Hit by the penguin update
-
Hi,
My site @ www.mortgageadvicecenter.co.uk has been hit by the penguin update. I cannot be found at all in google for certain keywords such as mortgage advice where we ranked page 2. We still rank for certain keywords. I really don't know why we have been penalised and what to do. I have plenty of brand links and nothing out of the ordinary link distribution.
This obviously affects our bottem line so do you have any idea's or time scales?
Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks
Ryan
-
Thank you for your response.
Well this is the problem. I have no messages in webmaster tools or any issues flagging up.
Do you think it is down to the links as I am still ranking for certain keywords and for my brand.?
-
Unfortunately, I paid 'credible' seo professional's to do the work!!! I suppose once upon a time these techniques were to an extent white hat but things change and I can see that it is for the better.
Very frustrating from an seo perspective as I am sure in the past relevant content and popularity did not count as much for seo until the arrhythms change.
At the end of the day we provide a great service to our clients and are very relevant to what is being searched for. We provide mortgage advice from our own office and have done so for years and have an established domain that has also been verified for google places.It is very frustrating when you see companies that are ranked higher than us that are only lead aggregators that sell information on.. ie. money supermarket and the emergence of more and more lead generators.
At the end of the day not much has changed as it is still the companies that pump the most money into seo that will win.
This is not a rant just my opinion from a business that provides great service but cant afford to put thousands of £ into seo to get to the top of the rankings.
-
Google got it right. Remove all of these spammy links and humbly file for reconsideration and tell them you won't do it again. You're lucky it's only a few hundred, the domain can be salvaged
-
I agree with Ian's advice as well. Your site still have a very spammy link profile which Penguin was designed to penalize, but there may be other issues affecting your site's rankings.
-
** I really don't know why we have been penalised and what to do. I have plenty of brand links and nothing out of the ordinary link distribution.**
Actually, your link distribution is quite unnatural. Here is your links as seen in OpenSiteExplorer filtered for only external, followed links to your root domain: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.mortgageadvicecenter.co.uk&sort=page_authority&filter=follow&source=external&target=domain&group=1
If you wish to see what a natural link profile looks like, here is the same query for Google: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.google.com&sort=page_authority&filter=follow&source=external&target=domain&group=1
Your anchor text is not natural, indicating your company controls these links. The natural way most people link is simply by copying and pasting your URL. When anchor text is used, it varies substantially as seen in the Google query above.
Also, your link sources are unnatural as well. Your top links as shown in OSE are as follows:
1. http://www.hasenchat.de/chat-verzeichnis/index.html. You are a UK site with your #1 link being offered from a German web page. You do not offer any German content and I otherwise could not evaluate this page.
2. Dmoz. A great link to have and it has value.
3. http://contentking10.typepad.com/blog/2010/10/ballon-d-or.html. A pure link page. Very unnatural.
4. http://www.genuinemortgageadvice.com/. Link cannot be located on website.
5. http://www.directoryworld.net/index.php?c=65&s=41 Free directory, does not comply with Google's guidelines. Manipulative link.
Article submission site, very low quality article designed to manipulate PR.
In summary, your site's links are an ideal example of the links Penguin was designed to penalize. To resolve this issue you need to perform a 100% solid scrub of every link to your domain. If any inorganic link cannot be removed for any reason, a detailed explanation along with contact dates needs to be provided to Google.
-
Hi Ryan,
First question: Did you receive a warning notice about unnatural links? Google's been sending those out to most Penguin victims. I still see you at #1 for your brand name at:
Normally with a Penguin penalty I'd expect to see you buried for your own name.
It's more likely you got caught up in an onsite, content-related update. Although there are some fairly suspect links in your profile, like this page:
http://www.hasenchat.de/chat-verzeichnis/index.html
It also happens to be your highest-DA inlinking page.
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
-
Product meta tags are not updating in my Magneto website!
I need some help! For some reason, each time I update the product meta tags in my Magento website, it doesn't change on the current website? Could someone help me understand why that is?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
What are the things that need update? before Appying SEO
Hello Everyone, I need Start work on for this site www.tajsigma.com, I want to know Did i need Add any things for Good ranking. what are the things that need update in This site For SEO??
Technical SEO | | falguniinnovative
i know Basic Things robots, title, discription , But i want know Any Additional Things that I need to apply?? can anyone help, please Thanx in advance0 -
Why would I suddenly start seeing a spike in hits from particular bots (specifically rogerbot, google, bing, and yahoo)?
