Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website?
-
Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website and the methodology they used? I have a PR 5 website that lost more than 50% of the traffic in Google. I removed some of the wide site links at the best of my ability but I see little or no results so far.
-
hmmm...I went looking on your profile to see if you had listed a URL and having run your domain through Open Site Explorer, I can see that it is very likely that the bulk of your problems are coming from your site's external link profile.
Here are a few more blog posts that might help you to get a clear picture of things:
Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo by Dr Pete Meyers.
Anchor Text Distribution: Avoiding Over Optimization by Geoff Kenyon.
Bad Backlink Checking by Richard Baxter
and for something a little less intense, but that can help immensely if you are trying to get a picture of your own situation, Link Removal Flowchart by Bob Meinke.
Hope that helps,
Sha
P.S. The Google Algorithm Change History can also be very useful in checking whether changes in site traffic, rankings etc coincide with changes at Google.
-
Hi Sorin,
If your site tanked on 25th-26th April, then it is safe to presume that your site was indeed hit by the Penguin update. There was a smaller Panda update that happened on 18th April as well. If you have access to Google Analytics or rank trackers, you should be able to tell by looking at the dates whether it was Panda or Penguin.
Coming to the issue of your small website, I would agree with Sha. It would be most appropriate if you can disclose the affected URL on the forum for real helpful suggestions.
Penguin penalized everything that was on the 'over' side. It punished sites with over-optimization at each level. Be it links (internal and external both) or the covert keyword stuffing across web pages. Penguin's impact could be felt more extensively because it affected almost everything that an SEO would have done to boost site's rankings.
I guess, if you are really looking for non-generalized approach towards helping your cause, then website's url is much needed.
Best Regards,
Rajesh Dhawan
-
Hi Sorin,
There are a couple of very comprehensive blog posts that will give you some very good information on identifying and removing problem links. Both talk about issues and successes.
The first of these is Identifying Link Penalties in 2012 by Ryan Kent.
Ryan also provided some very detailed information in this Q&A thread.
The second post that provides real detail on a recovery is How W.P.M.U. Recovered from the Penguin Update by Ross Hudgens. As you will see from reading all of these, recovery will be heavily influenced by the actual elements that have contributed to the problem.
The most critical part of a recovery is in accurately identifying the issues that are contributing to the problem...one big thing to remember is that Penguin came accompanied by another Panda. I have seen instances of people making the assumption that they were hit by Penguin, when in fact Panda finally caught up with them. This is not to say that your problem is not from Penguin, but to emphasize that you need to make an informed analysis and be sure of the real issues before going down a path.
If you are unsure where to start, then you could post the site URL and those here can take a look and give you their thoughts.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
If it was panda its algorithmic, wait till Google re-crawls your site. Also keep in mind if you are removing links that you will need to not only remove them but replace them to regain rankings.
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
-
Consolidating product pages during website migration
Hello, We are an e-commerce & content site undergoing a website migration and redesign in the coming months. We will be getting an entirely new website. Many of our URLs will be changing: Current URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/product-title-here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katelynroberts
Future URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/product-title-here So we're aware we will be using plenty of 301 redirects to achieve this. Further to this though, we currently have a product page for each configuration of a product - for example, a single-sided bookmark has its own page and URL, and the double-sided version of the same bookmark has its own page and URL. In our site redesign, we are hoping to consolidate each of these instances into one product page where users can select single or double-sided and the price will update accordingly. The bookmark URLs would then go from:
_www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/bookmark-single-sided _(call this URL A for simplicity)www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU67890/bookmark-double-sided (call this URL B) To (after migrating to the new URL structure for the new site, and the now-consolidated single- & double-sided product pages):
www.mysite.com/catalog/bookmark (call this URL C) What is the best way to make this transition without losing too much of our SEO value? I understand there is nearly always traffic loss with URL changes but I'd like to at least minimize the damage as best I can. We have backlinks and ranks for many product pages so I want to make sure we pass as much of this as we can. (And is this at all further complicated by the fact that URL A & B won't exist on the new site, and URL C doesn't exist on the current site? Does this impact the use of the 301 redirects and if so, how?) Are we better off to approach this page consolidation after the site migration and treat it as a separate project? This is something that is important to our user experience, and is definitely a change we want to make. Any advice is appreciated - thank you! I'm a fairly beginner-intermediate SEO so this is all somewhat new but I want to be able to at least convey some understanding to our developer of what we need to do. I was able to find this discussion (https://moz.com/community/q/merging-pages-and-seo) which describes a similar situation and solutions if we were just consolidating the pages but doesn't quite have the complicating factor of the entire site migration happening at the same time. Thanks so much!0 -
Should my website be accessible by IP?
