My website keeps getting hit every other month. What should I do?
-
Since April 2012, my website impressions has dropped about 88% according to GWT. Every other month or so, the impressions are dropping by about 30%. My total traffic (visitors, not impressions) has dropped by about 25% but now I am getting lots of junk traffic.
A few of the major keywords I used to rank for are still ranking in the top 10 but only in the USA. Lots of the keywords have gone to page 2 or 3 in the US and are gone to hell in other countries.
Now I know I'm mostly responsible for this mess. About 3 years ago, I hired a freelancer to write news for my blog and she did a great job for quite some time so I stopped monitoring her work for duplicated content. Unfortunately, she started to provide me with copied content after a while and did so for almost 9 months before I noticed it.
I had also hired RankPoop - errr I mean RankPop - to build some backlinks and that eventually got me in trouble too. I got an unnatural links warning in GWT in July 2012.
Since then, I had more than 50% of the bad links taken down. There are still lots of them but they sure account for way less than 50% of all the backlinks. I have not submitted a reconsideration request yet as I haven't compensate for all the links taken down yet.
I also started adding LOTS of fresh, unique and useful content to the website. I've added near 400 articles (sometimes up to 7 or 8 articles a day) over the last 5 months.
I've also set lots of the duplicated posts to "noindex" and when they're not indexed anymore, I completely removed them in order to avoid any copyright issues (some were 100% identical to the source). I keep doing this gradually to avoid 404 errors.
In early March of this year, I did a complete redesign of the site. The navigation structure stayed the same and visually, the layout is quite the same although the graphical elements are much more professional and the site is much faster. As much as I would've like to avoid a complete redesign, major technical issues from the previous design (and development platform) was now forcing me to do so.
Unfortunately, I updated the website design right before the last Panda update so now I don't know if the recent traffic lost is due to the new design or because of Panda... or both.
Google is like a police officer who repeatedly give you tickets for the same offense, yet they won't tell you what that offense is.
My website is located at http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/
Any advice is welcomed.
P.S. sorry for my english, I speak french.
-
What I mean is that these pages rank in pages 2 and 3 for their main keyword without backlinks.
-
One of my sites with 200+ pages of unique quality content had 12 backlinks on all pages combined and it got slapped by Penguin. If they don't manually recover the site your chances of recovery are slim.
-
One thing I forgot to mention is that the pages that are no longer ranking either have no backlinks or just a handful of links. That's why it makes me think that I can save this site.
-
Well that's your problem. If you can't get them all taken down use the Disavow tool. Show Google that you tried your hardest to get them taken down manually though.
-
No, as I haven't compensated for all the bad links yet.
-
Not sure. Did you ever file a reconsideration request after getting the unnatural link warning?
-
At some point, I thought I could've removed too many links too quickly. Could it be part of the problem?
-
Because it sounds like you were hit by every penalty Google has come out with. Contrary to popular belief, there is no threshold. You probably won't find the bottleneck and come bouncing back to the top as you once were... it doesn't work that way... unless you're a big brand like WPMU.org, JC Penny, Overstock etc. and get massive publicity over this.
After any penalty, algorithmic or manual, you're put on sort of a 'probationary' period. You'll get the tools you need to survive, but don't expect to get a decent job after being locked up... or in this case, bring in the big bucks again.
At some point a guru is going to come on this thread and tell you "don't loose hope" "you can come back if you make quality content and links!!"
I'm here to tell you to consider cutting your losses. Google isn't playing around anymore.
Try out AdWords again. Be creative with it. Mess around with the display network and exact match long-tail keywords.
-
But my question is: why does it keeps getting hit over and over even though I'm improving the site more than ever?
-
I tried paid search but in the web hosting niche, you can forget about it on Adwords. You ain't gonna get quality traffic below $10 a click.
I did get some nice traffic from Bing / Yahoo but now the prices have went up a lot since the competition increased so I had to stop the campaigns.
-
Sounds like you have a LOT of cleaning up to do if you want to rank organically. You know this it seems. Honestly, I'd focus on paid search and do organic on the side. You've got a site that is converting and has been converting for a while - why not try out a stable source of traffic and see what sort of return you can get that way?
One of my websites had 12 backlinks when it was hit by Penguin. I didn't spend more than 5 minutes trying to fix it.... just sold it and moved on (told the buyer about the penalty of course). That is another option for you to consider....
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
-
Any SEO benefits of adding a Glossary to our website?
Hi all, I manage a website for a software company. Many terms can be quite tricky so it would be nice to add a Glossary page. Other than that, I have 2 questions: 1. What would be the SEO benefits? 2. How would you suggest to implement this glossary so we can get as much SEO benefit as possible (for example how would we link, where would we place the glossary in the terms of the sitemap, etc.). Any advice appreciated! Katarina
Technical SEO | | Katarina-Borovska2 -
Website affected by Penguine / Panda
Dear All,
Technical SEO | | omverma
We have some websites. How we can check if site got affected by penguine / panda. We have observed few things since last few days like impressions are going down and keyword ranking is going down too. Any tools or any steps, to detect it will help us.
Thanks,
Om1 -
Canonicalization on my website
I am kind of new to all this but I would like to understand canonicalization. I have a website which when you arrive on it is www.mysite.com but once inside and flicking back to the homepage it reverts to www.mysite.com/index.html. Should I be doing something re canonicalization? If so what? Will the link juice be diluted by having two home page versions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FCAbroad0 -
Wordpress Website + 404 Errors
Hi everyone, I like to do a bit of auditing for our clients using SEOMoz. Once client that's using a Wordpress website had reported over a couple hundred 404 errors. However, when checking out the links, all the webpages (that I've tested) loaded just fine. Does anyone know why this would be the case? I thought, perhaps, the website might have gone down when it was crawling, but I have no evidence to back this up.
Technical SEO | | ThinkShiftInc0 -
Keep getting random broken links pointed at our website
Over the past 6 months I've noticed an increase of 404 errors being picked up by Google Webmaster Tools. When I look at the errors table and review these errors the links are invariable made up likes being generated from what looks like scraper sites or sites with search results embedded into them. Below are some examples of them. Broken Link URL Generating the Link www.mysite.com/rwickenhauser http://www.webstatsdomain.com
Technical SEO | | adamlcasey
www.mysite.com/guest http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/windows http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/..app http://213.174.143.40/
www.mysite.com/ht.. http://de.aguea.com/ None of these pages exist on our website.
So do I need to setup redirects for these or can they be ignored?0 -
Multi Language websites!
Hello, What is the best way for a website to have more languages? For example www.site.com is in english BUT the content will be translated in other 4 languages .es .it .fr .de . Should i buy 4 diferent domains www.site1.es www.site2.it etc... or create folders like site.com/es/ site.com/it etc OR create subdomains es.site.com Few months ago i was 100% sure..to go and buy diferent domains then to create diferent content on that languages..but now..i am not so sure. Thank you very much for your help!
Technical SEO | | willyg0 -
Where do you go to get a question answered by seomoz?
I thought it was here before but now the seomoz folks don't seem to be responding in this forum. Is there another place to go to get seomoz to answer a question?
Technical SEO | | klkirby0 -
Separate websites for 2 products in the same business?
I have a business that sells art. There are 2 distinct types of art on offer. In many cases, someone who is interested in Type A may also be interested in Type B. Most search competitors that sell Type B, only sell Type B. As a result, they have a dedicated site for type B art. Would I be better off separating my business into 2 dedicated websites or keeping them combined? The site currently ranks reasonably well due to content, age and has some decent inbound links. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Peter.
Technical SEO | | peteraitken0