Can't seem to get traffic back post Panda / Penguin. WHY?
-
I have done and am doing everything I can think of to bring back lost traffic after the late 2012 updates from google hit us. I just is not working.
We had some issues with our out of house web developers which screwed up our site in 2012 and after taking it in house we have Eden doing damage control form months now. We think we have fixed pretty much everything.
- URL structure
- filling up with good unique content(under way. Lots still to do)
- making better category descriptions
- redesigned homepage.
- Updated product pages (CMS is holding things back on that part otherwise they would be better. New CMS under construction)
- started more link building(its a real weak spot on our SEO as far as I can see)
- audited bad links from dodgy irelavent sites.
- hired writers to create content and link bait articles.
- Begun making high quality video's for both YouTube (brand awareness and viral) and on site hosting (link building and conversions) (in the pipeline not online yet).
- Flattened out site architecture.
- optimise internal link flow (got this wrong by using nofollows. In the process of thinking of a better way by reducing nun wanted Nav links on page.)
i realise its not all done but I have been working ever since the drop in traffic and I'm just seeing no increase at all.
I have been asking a few questions on here for the past few days but still can't put my finger on the issue.
Am I just impatient and need to wait on the traffic as I am doing all the correct things? Or have I missed something and need to fix it.
you anyone would like to have a quick look at my site and see if there is an obvious issue I have missed It would be great as I have been tearing my hair out trying to find the issues with my site. It's www.centralsaddlery.co.uk
Criticism would me much appreciated.
-
We didn't get an instant hit. It was a 50-60% drop spread from aug to end of feb in a pretty steady downward slope. It has been pretty level from feb until now. That's why I'm a bit unsure of the reason for the drop. I havlocal ready cross referenced the google updates and there is a rough coronation between the updates and the start of the declin but nothing concert.
-
Check SEOMoz's Google algo change history:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
If you were hit by Panda or Penguin, you should see a cliff-like drop on or within a day of the dates listed in the document. Panda & Penguin are completely different penalties, so recovering from them requires knowing which one it was.
Of course there could be other issues with your site as well, it's hard to say without more info.
-
I'm not sure exactly but I think it's more Panda as we have not had the best content in the past. If we just keep on slogging through with more content is that the best plan? If so I'm happy to do so. I just need to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. would also like to be sure that everything else a pout our site is as good as can be.
-
Is it Panda or Penguin you've been hit with? With Penguin it's necessary to submit a reconsideration request after you've removed your low quality links. Your rankings may not immediately recover because you removed links that were previously benefiting you, so it's necessary to build new links.
Panda is a lot trickier to recover from. Only a small percentage of sites that were hit by Panda have recovered. Mainly the penalty hit sites with massive amounts of thin content, so if you have a lot of low quality or duplicate content, you need to replace it with unique, original content. There are no real shortcuts here, but you can work with 3rd party content brokers to help you with process.
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
-
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amarieyoussef0 -
404's after pruning old posts
Hey all, So after reading about the benefits of pruning old content I decided to give it a try on our blog. After reviewing thousands of posts I found around 2500 that were simply not getting any traffic, or if they were there was 100% bounce & exit. Many of these posts also had content with relevance that had long ago expired. After deleted these old posts, I am now seeing the posts being reported as 404's in Google Search Console. But most of them are the old url with "trashed" appended to the url. My question is: are these 404's normal? Do I now have to go through and set up 301's for all of these? Is it enough to simply add the lot to my robots.txt file? Are these 404's going to hurt my blog? Thanks, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
Establishing if links are 'nofollow'
Wonder if any of you guys can tell me if there is any other way to tell google links are nofollow other than in the html (ie can you tell google to nofollow every link in a subdomain or something). I'm trying to establish if a couple of links on a very high ranking site are passing me pagerank or not without asking them directly and looking silly! Within the source code for the page they are NOT tagged as nofollow at present. Hope that all makes sense 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Wondering why PR hasn't increased?
Hi there, I’ve been working on a website for about 6 months now and the page rank still remains at 0 - Google Page Rank. Fresh content has been created across the majority of the site, blog implemented, titles and meta’s, schema.org, we've built some good links etc. There are a lot of 404’errors but a lot of this is to do with stocking issues, products being sold/taken down and new products being put up. Do you think this is the major reason the page rank is not moving – but 404’s are a regular occurrence on a lot of E-Commerce sites. Also, the server went off line on two occasions(obviously Google frowns upon this) but in general server is grand. Also when we started working on the website it wasn't in the best of shape DA: 11, now it's DA:17. I know still not great but moving in the right direction. Just wondering yer thoughts on the PR?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | niamhomahony0 -
Do I need to update my previous blog posts with my new SEO strategy'?
Hi Everyone, I have published 46 articles so far on my blog. Recently I changed my SEO strategy including changing main page titles, changing the targeting pages for each keyword, ... . Do you think it is a good thing to go back through all of my blog posts and change the internal link building and modify them accordingly. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Is there any SEO advantage to sharing links on twitter using google's url shortener goo.gl/
Hi is there any advantage to using <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> to shorten a URL for Twitter instead of other ones? I had a thought that <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> might allow google to track click throughs and hence judge popularity.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Don't want to lose page rank, what's the best way to restructure a url other than a 301 redirect?
Currently in the process of redesigning a site. What i want to know, is what is the best way for me to restructure the url w/out it losing its value (page rank) other than a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marig0