lucky to get over 15 a day. I do not do ANY black hat SEO whatsoever. I have not taken part in any shady link building schemes, nor do I try to trick Google in any way. I just write good content, do good keyword research (Targeting only low-hanging fruit and low-difficulty keywords using KWFinder), and do my best to provide a good user experience. I run no ads on my site. Glenn Gabe wrote about a potential Google update on November 29th, but the stuff he said in his article doesn't seem to affect me - my mobile site is perfectly fine, according to Google's own metrics and testing tools. Here's the article in question: http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/november-30-2016-google-algorithm-update/ At first, I thought it was possible that this was a result of my competitors simply doing far better than me - but that doesn't seem to be the case, as their rankings did not actually move - mine simply pummeted. And many of their sites are far worse than mine in terms of grammar, spelling, and site speed. I understand backlinks are important, by the way, but I really don't think that's why my site was hit. Many competitors of mine have little to no backlinks and are doing great, and it would also not make much sense for Google to hit an otherwise great site just because they have few backlinks. A friend of mine has reached out to Glenn Gabe himself to see if he can get his input on my site, but he's had a busy schedule and hasn't gotten a chance to take a look yet. I recently obtained a backlink from a highly relevant DA 65 site (About a month ago, same niche as my site), and it now shows up in Search Console and Ahrefs - but it hasn't affected rankings whatsoever. Important Note: I'm not only just ranking poorly for stuff, I'm ranking in position 100-150+ for many low-competition keywords. I have no idea why that is happening - is my site THAT bad, that my content deserves to be ranking on page 15 or lower? Sorry for the long question. I'm struggling here, and just wanted to give as much information as possible. I would really appreciate any input you guys can give me - if any SEO experts want to turn my site into a case study and work with me to improve things, I'd also be open to that 😉 I kid, of course - I know you guys are all busy. Thanks! P.S. I've attached a picture of my SEMRush graph, for reference, as well. mhgSw
Algorithm Updates | | polycountz0 -
In one site a 3rd party is asking visitors to give feedback via pop-up that covers 30-50% of the bottom of the screen, depending on screen size. Is the 3rd party or the site in danger of getting penalized after the intrusive interstitial guidelines?
I am wondering whether the intrusive interstitial penalty affects all kinds of pop-ups regardless of their nature, eg if a third party is asking feedback through a discreet pop-up that appears from the bottom of the screen and covers max 50% of it. Is the site or the third party who is asking the feedback subject to intrusive interstitial penalty? Also is the fact that in some screens the popup covers 30% and in some others 50% plays any role?
Algorithm Updates | | deels-SEO0 -
Am I hit by an update????? Please help
Hello. Is possible to have just a page or two penalized?? From 24th april ( around that date i heard was an update) two of my pages ( out of 37) do not rank for their main keywords but are indexed. Also, lately a lot of my pages drop out of top 100 and get back on their position. Any help? Am I in trouble? Anyone has the same problem?
Algorithm Updates | | Ag96adc0 -
Panda...Should I consolidate...Like this...
I'm torn. Many of our 'niche' ecommerce products rank ok, however I'm concerned that duplicate content is negatively effecting our overall rankings via Panda Algo. Here is an example that can be found through quite a few products on the site. This sub-category page (http://www.ledsupply.com/buckblock-constant-current-led-drivers) in our 'led drivers' --> 'luxdrive drivers' section has three products that are virtually identical with much of the same content on each page, except for their 'output current' - sort of like a shirt selling in different size attributes: S, M, L and XL. I could realistically condense 44 product pages (similar to example above) down to 13 within this sub-category section alone (http://www.ledsupply.com/luxdrive-constant-current-led-drivers). Again, we sell many of these products and rank ok for them, but given the outline for how Panda works I believe this structure could be compromising our overall Panda 'quality score', consequently keeping our traffic from increasing. Has anyone had similar issues and found that its worth the risk to condense product pages by adding attributes? If so, do I make the new pages and just 301 all the old URLs or is there a better way?
Algorithm Updates | | saultienut0 -
Clean up of Links, What to get rid of?
We have been cleaning up our back office and preparing our .com domain to take all our future traffic and have got into a debate about how far to clean up the old past links. We have not ever had a penalty on the site as far as we know, but did once get the site taken offline by Google as they thought it was a malware site back in March this year. They put it straight back up and running in 5 hours, but was very strange as it is an amazon-webstore retail site. We are not sure why Google thought (edit: typo) this, so just in-case we have been combing through the historical links and now started to disavow any links we cannot get removed manually. So far just a couple of sites that have no relevance to our retail business. However, the debate we have been having is around Directory listings: Should we get rid of these too? Gut reaction is Yes, based on the need for quality relevant links for the end user, but then some are passing proper links to relevant sections of our site albeit in a directory format. Dmoz comes to mind Any thoughts? Bruce.
Algorithm Updates | | BruceA0 -
ECommerce site being "filtered" by last Panda update, ideas and discussion
Hello fellow internet go'ers! Just as a disclaimer, I have been following a number of discussions, articles, posts, etc. trying to find a solution to this problem, but have yet to get anything conclusive. So I am reaching out to the community for help. Before I get into the questions I would like to provide some background: I help a team manage and improve a number of med-large eCommerce websites. Traffic ranges anywhere from 2K - 12K+ (per day) depending on the site. Back in March one of our larger sites was "filtered" from Google's search results. I say "filtered" because we didn't receive any warnings and our domain was/is still listed in the first search position. About 2-3 weeks later another site was "filtered", and then 1-2 weeks after that, a third site. We have around ten niche sites (in total), about seven of them share an identical code base (about an 80% match). This isn't that uncommon, since we use a CMS platform to manage all of our sites that holds hundreds of thousands of category and product pages. Needless to say, April was definitely a frantic month for us. Many meetings later, we attributed the "filter" to duplicate content that stems from our product data base and written content (shared across all of our sites). We decided we would use rel="canonical" to address the problem. Exactly 30 days from being filtered our first site bounced back (like it was never "filtered"), however, the other two sites remain "under the thumb" of Google. Now for some questions: Why would only 3 of our sites be affected by this "filter"/Panda if many of them share the same content? Is it a coincidence that it was an exact 30 day "filter"? Why has only one site recovered?
Algorithm Updates | | WEB-IRS1 -
Has anyone recovered from Panda?
My two websites were unaffected by the original and 2.0 panda updates, but istring in June my traffic has been down around 30%. In analyzing it appears that my long tail searches have been greatly impacted. So it looks like I am a victim of the mighty panda.My main site, www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com is in my opinion a decent looking site, with unique content and no ads, etc., but for whatever reason it has been negatively affected. There might be some duplication of content between certain pages and also my links are all or practically all directory links, though a lot are pretty heavy duty directories. I see a lot of stuff written giving advice on how to recover from Panda. Has anyone actually done so? How did you do it? thx Paul
Algorithm Updates | | diogenes1