Hit by a penalty? But which one?
-
Hi guys,
First off, thanks for reading my post! My site, www.doctorloanusa.com suffered a massive drop in Google rankings and traffic on September 27. For the past 4 years, I've ranked in spots 1-3.
My main keywords are physician loans and doctor loans.
-
I had a competitor copy almost ALL my text. In early October, I filed a DMCA takedown and had the infringing site removed from the SERPS. I also made text changes to my site. I thought this duplicate content was the problem, but I have yet to see any improvements 2 months later.
-
My site isn't particularly deep content-wise, but it's competitive with others in my niche. I have relatively few links but others in the SERPS have very similar link profiles.
-
I tried to clean up a few questionable links and used the disavow tool.
-
I have used the SEOmoz on-page tools to grade my site. Typically, I receive grade A reports.
-
I still rank for my website URL, and still rank 1 in both Yahoo and Bing.
-
My bounce rate is 43%.
If anyone could provide insight, I would be very grateful. I need to get this site ranking again, as this property is my main source of income.
Is the site over-optimized? Is it my anchor text profile?
Thank you very much in advance!
-
-
Hi Moosa,
The only thing is, I don't rank at ALL on Google for my keywords. Not even in the top 1000. That leads me to believe it is some type of penalty.
What were the small problems you saw?
Thanks so much.
-
Thanks!
-
Thanks for your response, Hampig! See below for answers:
1. where do you rank currently for Physician Loans and Doctor Loans on google? Not in the top 1000!
2. when did you use the Disavow tool. The day after it came out.
3. Did you get a questionable link email from google webmaster tools? No
I'll look into the citations, and I know I need a blog. I have one but it's on a different domain and honestly it's only 4-5 pages. I plan to write more content for it. I also plan on doing some social media, I just haven't had time yet.
-
Google rolled out Panda and Exact-Match Domain (EMD) updates on September 27th. As one of your keywords almost exactly matches your domain the EMD penalty could be a possibility. I don't know enough about the EMD update to be certain, but your link profile still doesn't look perfect either - it'd look more natural if more of your links had your URL as the anchor text, but be careful about where you get links from.
I Googled some of your text and it was duplicated on other sites (e.g. experts123), so Panda could be a possibility too.
The homepage doesn't look too bad; perhaps the title tag looks a bit spammy and you use "doctor loan" an awful lot in alt text; including the alt text there are 17 occurences of "doctor loan" on your homepage, so I would definitely reduce that. I'm not sure if that sort of keyword usage ties in with EMD, so have a look if some trusted resources have advice on it. I haven't read through it but this looks useful: http://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340
-
I checked your site and see some really small problems here and there and i don’t really think this is any penalty or something... I think all you need is an in-depth on-page analysis and with time you might receive everything back at least in terms of rankings...
-
I would do the quiz at http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/
-
A few questions.
1. where do you rank currently for Physician Loans and Doctor Loans on google?
2. when did you use the Disavow tool
3. Did you get a questionable link email from google webmaster tools?
I would try to put more content on the page. you dont have much . ie: Blog.
A few things missing:
* Citation on every page. You need to make sure you have your address and phone number on every page. ( Site wide footer can do the job )
* Citations across the web. Check out Getlisted.org and make sure all the local search directories have all your information. You can also use yext.com ( The best tool out there right now but it will cost you )
* No Blog? why?
* No Social Media . why?
is this your facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Doctor-loan-usa-reviews/103958646433000
After you get that in order and rankings don't improve my best guess is there is a link that is pointing to your site thats bad link and you havent removed it. I would contact Webmaster tools and try to get more help from them ?
But let me know the answers to my questions
Best wishes,
Hampig M.
BizDetox
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
-
How can I get Google to forget an https version of one page on my site?
Google mysteriously decided to index the broken, https version of one page on my company's site (we have a cert for the site, but this page is not designed to be served over https and the CSS doesn't load). The page already has many incoming links to the http version, and it has a canonical URL with http. I resubmitted it on http with webmaster tools. Is there anything else I could do?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Building a new website post penalty and redirects
A website I'm working on is clearly algorithmically penalised. I've spent a lot of time mass disavowing spammy links, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. We have been planning to build a new website anyway since we are rebranding. 1. Is it possible to tell which pages are most likely to have a penalty applied? 2. If the website as a whole has a penalty, will redirecting certain pages to the new website carry the penalty? 3. Our website is structured as sales pages and blog content. It is the sales pages that have the spammy links, yet most of the blog content does not rank either. Would it be a good strategy to only redirect all the blog posts (which have natural links pointing to them) to the new website and not the sales pages? 4. The homepage has a mix of spam and very good editorial links. If I have disavowed links and domains, can I safely redirect this page?
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Switchboard Tags - Multiple desktop pages pointing to one mobile page
I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users. Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page. However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page. I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether. Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?
Technical SEO | | JBlank0 -
Is all in one seo getting rid of my google authorship?
is all in one seo getting rid of my google authorship? I had it before and after installing All in One it is not coming up anymore. I have nothing in the google plus field of the main All in one settings, and I have it inserted in my user->your profile. When I view page source it is there. But it does not show up in the search, see: https://www.google.com/search?q=chicago+nightlife+superstar It even works in the rich snippet tester: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.howlatthemoon.com%2Fdueling_piano_bar%2Fchicago-nightlife-superstar%2F&html= Also my title has changed. It is correct in the tester but not in Google. Please help!!!
Technical SEO | | howlusa0 -
Another 301 redirect question - penalty?
Good Morning, We have 2 sites have images and minimal text on them. The images have links that point to a 3<sup>rd</sup> site that facilitates eCommerce. Question: If we 301 redirect these sites permanently to yet a 4<sup>th</sup> site… 1) Does it violate any G’s guidelines 2) Should we delete the links embedded in the images (as they point to the 3<sup>rd</sup> site) Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
I think google thinks i have two sites when i only have one
Hi, i am a bit puzzled, i have just used http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=in2town.co.uk to check my anchor text and forgot to put in the www. and the information came up totally different from when i put the www. in it shows a few links for the in2town.co.uk but then when i put in www.in2town.co.uk it gives me different information, is this a problem and if so how do i solve this | | | | | | | | |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
| | | | | | | | |0 -
Will one line of duplicate content drag down my landing page?
I am using copyscape to check for duplicate content on my landing pages. I found three sites that have the exact same sentence as mine, on a page that I rank well for on one of two key terms related to the product. The sentence is not essential to my product page. Do I risk losing page one rank on a key search term when I remove that sentence on my site, in hopes of possibly improving the page on the second key search term? Do I leave it alone? This is an older "template" site with very little that I can do SEO-wise, and I have managed to get a few key prodcut landing pages on page one of Google. It has seen a drop in rank on many landing pages post-panda, and I'm doing my best to clean up what I can. Do I leave well enough alone for a page one rank on one term, or swap out that sentence in hopes of getting better rank on two keywords?
Technical SEO | | Ticket_King0 -
I think I have a penalty on my domain...
my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead. I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these. Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9. This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site. Any feedback would be gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0