Site is penalized yet Google WTC and SEOMOZ says it's ok!

[HossamHossny]

My first question on this community..

A high traffic site of mine has been severely hit for over two months. I took a look at GWTC and noticed a lot of suggestions on the HTML suggestions tab, where I believed that one or a combination of these errors/notices might been causing the penalty. At the moment of typing GWTC shows no HTML suggestions and minor meaningless crawl errors.

Checking on SEOMOZ reported issues, I see zero errors except for a high number of duplicate page titles resulting from tag pages being accessible in the same tag title in paginations (tag.html?page=x) which can be fixed easily by using rel=canonical but I just know it can't cause such penalty. For reported warnings, site has a decent amount of title element being too long and missing meta tag description tags. I have been very active in the past with 301 inner pages of the site to make pages URLs as unique as possible and results were great, but that was long time ago before taking the hit.

The penalty the site suffers from is zero rankings for newly added contents and old contents as well. It has also lost all rankings for its money terms. Site is not banned and still ranking top for its name which is a good thing.

I am not sure where else I should be looking and will appreciate any good advices.

Thanks!

[HossamHossny]

Thanks for your reply..

1. not hit during on the specific panda dates
2. lots of duplicate page titles
3. Google Webmaster Reports no major problems

After correction it was hit after panda update or during it. I have, after the hit, did a lot of 302 redirection to newer URLs and title rewriting in a way to make titles and URLs as unique as possible. Google Webmaster was reporting a LOT of HTML suggestions before my action and is currently reporting zero HTML suggestions but a few crawling errors that was solved also a lot of time ago.

_You state that you have lots of duplicate URLs yet you claim this is not the problem yet I would beg to differ. If there are duplicate URLs is there other weak or duplicate content? _

Problem is, the site is sports related. Contents are previews of fixtures of a lot of teams and in many occasions the fixtures are the same (obviously unique content for each preview and unique date as well, represented in the title and URL). Titles and URLs are both more than they should but this can't be helped because of the fix I did to make them more unique!

Secondly, I have a client in the same industry and he is #1 in this industry. The same off-site promotions methods is used for both sites (don't get confused and assumed interlinking, etc..). The time my site took a hit his site performed more than the normal and he had big increase in rankings and traffic. It will be wise to mention that when speaking of contents, although the two sites has the same high quality contents, but my site consists of contents that is shorter (perhaps this makes google thinks this contents is shallow?). More importantly, the change I did to make titles and URLs more unique I never did to his site (I run both!) so in reality his site has a major problem of duplicated titles, yet performing very well, although Google Webmasters Tools is reporting a small amount of HTML suggestions (duplicate title tags) but it seems to help them though. I know we can't rely on this tool because "it is broken" but it helps a lot on many occasions.

Do you have product descriptions that are used on other sites or on multiple pages across the site? Do you have lots of content that is repeated on multiple pages across the site?

No off-site duplicate contents or similarity or widgets descriptions or whatever. The way site is structured and using tags makes a decent amount of tags pages being duplicated with "snippets" of the games previews/contents. I thought about having all tags pages in robots.txt but never executed the idea, and believe it or not on many occasions along the years I have seen googlebots not respecting robots.txt at all. I never thought of removing them manually using Google Webmasters Tools because in my opinion it is very risky and not required!

**The kind of loss of traffic and ranking whilst still maintaining visibility for brand queries smacks of one of the more aggressive duplicate content filters that I have seen at least two cases of recently. These tend to kick in once the site has been crawled so do not stick to any specific date and the result is that you are buried for popular search terms but can still rank for terms with no competition and brand related queries. **

If I combined the site name/brand into a targeted keyword, the site is still ranking but if I did the same combinations with long tails (main landing pages/games previews) there is no result, and the latter is what ensures me there is some penalty or devaluation of contents (short contents=shallow contents?!).

This could be remedied by the following measures:

1. canonical urls for any internal page duplication
2. **remove thin or weak content pages from the site (delete or noindex) **
3. remove or replace any content that is not unique to your site alone (generic product descriptions etc)
4. identify any other sites that have stolen your content and request that it is removed & follow that up with DMCA request for any sites that will not play ball

All of these measures has been considered already. For an example searching a snippet of contents return site homepage or other areas of the sites except for the intended ones, that is landing pages.

**Happy to take another look if you can supply a URL. **

I have forwarded the URL to your inbox.

Many thanks for the in-depth analysis, it at least makes me thinks of more issues to investigate.

Regards,
Hossam

[HossamHossny]

I got you now. I think it's worthy to investigate dropping in rankings in other searching engine as well.

[KeriMorgret]

For example, if your organic traffic from multiple engines suddenly took a dive at the same time, it might indicate that there is an issue with instructions to the search engines in general. Another user also had Google traffic drop and posted in Q&A, and we discovered that a robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" had been placed on many of the pages. It wasn't a penalty at all, it was all of the search engines following the directives given.

In referring sites, if you saw refers come from listofeasytohacksites.com, that could provide a clue as to what is happening.

We are all trying to help here, and trying to make sure something bigger isn't a factor.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Hossam,

When you view someone's profile, you should have the option to send them a private message.

