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?
-
The penalty varies widely by page. The penalty appears to hit certain keywords associated with individual pages.
-
I will just add my 2 cents. Based on the changes I saw in my websites it seems like it is based on the page, not the site. While some pages have disappeared from the rankings, others seem to be unaffected. Ray.
-
From my sites it is only pages that are over optimized have been hit, pages that were not highly optimized or not optimized at all are now ranking
-
I think Elias is right about the query. I have a page that still ranks but my "primary" keyword is nowhere to be found anymore. It may have been deemed "over-optimized".
-
It seems to be a combination of page and search query.
-
In my experience, page. Certain keywords/pages were hit hard whereas others were not affected. Tom
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
-
Too many SEO changes needed on a page. Create a new page?
I've been doing some research on a keyword with Page Optimization. I'm finding there's a lot of changes suggested. I'm wondering that because of the amount of changes required is it better to create a new page entirely from scratch that has all the suggestions implemented OR change the current page? Thanks, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris29181 -
How do we decide which pages to index/de-index? Help for a 250k page site
At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally. Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles). Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggiaco-siftery0 -
Open Site Explorer - Top Pages that don't exist / result of a hack(?)
Hi all, Last year, a website I monitor, got hacked, or infected with malware, I’m not sure which. The result that I got to see is 100’s of ‘not found’ entries in Google Search Console / Crawl Errors for non-existent pages relating to / variations of ‘Canada Goose’. And also, there's a couple of such links showing up in SERPs. Here’s an example of the page URLs: ourdomain.com/canadagoose.php ourdomain.com/replicacanadagoose.php I looked for advice on the webmaster forums, and was recommended to just keep marking them as ‘fixed’ in the console. Sooner or later they’ll disappear. Still, a year after, they appear. I’ve just signed up for a Moz trail and, in Open Site Explorer->Top Pages, the top 2-5 pages are relating to these non-existent pages: URLs that are the result of this ‘canada goose’ spam attack. The non-existent pages each have around 10 Linking Root Domains, with around 50 Inbound Links. My question is: Is there a more direct action I should take here? For example, informing Google of the offending domains with these backlinks. Any thoughts appreciated! Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | macthing1 -
Would it work to place H1 (or important page keywords) at the top of your page in HTML and move lower on page with CSS?
I understand that the H1 tag is no longer heavily correlated with stronger ranking signals but it is more important that Keywords or keyphrases are at the top of a page. My question is, if I just put my important keyword (or H1) toward the top of my page in the HTML and move it towards the middle/lower portion with css position elements, will this still be viewed by Googlebot as important keywords toward the top of my page? QCaxMHL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
301'd an important, ranking page to the wrong new page, any recourse?
Our 1,300 page site conversion from static html to Wordpress platform went flawlessly with the exception of 1 significant issue....an old, important, highly ranking page was 301 redirected to the wrong corresponding new page. The page it was redirected to is about a similar product, but not the same. This was an oversight that slipped through. It was brought to my attention when I noticed this new page was still holding the old page's rankings but the bounce rate skyrocketed (clearly because the content on the wrong new page was not relevant). Once identified, we cleaned up the redirect. My fear is that all the juice built up on the old .html page that ranked well has now permanently been passed to an irrelevant, insignificant page. -Is there any way to clean up this mistake? -Is there anything I can do to assist Google in associating the correct 'new' page with correct 'old' page after the wrong redirect was initially set-up? -Am I going to have to start from scratch with the new page in terms of trust, backlinks, etc. since google already noted the redirect? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
Duplicate page title at bottom of page - ok, or bad?
Can I get you experts opinion? A few years ago, we customized our pages to repeat the page title at the bottom of the page. So the page title is in the breadcrumbs at the top, and then it's also at the bottom of the page under all the contents. Here is a sample page: bit.ly/1pYyrUl I attached a screen shot and highlighted the second occurence of the page title. Am worried that this might be keyword stuffing, or over optimizing? Thoughts or advice on this? Thank you so much! ron ZH8xQX6
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales). My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead. Would you noindex this page or not? Any thoughts?0