Hit by Google
-
My site - www.northernlightsiceland.com - has been hit by google and Im not sure why. The traffic dropped 75% last 24 hours and all the most important keywords have dropped significantly in the SERP. The only issue I can think of are the subpages for the northern lights forecasting I did every day e.g. http://www.northernlightsiceland.com/northern-lights-forecast-iceland-3-oct-2012/ I have been simply doing a copy/paste for 1 month the same subpage, but only changing the top part (Summary) for each day. Could this be the reason why Im penalized? I have now simply taken them all down minus the last 3 days (that are relevant). What can I do to get up on my feet again? This is mission critical for me as you can imagine.
Im wondering if it got hit by this EMD update on 28 sept that was focusing on exact match domains http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4501349-1-30.htm
-
Hmm how did e.g. normal local newspaper then survive - most news articles are some 200-300 words of orginal text + 1-2 images. The rest are ads and excerpt of other relevant news etc. As far as I understand the article you send then it is about “above-the-fold” i.e. the only think you see when you land on a page are ads as the main source. On my site I only use the sidebar - in similar manner as newspapers - and the rest is simply information on various travelling arrangement possible. That is what a niche site this is all about - collecing all of this into one place and solving the travelers problems of finding it in various places. This creates value for the end-user.
-
Placing the nofollow will not necessarily solve the problem, that Google for example does not classify the remaining content on your website good enough to rank well.
If you take any page on your site and strip out external links, there is hardly any original content left.
I would read this article which covers the user experience and algorithm change from January, and I think Google has demoted your site based on that.
-
Irving - thanks a lot for pointing me into the direction of the "follow" on the paid ads. Very helpful - I thought I had it covered with no-follow but found out it wasnt. So probably that is the main reason for the penalty. Did you see any other violations on the guidelines? - i was trying to fix all the "not found" errors etc yesterday:) Again thanks a lot for the help:)
-
I though the newest versions of Wordpress automatically takes care of this canonical tag issue?
-
Correct - the no-follow link needs to be on the outbound link
-
I have discovered something interesting. I read article on paid ads: http://www.feedthebot.com/bad-ads-affect-rankings.html
It says it is ok to have ads as I thought but it needs to have a no-follow. Then I looked at my code and it seems like the no-follow tag is at the wrong place so it is not no-follow - isnt this correct? Here is a typical code in a widget on the side:
| id="text-12" class="widgetblock widget_text">class="textwidget"><a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>http://www.hotelranga.is" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-ad','http://www.hotelranga.is-special-offer-new']); "> |
| | src="http://www.northernlightsiceland.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HotelRanga30off.jpg" width="280" height="280" border="0" style="border:0px solid black; margin-left: 2px;margin-top: 1px; margin-bottom: 1px;" rel="nofollow" alt="northern lights forecast" align=middle /> |
| | | -
it aggregates into one place all the offers the local industry has into one place. That is the main value. Not necessarily creating a lot of text on each provider e.g. a hotel. People see this teaser - and if they like the teaser they click through to the local provider to learn more.
-
Im not really having much of a link building strategy - it has normally just happened naturally e.g. other sites point to this site as the most informative northern light site in Iceland and also because Im the only one giving nortern lights forecast in the country etc.
-
I think you should build out your content - for example if you look at this URL there is hardly any content on it and a large count of external links. One could almost argue, that your site being an intermediary has no real value to a user.
-
Thanks a lot for your feedback. Im a bit of a new in this all so all feedbacks are very valuable for me:) thx thx
It does not look like the crawl rate has dropped. Looking at the webmaster - pages crawled per day - the graph is quite similar as before.
Yes I have some errors - i did not consider them material - primarily "not found" errors but yes some others. Did not know how to fix it
Im a typical aggregation site for some local travel businesses - so no affiliate - but yes just like any other company these local travel companies want to advertise their business and I set up content so people can find all the tours etc at the same place. All the content is orginal and in fact it simply gives a view of how much of these services are available.
Not sure what Irving means by "having follow links to paid advertising" - is it against the guidelines to have ads companies pay for? It is just the same as having google ads that companies are paying for?
-
I don't think it is the canonical. I would first look at GWMT (crawl rate dropped? errors increased?) and then look at Google Analytics as well.
For what it's worth, your current site has duplicate keywords and descriptions and plenty of errors (JavaScript).
You could have very well been dropped due to a manual review - your site looks very much like an affiliate with plenty of advertising and not much original content (that was at least my initial opinion)
-
Just to clarify the canonical tag issue - you have a slash in the canonical tag www.northernlightsiceland.com/, but the htaccess redirects all slashes to no slashes.
-
You are violating Google guidelines in several ways including having follow links to paid advertising.
You need a good SEO review - take this for example:
Canonical tag on homepage is rel="canonical" href="http://www.northernlightsiceland.com/" />
but then http://www.northernlightsiceland.com/ redirects to http://www.northernlightsiceland.com
-
There was recently EMD and Penguin update. What was your link building strategy? If you builded your links everytime with same anchor text or was building links to low quality directories or social bookmarks?
