Not Sure Exactly How Penguin is Effecting My Site (looking for tuff love)
-
Hello Everyone,
I own a small web design firm website. My site was for sure hit by Penguin, but not sure why they devalued my pages. I dont really do SEO or link building except for my own site. I normally turn clients down when they want SEO services. Mainly because we do web design really well, so I've chosen to invest my time doing that versus doing both.
For most of my keywords I took a 5-10 spot drop. Nothing super major, but enough that its tanking my business. I've survived all of the panda stuff, so I assumed my content writing, and link building tactics were good, but I'm wrong.
Here is my website: http://www.clikzy.com/ I will explain what I have been doing below, and I am looking for a little help/direction. I don't mind if you look at my site, links, and are brutally honest.
I do have original content ( I just ran everything through copyscape a month prior), and I occasionally get duplicate pages as my CMS tends to create them automatically, but we do a fairly good job of redirecting those pages when they occur.
My link building tactics have been a mixture of the following. I have used anchor text alot which could be my demise.
Forum postings
Blog Comments
Website Footers (roughly 20 over the course of a year)
Web Design Directories (explain below)I did start using directories in January. I would use OpenSite Explorer, and review some of my bigger competitors, and would occasionally get listed on a web design directory they were on. I think total I probably purchase 8-10 since Jan including botw, business.com, etc.
I have some local pages which I create case studies for which ranked fairly well. For instance for the term Baltimore Web Design I used to rank #1, but not I'm 5-6.
Here's the keyword: http://www.clikzy.com/reston-web-design.html
One more note: I did redirect an older website I have (12 years) to my current site (3 years) in Jan. Mainly because it ranked well for terms in NYC. I've dropped for those terms around 5 spots.
I have a few questions:
1. What would you suggest to fix something like this?
Power Content?
Better Links? (of course, we all want better links)
2. Remove links? I am not sure which ones are bad.
One thought was to just kill my local pages (roughly 15 pages) which would also kill any bad links I may have point to them.
3. If I have a bad link pointing to a internal page, could that bring down my home page rankings?
Any help would be appreciated.
I am in the process of interviewing for a full time PR person to come on staff to help us with our content, and PR. I knew I should have invested in this person a year ago! ha!
Thank you!
Pete
-
Hi Charles,
Thank you for the response. Just to clairify, as I have never had a penalty, or anything like this happen in the past.
If Google devalues my links, then I should not worry about removing them since they are not passing link juice?
I've never used a blog network, and I have not revived any messages from Google in WMT about spammy links.
I appreciate your help.
If anyone else has any repsonses, I would love to hear them!
Thank you,
Pete
-
Hi Pete,
Firstly I wouldn't remove any of your links, it looks like your links have been devalued.
This basiclly means that Google isn't counting many of your links. Most likely Website footers, blog comments and forums have all been devalued.
Watch this video by Rand for more info http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-on-googles-penguin-update
If you want to regain your ranking I would conentrate on content creation for your blog and guest blogging. It looks like you haven't added anything for awhile. Try posting each week. Also add some photos to each of your blog posts.
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
-
Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?
Hello, We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console. Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup? We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago. Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone? Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW2 -
Malicious links on our site indexed by Google but only visible to bots
We've been suffering from some very nasty black hat seo. In Google's index, our pages show external links to various pharmaceutical websites, but our actual live pages don't show them. It seems as though only certain user-agents see the malicious links. Setting up Screaming Frog SEO crawler using the Googlebot user agent also sees the malicious links. Any idea what could have caused this or how this can be stopped? We scanned all files on our webserver and couldn't find any of malicious links. We've changed our FTP and CMS passwords, is there anything else we can do? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
Cross-Site Links with different Country Code Domains
I have a question with the penguin update. I know they are really cracking down on "spam" links. I know that they are wanting you to shift from linking keywords to the brand name, unless it makes sense in a sentence. We have five sites for one company in the header they have little flag images, that link to different country domains. These domains all have relatively the same domain name besides the country code. My question is, linking these sites back and fourth to each other in this way, does it hurt you in penguin? I know they are wanting you to push your identity but does this cross-site scheme hurt you? In the header of these sites we have something like this. I am assuming the best strategy would probably be to treat them like separate entities. Or, just focus on one domain. They also have some sites that have links in the footer but they are set up like:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AlliedComputer
For product visit Domain.com Should nofollows be added on these footer links as well? I am not sure if penguin finds them spammy too.0 -
Untrusted site - malware!
I recently had my link profile done as I was badly effected by something in 2012 (Penguin, Panda.. who knows? never got a message from google in webmaster about anything). Loads of INBOUND links were identified as being 'dodgy'' and the person highlighted them in different colors. However, another seo éxpert' told me to leave them (perhaps remove just 3 of them) and don't bother with the rest. Now I am not sure what to do? Any opinions? RED
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero
3 were highlighted as being from untrusted malware. I think I should disavow them but really, would 3 make that much difference for a fall in my site? ORANGE
240 were said to be spam articles and I was advised:
The following pages highlighted in orange are on sites created for the purpose of publishing articles for link building. Since the same articles appear on multiple sites, Google views this as duplicate content. Links to Monteverde Tours in these articles should be removed or tagged "nofollow." Where this is not possible, the domains should be disavowed. YELLOW
85 were said to be from Low-quality directories
The following pages highlighted in yellow are on low-quality directories and link farms. Links to Monteverde Tours on these pages should be removed or the domains disavowed. GREEN
340 were said to be from sites were the page was not found , Account suspended, Problem loading page, Link removed, domain expired
The following pages highlighted in green include pages whose links to Monteverde Tours have been removed and pages that were inaccessible for various reasons, as shown in the Comments column. These pages or their domains should be disavowed to remove them from the Google index. I have read (and asked on this forum) about disavow but the more I read the more I am getting confused about the next action. I tried for one year to get rid of any bad outbound links, did blogging, social media, improved content, landing pages etc but all to no avail. Any opinions appreciated. I am not looking for a magic bullet, I know there isn't one. I know I need to keep improving content etc but after a year of NO improvements should I consider the link removal route? <colgroup><col width="215"></colgroup>
| Untrusted site - malware! |0 -
Switching site content
I have been advised to take a particular path with my domain, to me it seems "black hat" but ill ask the experts: Is it acceptable when one owns an exact match location domain eg london.com, to run as a tourist information site, gathering links from wikipedia,bbc,local paper/radio/sports websites etc, then after 6 - 12 months, switch the content to a business site? What could the penalties be? Please advise...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | klsdnflksdnvl0 -
Site being targeted by hardcore porn links
We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic. I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking. I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern. The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code. Has anyone else seen this before? Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it? All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance. MB.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MattBarker0 -
Competitors have local "mirror" sites
I have noticed that some of my competitors have set up "mirror" homepages set up for different counties, towns, or suburbs. In one case the mirror homepages are virtually identical escept for the title and in the other case about half of the content id duplicate and the other half is different. both of these competors have excellent rankings and traffic. I am surprised about these results, does anyone care to comment about it and is this a grey hat technique that is likely to be penalized eventually. thx Diogenes
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0 -
What does Youtube Consider Duplicate content and will it effect my ranking/traffic?
What does youtube consider duplicated content? If I have a power point type video that I already have on youtube and I want to change the beginning and end call to action, would that be considered duplicate content? If yes then how would this effect my ranking/youtube page. Will it make a difference if I have it embedded on my blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christinarule0