For quoting, people have usually just used the copy and paste function and bolded/put in quotes what they were quoting, then responded below the quote.

[Marcus_Miller]

You can private message and my email address is on my profile. Cheers. M

[HossamHossny]

There is no quote on this message board and there is no private messaging feature also? I obviously would like you to take a look but I don't want to share the site URL on public.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hi Hossam

If you can post your URL I can take a better look for you.

Marcus

[HossamHossny]

Very intensive checklist and great effort that I would like to thank. But I figured out from knowing that panda was on 24th of February adds to the odds that site was affected also by this update and the hit was in early March.

Is there some [quote] option I can use to reply to your response properly?!.

[HossamHossny]

I "assumed" Keri was asking about code/links injection and security issues and responded by I know the site is safe and secure. Sorry for the confusion.

[HossamHossny]

Right you are! I never related both because for some reason I thought it was in January. But at least I know there is something check list to check against and start getting back to the habit of chasing google updates!

Thanks for the advice.

[HossamHossny]

Not sure how is that different. I never even care to take a look at the other segmentation of traffic that is non organic because the site relies on organic traffic and some times PPC. How is this relevant to a SEO hit? I seriously don't understand the logic.

[mwoody]

I wouldn't assume.  This alone would cause your whole site to disappear from the SERPS.  I had a wordpress blog last year (using latest version at the time) that got hit, looking at the page in a browser it looked fine and even looking through the source code it wasn't glaringly obvious but the whole page was flooded with spam links.

After removing the code, ranks returned within 10 days

[SteveOllington]

I think you've misunderstood what Kerri was saying here. She's not saying that you're not talking about Google organic traffic, she's just trying to find out if it was only that which was affected in order to diagnose the problem. It makes good sense to trouble shoot via segmentation. Have you carried out the segmentation suggested?

[SteveOllington]

The update wasn't in January, it was end of February... so March may well have seen problems due to it.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hi Hossam

This kind of thing is tricky without a URL but lets quickly examine what you have stated above:

1. not hit during on the specific panda dates
2. lots of duplicate page titles
3. Google Webmaster Reports no major problems

The Google Webmaster Tools & SEOMoz tools do not scan your site for duplicate content problems, it would be a great addition if they could but it would require cross referencing all the pages against each other and then the rest of the internet so I imagine it would be a bit of a challenge to do so (Rand - you guys love a challenge, right? ;)). The offshoot of this is that you can ignore the SEO advice from SEOMoz and the recommendations from GWMT in relation to your problem.

You state that you have lots of duplicate URLs yet you claim this is not the problem yet I would beg to differ. If there are duplicate URLs is there other weak or duplicate content? Do you have product descriptions that are used on other sites or on multiple pages across the site? Do you have lots of content that is repeated on multiple pages across the site?

The kind of loss of traffic and ranking whilst still maintaining visibility for brand queries smacks of one of the more aggressive duplicate content filters that I have seen at least two cases of recently. These tend to kick in once the site has been crawled so do not stick to any specific date and the result is that you are buried for popular search terms but can still rank for terms with no competition and brand related queries.

Link devaluation was mentioned above but if the drop has been sudden and severe I would suspect a penalty is far more likely rather than a slow slide over x weeks, months into the doldrums.

Without a URL we can only theorise up to a point. To do some more in depth analysis and hang some meat on this theory we need to see your web address but from instinct and the information currently supplied,  it sounds like you have a duplication penalty.

This could be remedied by the following measures:

1. canonical urls for any internal page duplication
2. remove thin or weak content pages from the site (delete or noindex)
3. remove or replace any content that is not unique to your site alone (generic product descriptions etc)
4. identify any other sites that have stolen your content and request that it is removed & follow that up with DMCA request for any sites that will not play ball

Generally, review the quality of your site and it's content specifically with an eye to make sure your content is unique, not repeated internally, there are not duplicate URLs and that your content has not been stolen by other sites (google sentences from your site in double quotes for a simple check, use copyscape for something more indepth).

Happy to take another look if you can supply a URL.

Regards, 
Marcus

[HossamHossny]

If that's the case and I assume it is, my site is safe and secure. Let's speak SEO please.

[HossamHossny]

Obviously I am speaking about Google organic traffic, Keri!

[KeriMorgret]

In your analytics, when you segment out by source, how is direct and referring traffic? Have either of those taken a hit, or is it mainly search traffic? And is it just Google, or have all of the major engines taken the same nose dive?

[KeriMorgret]

MagentoWebDeveloper, are you referring to the new black hat practice of hacking a site and putting in cross-domain canonical tags to a different site?

[HossamHossny]

Sorry, what you mean by URLs I don't recognize?

[HossamHossny]

Nope, off-site promotion is out of the formula. Also the site hasn't been affected by January update (it was hit on March) and obviously the recent updates in May had no effect neither since the site was penalized before them.

[Francisco_Meza]

Check your source code for URLs you don't recognize.

[AlanMosley]

did you have a lot of cheap links?
could it be you have lost a load of links in the recent algo updates?