Slapped by the Penguin
-
We had a client's website hit hard by the Penguin update, particularly on the 24th. Sitewide each keyword lost 10-20 positions. It was in #1 or #2 for the past couple years.
We optimize all of our websites onpage features well and within the whitehat realm. Since this was the only website affected out of 50+ other sites, I am guessing the penalty came directly from the backlink profile which was quite bad. The client had bought two other directory link package deals about 4 years ago which all of the incoming directory links have the exact same anchor text. I warned him this was completely unnatural and we only went after "natural-looking" links since then. Keep in mind these links were from 4+ years ago and did very little for rankings as we came into the picture.
Out of 143 root domain links, around 45 use the same anchor text in link.
We started with about 50 links total 2 years ago and have since built a very good quality profile, or so I thought. I was almost certain is was enough various anchor text to dilute it down.
I'm wondering if any of your websites that have been hit have a high amount of exact match anchor text. I can't believe Google would penalize just for linkbuilding because it seems to be an easy way to attack competitors but all my data is looking that way. Let me know your thoughts if any of your sites have been hit. Thanks
-
local niche, so yes the anchor text was probably very similar. What's really weird is that I just noticed on one of my sites that I had accidentally left some REALLY old pages up for a couple of cities. These are actually ranking now front page. The others are back on page 2 or 3 and this one is now top 5.
I think I'm just going to see what next week holds. Google seems to have lost a screw this week. I've had enough! Signing off for the week...
-
Not that high of a percentage, but yes they are niche sites so "close to exact match anchor text" is extremely hard to avoid.
For someone to link to our site about "tonneau covers" and not mention that term...it really makes little to no sense.
-
Did you guys have a high amount of exact anchor text? We were at roughly 33% for a single phrase when it hit us.
Ironically, the anchor text used for all the spam directory links wasn't even a good search term and we never optimized a page to utilize it.
-
We're in the same boat on 2 sites. Went from #1 to page 2 on many major searches.
-
Yes, I've had several hit hard. A few are from the same situation that you have. I'm hoping that the update has not completed yet and that things will raise back up over the next few weeks. I can't see how this could be the "final product" ... at least I'm hoping.
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
-
Is it a Panda/Penguin hit? Or it's just a natural ranking drop?
My traffic comes from google. This is the traffic profile. Does it look like a Panda or Penguin hit? I have a hard time determining it myself. Thanks. ne0r7kg.png
Technical SEO | | ChelseaP0 -
Website affected by Penguine / Panda
Dear All,
Technical SEO | | omverma
We have some websites. How we can check if site got affected by penguine / panda. We have observed few things since last few days like impressions are going down and keyword ranking is going down too. Any tools or any steps, to detect it will help us.
Thanks,
Om1 -
Can I disallow my subdomain for penguin recover?
Hi, I have a site like BannerBuzz.com, before last penguin my site's all keywords were in good position in google, but after penguin hit on my website, my all keywords are going down and down day by day, i have done some changes in my website for improvement, but in 1 change i have some confusion. i have one sub domain (http://reviews.bannerbuzz.com/), which display my websites all keywords user reviews, in which every category's 15 reviews are display in my website http://www.bannerbuzz.com so are those user reviews consider as duplicate content between sub domain and main website. can i disallow sub domain from all search engine? currently sub domain is open for all search engine, is that helpful to block it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Possible penguin hit but then back, now what's next?
hiz, i did a little check on my site by answering the quiz at mytrafficdropped.com and there was a question about on what dates there was drop in organic. and i did checked my analytics on a top sending keyword. here is what i found. see attached image . Traffic dropped totally on April 20 to onwards. Then got back better in june, but again dropped in October, still down.. anythoughts guys ? 1Jk47.png
Technical SEO | | wickedsunny10 -
Local SEO and Penguin
All, One of my client's sites was hit by Penguin. The business has lost almost all of its organic rankings but is still holding on for a handful of local searches for some of its satellite offices. We've built a new site and are slowly building domain authority. My question is this: at what point do I swap out the new site's location URL for the old URL in Google places? I don't want to risk the existing local placement which is all they have left for the time being. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | JSOC0 -
Penguin update: Penalty caused from onsite issues or link profile?
Back in April before the Penguin update, our website home page ranked in the #1 position for several of our keywords and on page 1 for dozens of other keywords. But immediately after the Penguin update in April our rankings dropped immediately to below #100 for nearly all keywords. The sharp drop was obviously a penalty of some kind. We worked on removing some bad back links that were questionable. Over the past 7 months many of the bad links have dropped off and our link profile is improving. Our rankings, however, have not improved at all. In Yahoo and Bing we remain strong and rank on page 1 for many of our keywords. I joined SEOmoz because I’ve heard about their great tools and resources for SEO. The first thing I learned is that I had a lot of errors and warnings that need to be addressed and I’m optimistic that these items once addressed will get me out of that dreadful penalty box we’ve been in for 7 months now. So with that quick summary of our SEO problems I have a few questions that I hope to get some direction on. 1. Crawl Diagnostics for my site in SEOmoz reports 7 errors and 19 warnings including missing meta description tags, temporary redirects, duplicate page content, duplicate page title, 4xx client error, and title element too long. Could these errors and warnings be what has landed my website in some kind of penalty or filter? 2. A couple of the errors were duplicate page title and duplicate page content. So there appears to be a duplicate home page. Here are the two pages: howtomaketutus.com/ howtomaketutus.com/?p=home They are the same page but it looks like Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Do I need to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file? I’m not sure how that would work since they are the same page. If that is possible how would I go about doing that? 3. Finally based on what I’ve described above is it more likely that the penalty we are experiencing is because of onsite issues or because of our link profile? We would really appreciate any help or direction anyone can offer on these issues. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 123craft0 -
Diagnosing a Penguin Demotion
Whilst ive noyt hit the panic button just yet ive learnt that a specific target term I was optimising a site flor has dropped off the Google radar from forth to zero 😞 The site is www.davidclick.com the target term was "York wedding photographer" and the demotion happened at the end of March this year, below illustrates the carnage.. http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/target-term-demotioncopy.jpg When i first learnt about this I began to wonder if I was a victim of the Penguin update. I suspected i might so I ran a test to see how many inbound links used the target term York wedding photographer and here is what i found... Only one site http://www.singingwaitersx2.com/links/ and at a push this site also http://york-wedding-photographer.blogspot.co.uk/ So my question is have i fallen foul to the penguin update? If yes then is the only remedy to block the aforementioned site links via this technique: http://www.htaccess-guide.com/deny-visitors-by-referrer/ Thanks in advance, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Very Weird Type of Penguin Penalization
One of my client's sites has a bunch of bad links from blog networks with exact-match anchor text. Since Penguin, they have been completely removed from Google for that keyword. But here's the weird part: It's only the homepage that has been removed, and only for that keyword. If I put other keywords into Google, our homepage comes up. So the site hasn't been banned, and that page hasn't even been banned because it still comes up with all of our other keywords. It's only when you put in the keyword that has all the anchor text that the homepage doesn't come up anywhere. (I went all the way to the end). Has this happened to anyone else, and does it warrant a re-inclusion request since the site and even that page haven't technically been banned?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0
