Panda or Penquin -Website Fell - Shouldn't this Recover?
-
On March 23rd our site fell 47% in one day. www.TranslationSoftware4u.com but we still held quite a few #1 to #7 rankings on Google and thought it would just recover.
Our top keyword "translation software" was #4 , now we are #19
Over the next week I waited to see if it recovered. We have been online 10+ years and always stayed with white hat. I admit to learning as I go over the years but always felt content was king so I focused on information. I really do not see my site as using spam techniques but maybe I am missing something on the way I have it.
March 23rd, major drop -47%
On April 2nd I started with SEO MOZ and the Research tools showed we had duplicate content warning. This was from a blog we were trying to start that only had 7 posts but it had about 20 tags per post. I did not realize that tags actually created that post under that tag. I went in and deleted the tags again being stupid and not realizing it was then making that come up 404. The blog was so small we do not get hits on it anyway so hoping it just clears itself up. ( still get duplicate warning on our directory due to using "php Link Directory", but it's due to how it reuses the title tag and description, 2 instances per category page"). Still trying to fix the php directory issue. Seems many others are running it and did not have a drop.
April 24th, we dropped another -10%
It keeps falling -70% now.
I have gone through the site and tried to clean up any warnings like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions.
With regards to links I put up a small web directory with some reciprocal linking. Our product translates languages but software is not the same as a human so we often set clients up with human translators, the directory is a nice place to help our customers find a translator or see online tools that can help. The links were not excessive, there were maybe 100 links. After the fall I went in and found some translators had gone out of business so I deleted those, I am down to 65 links now, about 45 are exchanges.
I have submitted to some online directories manually, but looking back through the links there is not really anything that makes me concerned. The link back to my site was really the most neglected SEO thing I did. Again concentrating on content. I did find a few links that I was not happy about but I did not put those links so had no control.
I have been working on cleaning up my title tags, and making sure the content just reads better. I have been hoping that my site would just start recovering but it keeps sliding.
Has anyone seen recovery from the updates. Should I see anything yet? I cannot seem to get Google to return to the site and reindex. Am I doing somethign spammy on my site and I do not realize it?
Thanks for any advice in advance!
-
Hi Force7
Unfortunately, it looks like Google threw a little bit of everything at you, so untangling the mess may be a little tricky.
Thanks for including the exact dates of the traffic drops. From these we can clearly see you were hit with two different penalties.
March 23 - Panda
April 24 - Penguinhttp://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
Panda - This is a tricky one to pin down, but you may be going in the right direction by fixing the duplicate content. I don't quiet understand what you mean by the "php Link Directory" but if you can get it fixed, I highly encourage you to do so.
Recently however, we've seen instances of Panda targeting link profiles, and if you've been double hit by penguin as well, that's probably a good place to look.
Looking at your backlink profile, it's obvious there's a lot of low-quality directory and article type links in your profile.
This could easily explain both penalties, and when we look at your site's distribution of anchor text terms, there is large proportion of optimized terms
Which helps explain the Panda penalty. Have you received any messages in Google Webmaster Tools?
So what can you do? Unfortunately, cleaning up a large link profile is hard work, and so is rebuilding it with clean, high quality links. I highly recommend reading Dr. Pete's article on the subject.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
No easy answers. It's okay to have a few spammy backlinks in your profile, but you want to look at the entire balance of your links, and make sure you're earning the majority of your links in a natural looking manner from high quality sites.
Regardless, hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
As of today 42 views of this question and no comments. I would have to guess that some looked at the site a little and did not see anything. The reason I even posted this question is because I saw someone else post a similar question and there were a lot of quick comments stating that the person's website had obvious spam techniques on the home page.
Still hoping some experts at least throw in a comment.
Thanks!
Force7
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
-
My 'complete guide' is cannibalising my main product page and hurting rankings
Hi everyone, I have a main page for my blepharoplasty surgical product that I want to rank. It's a pretty in-depth summary for patients to read all about the treatment and look at before and after pictures and there's calls to action in there. It works great and is getting lots of conversions. But I also have a 'complete guide' PDF which is for patients who are really interested in discovering all the technicalities of their eye-lift procedure including medical research, clinical stuff and risks. Now my main page is at position 4 and the complete guide is right below it in 5. So I tried to consolidate by adding the complete guide as a download on the main page. I've looked into rel canonical but don't think it's appropriate here as they are not technically 'duplicates' because they serve different purposes. Then I thought of adding a meta noindex but was not sure whether this was the right thing to do either. My report doesn't get any clicks from the serps, people visit it from the main page. I saw in Wordpress that there's options for the link, one says 'link to media file', 'custom URL' and 'attachment'. I've got the custom URL selected at the moment. There's also a box for 'link rel' which i figure is where I'd put the noindex. If that's the right thing to do, what should go in that box? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool0 -
Site hacked, but can't find the code
Discovered some really odd words ranking for us in WMT. Looked further and found pages like this www.pdnseek.com/wll/canadian-24-hour-pharmacy. When you click it it redirects to the home page. The developers can't find /wll anywhere on the site. The pages are indexed and cached. Looked at the back links in moz and found many backlinks to our site from other sites using URLs like this. The host says there is nothing on the server, but where else could it be. We've run virus scans, nothing, looked through source code, nothing. Anyone with some idea? www.pdnseek.com is the URL
Technical SEO | | Britewave0 -
Why is this site beating mine? I can't work it out!