We have seen consistent network traffic over the past month, then starting yesterday, huge spikes in hits (hits as in crawls to pages causing an increase in megabytes downloaded) started coming in from Rogerbot, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. A specific example from Rogerbot is as follows: rogerbot/1.1+(http://moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/crawl-diagnostics#more-help,+rogerbot-crawler+pr2-crawler-104@moz.com) Useragent from the bot IP address: 54.226.73.52 Domain / hostname: ec2-54-226-73-52.compute-1.amazonaws.com Physical location: United States flag United States, VA, Ashburn We've have thought about doing a crawl-delay to prevent these bots from hitting us so hard, but that still doesn't help us answer why this even started in the first place. Any clue on what may be going on here?
Technical SEO | | eTundra0 -
Do the terms in a website url drive search hits
I've tried to do a search on a few key words that I knew was on my landing page and I couldn't get Google to find it. So I thought maybe I needed to change my url to reflect a few the terms.
Technical SEO | | Toal0 -
Has Google stopped rendering author snippets on SERP pages if the author's G+ page is not actively updated?
Working with a site that has multiple authors and author microformat enabled. The image is rendering for some authors on SERP page and not for others. Difference seems to be having an updated G+ page and not having a constantly updating G+ page. any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
Do I have a chance to recover from penguin?
Hello All, I am an internet retailer www.giftbasket4kids.com hit by Penguin and have made many changes to my site since first being hit on May 2011. It seems I lost my ranking in some keywords on the two following landing pages. I am OK on my other keywords /landing pages. http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/shop-by-category/gift-basket.html keyword “Gift Basket Ideas” http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/pages/birthday-gifts.html Keywords “Birthday gift for kids, boys, Girls, Children” it seems all keyword that includes “Gift, Gifts” and “birthday”. Note: sometime most of the lost keywords come to 2<sup>nd</sup> page for a day or two then they disappear again I received a Google notice first week of August that there are unnatural links pointing to my site. There was couple of paid banner advertising. I stopped the links and request reconsideration. A week later I got response that there are still unnatural link pointing to the site. I request for reconsideration again and asked Google to let me know which links are in question.it is over 3 weeks I did not get answer yet as I suspected. I have optimized most of my product (80 fresh content well optimized product pages) and added a lot new content. I am making links differently. I am using Squidoo lens to promote my products. I do not know what else I can do. I have been told maybe I should restart new site! All my other keywords are ok . I do not want to start over. Can I make new landing pages and promote them? Would it work or the site is penalized for those keywords? I appreciate your advice in advance. If anyone knows of recoveries of a site like mine? I am looking for an SEO who has experience with relates to sites like mine. Do I have a chance to recover from penguin?
Technical SEO | | giftbasket4kids0 -
Drupal Updates = errors
We have worked diligently to correct our SEO Moz crawl diagnostic errors to below 20. However, at least twice now, our coder updates the drupal security warnings and BINGO- every time - our errors go sky high again. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Stevej240 -
I have been Hit with UNWANTED Links and I need to know how to remove them?
I have been looking at Google Webmasters Tools and saw that suddenly I have this huge amount of links form an unknown source “SiteLoki” never heard of it? Didn’t want it! Need to get rid of it!
Technical SEO | | rdominey
My Website www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com experienced a sudden and dramatic loss of presence on Google about three weeks ago. I first thought it was something to do with the new Google Algorithm. I also contacted Google to be re-evaluated. They replied:
Reconsideration request for http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/: No manual spam actions foundMay 10, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. - - - - - -
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Google Search Quality Team I have ran all kinds of web crawl tests, Google webmaster, talked with SEO “Experts” and still can not figure out what is happening. I decided to use a couple of SEOmoz tools to try to help me explain what is happening. I figured that if I could take a very specific and unique KeyPhrase and run it on a specific page that I might be able to better explain what is happening. Basically, We appear to be no longer searchable by key words or phrases on google?
There was another post regarding canonical tag issues; resolved, I removed all canonical tags for now. Today I discovered the links and I suspect that having even
1 link for this website will penalize you in Google. Here are some Webmaster Tools pages for reference: I also noted that the image for the link is from an old site hosted on www.Globat.com. I don't know what that significance might be. I left them in January. Thanks in advance for any help and advice you can offer, Ray Webmaster-Tools-Query_Your-Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photos-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki_links.jpg0