There are many factors that may affect your website. I advise you to do a advanced review on Google webmaster guidelines here:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
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
-
Blocking Google from telemetry requests
At Magnet.me we track the items people are viewing in order to optimize our recommendations. As such we fire POST requests back to our backends every few seconds when enough user initiated actions have happened (think about scrolling for example). In order to eliminate bots from distorting statistics we ignore their values serverside. Based on some internal logging, we see that Googlebot is also performing these POST requests in its javascript crawling. In a 7 day period, that amounts to around 800k POST requests. As we are ignoring that data anyhow, and it is quite a number, we considered reducing this for bots. Though, we had several questions about this:
Technical SEO | | rogier_slag
1. Do these requests count towards crawl budgets?
2. If they do, and we'd want to prevent this from happening: what would be the preferred option? Either preventing the request in the frontend code, or blocking the request using a robots.txt line? The latter question is given by the fact that a in-app block for the request could lead to different behaviour for users and bots, and may be Google could penalize that as cloaking. The latter is slightly less convenient from a development perspective, as all logic is spread throughout the application. I'm aware one should not cloak, or makes pages appear differently to search engine crawlers. However these requests do not change anything in the pages behaviour, and purely send some anonymous data so we can improve future recommendations.0 -
Google is indexing bad URLS
Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Incorrect Youtube metadescription in Google SERP
One of our client's Youtube video is showing a competitor's meta data on the Google search results page? It looks like it is pulling from videos in the right-hand rail of the Youtube page. Is there any way this can be controlled/changed? If so, how? The client is Deep South Crane. When you perform a search for "Deep South Heavy Hitters", the correct video appears in the search results. However, the meta-description is pulling from a competitor's Youtube. Any insight as to why this is happening and how I can change it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | JaredBroussard0 -
Can Google Crawl This Page?
I'm going to have to post the page in question which i'd rather not do but I have permission from the client to do so. Question: A recruitment client of mine had their website build on a proprietary platform by a so-called recruitment specialist agency. Unfortunately the site is not performing well in the organic listings. I believe the culprit is this page and others like it: http://www.prospect-health.com/Jobs/?st=0&o3=973&s=1&o4=1215&sortdir=desc&displayinstance=Advanced Search_Site1&pagesize=50000&page=1&o1=255&sortby=CreationDate&o2=260&ij=0 Basically as soon as you deviate from the top level pages you land on pages that have database-query URLs like this one. My take on it is that Google cannot crawl these pages and is therefore having trouble picking up all of the job listings. I have taken some measures to combat this and obviously we have an xml sitemap in place but it seems the pages that Google finds via the XML feed are not performing because there is no obvious flow of 'link juice' to them. There are a number of latest jobs listed on top level pages like this one: http://www.prospect-health.com/optometry-jobs and when they are picked up they perform Ok in the SERPs, which is the biggest clue to the problem outlined above. The agency in question have an SEO department who dispute the problem and their proposed solution is to create more content and build more links (genius!). Just looking for some clarification from you guys if you don't mind?
Technical SEO | | shr1090 -
How To Cleanup the Google Index After a Website Has Been HACKED
We have a client whose website was hacked, and some troll created thousands of viagra pages, which were all indexed by Google. See the screenshot for an example. The site has been cleaned up completely, but I wanted to know if anyone can weigh in on how we can cleanup the Google index. Are there extra steps we should take? So far we have gone into webmaster tools and submitted a new site map. ^802D799E5372F02797BE19290D8987F3E248DCA6656F8D9BF6^pimgpsh_fullsize_distr.png
Technical SEO | | yoursearchteam0 -
Should I delete Google Places and start over?
My Google Places page is stagnant. It never changes its rank, doesn't find corresponding reviews on directory sites, disappears altogether after a few days for certain keywords and ranks poorly overall. We have had a horrible time getting our web presence to be uniform...name, address, phone, etc. Our business was previously a different name so all those listings were still active, we have had different doctors over the years...those were associated with the business name in different listings, we used a referral service that sponsored listings using a diffferent phone number, change web url in the past year so some sites indicated the wrong address. HUGE HEADACHE Are there any positives/negatives to deleting the Places page and starting over? Here is the page: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&georestrict=input_srcid%3Ab1706925095a8afa Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | PMC-3120871 -
Google and QnA sites
My website has a QnA site - a bit like this one except it's not private to premium members. It is a page with a left colomn for category links and it has a list of recently asked questions, each question is a link to view the full question and answers etc. Does google know this is a QnA ? Or will it say - hey, there are far too many links on this page, tut tut. Is there anything I can do to help it understand what the page is.
Technical SEO | | borderbound0 -
Google Pake Rank of Zero?
Hi! We've been running our website www.opzeggen.nl for a while now, but we still have a google page rank of 0. Searching for a keyword like 'opzeggen' does give us good ranking however. Should I be worried about this? And if so, is there a way to fix this? Best Regards, Pieter
Technical SEO | | greenonline0