I feel my site is not to bad. Needs more work and could be better but what site could not, However i'm bamboozled by some of the sites that are out ranking me on key terms. e.g. Horse Rugs http://www.fasttackdirect.co.uk/products-1-122/Horse_Clothing/HORSE_RUG_SALE.html ranking 8th http://www.centralsaddlery.co.uk/horse/horse-rugs/ not ranking in first 10 pages I dont expect my site (the later) to rank well as its not up there with the bigger players in our industry yet however I can't see why a page like the one i mentioned is ranking so well when as far as i can see its not as well optimized and has very little content. This is not me ranting about it or whining about why i'm not top etc. I just can't work it out and would love sombody to explain the reasons for this? The only thing i can think of is that they have more category with the words "Horse Rugs" in them. Other than that i'm stumped! Ideas on a postcard please!
Technical SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Recovering from Blocked Pages Debaucle
Hi, per this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/800-000-pages-blocked-by-robots We had a huge number of pages blocked by robots.txt by some dynamic file that must have integrated with our CMS somehow. In just a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pages were "blocked." This number is now going down, but instead of by the hundreds of thousands, it is going down by the hundreds and very sloooooowwwwllly. So, we really need to speed up this process. We have our sitemap we will re-submit, but I have a few questions related to it: Previously the sitemap had the <lastmod>tag set to the original date of the page. So, all of these pages have been changed since then. Any harm in doing a mass change of the <lastmod>field? It would be an accurate reflection, but I don't want it to be caught by some spam catcher. The easy thing to do would be to just set that date to now, but then they would all have the same date. Any other tips on how to get these pages "unblocked" faster? Thanks! Craig</lastmod></lastmod>
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
If a page isn't linked to or directly sumitted to a search engine can it get indexed?
Hey Guys, I'm curious if there are ways a page can get indexed even if the page isn't linked to or hasn't been submitted to a search engine. To my knowledge the following page on our website is not linked to and we definitely didn't submit it to Google - but it's currently indexed: <cite>takelessons.com/admin.php/adminJobPosition/corp</cite> Anyone have any ideas as to why or how this could have happened? Hopefully I'm missing something obvious 🙂 Thanks, Jon
Technical SEO | | TakeLessons0 -
Google Panda and ticketing sites: quality of content
Hi from Madrid! I am managing the Marketing Department of a ticketing site in Europe similar to Stubhub.com. We have thousands of events and, until now, we used templates for their descriptions. A lot of events share the same description with minor changes. They also have a lot of tickets on sale, so that's unique content different on each event. Now the last Google Panda update hit Europe and I was wondering if that will affect us a lot. It's hard to tell for now, because we are in the middle of the summer and the volume of searches in our industry depends decreases a lot during this time of the year. I know that ideally we should have unique descriptions but that would need a lot of resources and they are not important for our users: they just want to know the venue, the time and the price of the tickets! Have you experienced something about Google Panda update with a similar site or with another e-commerce industry? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
We have a decent keyword rich URL domain that's not being used - what to do with it?
We're an ecommerce site and we have a second, older domain with a better keyword match URL than our main domain (I know, you may be wondering why we didn't use it, but that's beside the point now). It currently ranks fairly poorly as there's very few links pointing to it. However, the exact match URL means it has some value, if we were to build a few links to it. What would you do with it: 301 product/category pages to current site's equivalent page Link product/category pages to current site's equivalent page Not bother using it at all Something else
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
After entire site is noindex'd, how long to recover?
A programmers 'accidentally' put "name="robots" content="noindex" />" into every single page of one of my sites (articles, landing pages, home page etc). This happened on Monday, and we just noticed today. Ugh... We've fixed the issue; how long will it take to get reindexed? Will we instantly retain our same positions for keywords? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | EricPacifico0