Was I hit by panda or penguin?
-
My site, graciousbridal.com was hit pretty hard by google at the end of April. I actually noticed our traffic decreasing around February, then towards the end of April, it got really bad. Our sales this may were half of what they were in may 2011. We have never done any black or gray hat seo, wouldn't even know how to. I know in the past we did blog commenting, but changed up our keywords so it wasn't all the same, maybe we didn't change it enough?? We have another very similar site that I'm now wondering if we were penalized because they are too similar. We always have changed up the copy, but they have most of the same products. This second site barely gets traffic or sales and has about half of the items graciousbridal does. But, I'm wondering now if it's to similar and that is why we were penalized. I can't figure out what we did wrong to have this big of a drop. I really need help with this as this is supposed to be our busiest season of the year. Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated..
-
Hi James, Thanks for responding. We hired an SEO person to help us at the beginning of last year, that ended up not working out. I know she was working on link building, and it seems like she must have left comments on irrelevant blogs.. What do you recommend in this situation, focus time on getting high quality links or trying to get the bad ones removed? And is blog commenting still okay to do on blogs that are relevant to our industry, or does google see that as spammy? Thanks! Audrey
-
I had a quick look over your link profile, I feel you have been hit by Penguin.
I notice you have been doing some ok link building in terms of using varied anchor text in your link profile,
But I also notice you have been targeting some lower quality directories for your dedicated page "<a class="clickable title link-pivot expanded" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">personalized wedding favors"</a>
For example I notive you have a link on this directorie: coloradosph.org
http://coloradosph.org/index.php?s=A&c=363&p=17
Google has totally de indexed the URL for this low quality directory, If you take a similar sample accross more of these directories I see more like this.
Also in regards to your "Blog Comments" I notice some poor quality links from this area example:
this looks like it is a blog comment on a link network [comment made 28th Feb 2011), I mean their are 100s of other spammy comments this isn't really going to do any thing apart from have a negative impact on your SEO.
http://mommies.genuineinteractive.com/blog/post/Connecting-with-Alpha-Moms.aspx
To future proof your strategy you need to target higher quality link building strategies and do not let the lower quality stuff work.
Google has been very harsh after the last update, work done by agency's 5 years ago can get hit I have seen it over and over, from my experience "Quality" will be the winner in the end
-
Penguin was released on April 24th 2012. If you GA show a decrease on that date, then it's Penguin.
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
-
Was there a recent secret Panda update? Help.
Our site http://www.entrepreneurhandbook.co.uk has had a fairly significant drop in organic traffic this past week. Going from 3.8k to 3.k Can't see any reported updates on the major SEO websites, we'd had steady growth all year then appear to have back-peddled. One post in particular, our UK venture capital list was page1 for a number of VC related keywords such including 'venture capital' (google.co.uk) but it's completely dropped out of the index for that one and others. Does anybody have any ideas? We haven't done any link building at all, we've focussed entirely on on-site SEO and high quality in depth articles/posts/lists and historically we've always seen small increases at every algo update. 2CG25iv
Algorithm Updates | | entrepreneurhandbook0 -
Penguin 3.0 Site Dropped after Update
Hi We was hit by the Penguin update a long time ago and we lost a lot of traffic/positions because of this. For a long time we worked really hard to identify all off our links that may have caused us to recieve this penalty. After Months of work we submitted the disavow file and reconsideration request and in June 2014 we recieved confirmation from google in webmaster tools that the manual spam action had been revoked. over time we then started to recieve more traffic and better positions in the serps, however since penguin 3.0 we have dropped again for a range of keywords. many going from page 1 to 2 or page 2 to 3/4 Any ideas what we should do here , any help will be really appriciated as I'm totally confused We havent done any link building at all since the penalty / recovery
Algorithm Updates | | AMG1000 -
Site has disappeared since Panda 4 despite quality content, help!
