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
-
Redirecting an Entire Website?
Is it best to redirect an old website to a new website page by page to like pages or just the entire site all at once to the home page of the new site? I do have about 10 good pages on the site that are worth directing to corresponding pages on the new site. Just trying to figure out what is going to preserve the most link juice. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | photoseo10 -
Mobile website question
Hi Mozzers, A website I manage has a mobile friendly version of their main website and a /m version as well. I was wondering if anyone had any experience in the best way of handling this? Should we just get rid of the /m version and tag the mobile friendly version? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Redesiging website and how to prevent a SEO disaster?
Hey guys, I'm in the process of re designing my company website. This website runs in Kentico CMS and now I'm moving to drupal CMS. The main reason for the move is that I need a more flexible design with responsiveness and integrate better social aspects. Currently I'm having to deal with a developer whom can't be bothered to update the site. I also find kentico extremely difficult to deal with. The site has good Google rankings and I was thinking about setting up some 301 redirects when the move is completed. Now the question is this site is been live for over 2 years and I have tons of blog posts sitting in here. How can I get these moved? When this is done will they lose their 'age' ? What if I re create the blog posts as it is and then setup 301 re-directs on this? I have G+ authorship and will they be affected by this? Last question is having a responsive site will affect my SEO rankings once moved? I heard the 301 is not considered as a 'safe' thing with Google so what are my options? If anyone can share a link(s) to site upgrades/moving to new design tutorials/best practices articles based on SEO ill be grateful. Thank you very much.
Technical SEO | | Suganthan0 -
One hosting plan for multiple websites?
I use one Godaddy shared Linux hosting account for 4 separate websites. In Google Webamster Tools, specifally "Sitr Errors," I noticed that inner pages from another site are being listed as a broken link in the original unique-now-shared site. I checked and the files are not mi-installed. My question is, should each of the four sites have a unique hosting plan and/or static IP? Thanks, Eric
Technical SEO | | monthelie10 -
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 -
How to get rid of duplicate content
I have duplicate content that looks like http://deceptionbytes.com/component/mailto/?tmpl=component&link=932fea0640143bf08fe157d3570792a56dcc1284 - however I have 50 of these all with different numbers on the end. Does this affect the search engine optimization and how can I disallow this in my robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | Mishelm1 -
I have found a website on my dedicated server which is not mine
Hi i have found a website on my dedicated server that is not mine by using a number of tools including http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/ the site that i found that was not mine is buycostumes.com i contacted my hosting company and told them and this is the reply i got back We have checked the issue and it appears there have a bug/glitch in this site, because after we checked the mentioned domain we found that this website respond on IP which is not our and is not assisgned in your Dedicated server as you may preview below: Found 3 domains hosted on the same web server as buycostumes.com (66.45.3.44). buycostumes.com (linkback) target.com (linkback) www.certifigroup.com (linkback) Thus if you find any issues on your web server, please mention them in this ticket and we will be glad to provide you with further assistance on this matter. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further technical difficulties. Best regards, Now they have not said if they are going to do anything about this and to be honest i am getting fed up with the hosting company because i am being told that the slow speed i was receiving for my website www.in2town.co.uk was down to it taking a long time to reach my server before reaching my site. Now not sure if this is correct or not but with all the help i have received off semoz i have managed to increase the speed to my site but now i have found this problem. Can anyone tell me if i am being played and also can anyone recommend a professional UK hosting company. Also is this site affecting my spped and my site performance.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Local SEO for service industry - one landing page for every town...in every county...in every state?
Starting a second local based service site. Initially going to target a couple counties and move on from there as the business grows. The first site of mine I set up a page for each town [service] + [town] + [state] + [zip]. I am afraid this could get out of control though if I don't have unique content on each page. For the last site I simply copied the page and replace the town name in each as well as the picture, picture title, and image name to make it look more unique for users but not necessarily Google. I had pretty good results but I want this next site to be done properly. Should I only target a few of the major markets to begin with? What about long tail searches for smaller towns that currently bring in a good amount of business? I am concerned about having "too many" long tail pages for each town which would essentially become a listing of every town and county in the state if I was to maintain the pace I want to. Also I would need a good amount of backlinks to each specific town page url if I wanted to do well in each of those specific markets right? Is this where the fine line between niche term and broad search is? Is there any happy medium?
Technical SEO | | kabledesigns0