I have been doing some digging in to this today essentially triggered off by looking at the secure certificate on my site and comparing it to others as i have been seeing some security warnings on a random basis. I noticed that on all instances none of the other sites IP addresses re-direct to the website, whereas on my site it does. is re-directing the IP address to the website a big no-no?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WAWKA1 -
Do I redirect pages that no longer appear on the website?
Here is an example of the link that is no longer on the website (Broken link) http://www.weddingrings.com/item.cfm?str_shortdesc=UNIQUE The broken link was fixed to : http://www.weddingrings.com/item.cfm?str_shortdesc=UNIQUE CARRE CUT DIAMOND ETERNITY BAND&str_category=Diamond-Bands-and-Gold-Rings&grouping_id=9&category_id=21&int_item_id=6884 Would I still need to redirect the old broken link to the new fixed one using 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexkatalkin0 -
Website/SEO Audit Needed
We've been outsourcing our link building to India for the past 3 years and the results were pretty good up until beginning of this year. What they were essentially doing is putting links into directories, a few per month, and posting a few articles per month. Out of our top 10 keywords, 8 got into top 10. Then something happened around Jan 1 last year, our ranking started dropping, falling out of the top 50, before settling around 20-30ish. We disavowed most of the low quality links since then. Also, very odd, all the top ranking competitors all fell (including me) and were replaced by less "specialized" companies who sold a broad range of products (for example: all parts of the car, rather than someone who just focused on mufflers). Theres also other differences but again I can't put a finger on it. I'd like to find someone who can do a detailed audit of our site, and our competitors, what happened to cause the drop, and why the new top positions sites are ranked high. And I really don't have time to do an audit myself. Our site is American Hospitality Furniture dot com. Any feed back would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AHH8880 -
Penguin Apply To Internal Linking?
Is Penguin focused primarily on backlinks or does it also assess internal linking/anchor text? We've lost about 3,000 visitors a month since the rolling updates were implemented. I'm always careful not to over-react to algo updates but enough time has passed that I think the dust has settled. I try to stay white in all I do but I think if I've over-done anything its the internal linking related products/categories with exact match. My backlink profile also has an over-abundance of affiliate links but that's kind of out of my hands isn't it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Same website, seperate subfolders or separete websites? 12 stores in two cities
I have a situation where there are 12 stores in separate suburbs across two cities. Currently the chain store has one eCommerce website. So I could keep the one website with all the attendant link building benefits of one domain. I would keep a separate webpage for each store with address details to assist with some Local SEO. But (1) each store has slightly different inventory and (2) I would like to garner the (Local) SEO benefits of being in a searchers suburb. So I'm wondering if I should go down the subfolder route with each store having its own eCommerce store and blog eg example.com/suburb? This is sort of what Apple does (albeit with countries) and is used as a best practice for international SEO (according to a moz seminar I watched awhile back). Or I could go down the separate eCommerce website domain track? However I feel that is too much effort for not much extra return. Any thoughts? Thanks, Bruce.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMcG0 -
Penguin Recovery Possible Solution (when all fails...)?
Hi, INTRO We were hit pretty bad - first with unnatural links warning and then (we assume) by penguin. We removed a lot of links and disavowed the removed along with all others we couldn't.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
The manual penalization was revoked but the site is still down. I understand that Penguin and Unnatural links are not the same.
I assume that while our removal and fixes were enough for the manual penalty to be removed the penguin algorithm still disapproves us. Also, I am not expecting to be where we were but we know our current locations don't make sense (several pages seem to be de-indexed). AND THE QUESTION... SINCE ALL HAS FAILED, we consider removing the main landing pages (which were the target for link-building) and build new ones with new URLs. In the old ones placing 404 and not 301. This means that all the spammy links that were built will point to non-existing pages (404)
(besides for those that point to the homepage...) Do you think it will resolve the problem? Or since the spammy links still point to our domain we are still in a problem? (even if to 404 pages). The way we see it, it is the last resort prior to dropping the domain! Thanks0 -
Are there any SEO Tips before killing a website?
Hey guys, My company acquired another company, and after a couple of months we decided to completely kill their website. I'm not finding any info about SEO best practices for this type of situation. From the "switching domains" and "new sites" articles and blog posts I can extrapolate that I should: 301 redirect their home page to ours Look at specific pages with good authority that relate to our pages and 301 them. Look at the strongest backlinks to their site and try to change them to point to our site. Create a 404 page for the rest of their webpages that tells them that we acquired the company (hopefully with a main menu and search bar) Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nrv0