Our site www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk has lost over 20 first page rankings since the end of May. I assume this is because of Panda 4.0. All content on the site is high quality and 100% unique, so we did not expect to get penalised. Although I read somewhere that if Google can't read particular js anymore they don't rank you as high. The site has not been blacklisted as all pages are showing in Google's index and there are no messages on webmaster tools. We have not taken part in any link schemes and have disavowed all low quality links that were pointing there just in case (after the penalty). Can anybody see anything on www.physicalwellbeing.co.uk that may have cause Panda update to affect it so negatively? Would really appreciate any help.
Algorithm Updates | | search_shop0 -
Panda 4.0 Suggestions
My site was hit pretty negatively by Panda 4.0 and I am at a loss for the best way to address it. I have read like every article that I can and I know there is some duplicate manufacturer product descriptions but I don't hear many other ecoms complaining about Panda so I figure it must be something else. Also, the pages that seem most negatively affected are category and product list pages. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks! http://bit.ly/1plgOzM
Algorithm Updates | | Gordian0 -
Im I being hit by hummingbird?
Hello, Our website is a private equity firm database, privateequityfirms.com. We rank well for a number of private equity definitions and terms and have been increasing rank in those terms but unfortunately we have been losing ranking in our main keyword and url "private equity firms" .We have ranked as high as 3rd under wikipedia in recent months. The only real changes we have made are too the sitemap that is auto generated every time some thing is changed in the database. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on? im i being hit by hummingbird. Thank you! MozAnalyticsPDF115_zpsddec64fa.png
Algorithm Updates | | Nicktaylor10 -
Hummingbird - Client took hit. Anyone else?
I recently landed a client about 2 months ago. About 1 month ago organic started to go down. I'm not 100% sure it's Google hummingbird. Has anyone else looked at their GA or GWT and seen a decline?
Algorithm Updates | | Francisco_Meza0 -
That Penguin
Without trying to rub salt into the wounds of anyone hit hard, on the flip-side did anyone get some good news. We have one particular client that was effected in an immense positive way today, for the last four months we found it difficult to outrank one of their competitors ... but they have vanished of the face of the earth today, well Google's earth .. which meant our client moved up the SERP for a number of their key-phrases, which gave me a sense of immense delight. I could see exactly what they where doing, not so natural link building, creating a lot of sub-directories, naming each index file by the key phrase and linking all their internal links, while disturbing all their backlinks form the same source to each index page ... I wondered of they stayed under the radar cause each term was a sub-directory almost. No doubt they will be back, but not after a clean up and a restructure to their website Anyway I digress, anyone else seen any major improvements
Algorithm Updates | | Johnny4B3 -
I think Panda was a conspiracy.
It's just a theory, but I think that Panda was not really an algorithm update but rather a conspiracy. Google went out of their way to announce that a new algorithm was being rolled out. The word on the street was that content farms would be affected. Low quality sites would be affected. Scrapers would be affected. So, everyone with decent sites sat back and said, "Ah...this will be good...my rankings will increase." And then, the word started coming in that some really good sites took a massive hit. We've got a lot of theories on what could be causing the hit, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious fix. Many of the key factors that have been suggested causes of a site to look bad in Panda's eyes are present on one of my sites, but this site actually increased in rankings after Panda. So, this is my theory: I think that Google made some random changes that made no sense. They made changes that would cause some scraper sites to go down but they also knew that many decent sites would decline as well. Why would they do this? The result is fantastic in Google's eyes. They have the whole world of web design doing all they can to create the BEST quality site possible. People are removing duplicate content, reducing ad clutter and generally creating the best site possible. And this, is the goal of Larry Page and Sergey Brin...to make it so that Google gives the user the BEST possible sites to match their query. I think that a month or so from now there will be a sudden shift in the algo again and many of those decent sites will have their good rankings back again. The site owners will think it's because they put hard work into creating good quality, so they will be happy. And Google will be happy because the web is a better place. What do you think?
Algorithm Updates | | MarieHaynes3
