Penguine 2.0 Confusion
-
I am getting seriously confused over our rankings and am hoping someone can give me a bit of clarity.
When Penguin 2.0 hit last week we saw a drop of between 2 – 6 places on seven out of a set of around a dozen key phrases I monitor. We had been in the number 1 / 2 position for the majority of them over the last year – 18 months, and this drop has reduced our traffic by around 30 – 35%.
I have looked at our back link profile - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.wombatwebdesign.com%2F, and I don’t think it is that bad. Being a web design company the vast majority, 80% of the links are from the footer of client sites. We have a small, 5% number of links from comments; a similar amount of dead links and the rest are made up of the usual, profile, directory and article links.
I was wondering if the way we link from client sites could be an issue, we link twice, once with the anchor text (Web Design Cumbria) and the second link is our company branding (Wombat Web Design, with the title tag – Web Design Cumbria). Could this be causing a problem?
If anyone could point me in the right direction I would be most grateful.
Thanks
Fraser
-
I am even more confused, we removed 90% of the anchor text links and we have just dropped again. Does anyone have any ideas what we are doing wrong?
Thanks
Fraser
-
I know! 24 hours does not seem about right with SEO and marketing!.
I would also look at this resource on how to balance anchor text. http://moz.com/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization.
Good luck!!
-
Thanks for your help, I have had a look at our linking anchor text and it is some what keyword-rich. We are going to remove the majority of the keyword-rich links and just leave them with our branding to see if that makes a difference. I have always been careful with our link building, so I am fairly confident that not the issue, if things don't pick up I will look to either turn some of them to no-follow or have them only on the home page.
Content is defiantly the way to go, if only there were more hours in the day!
Thanks again.
Fraser
-
Footer links like that can end up hurting you. I have a web design and client site like you, but I do not put my link on all client sites. Nor do I use anchor text heavy links. Try building out some more links through guest blogging or promotional opportunities. This can help to balance out your link profile to seem less spammy
-
The links from your clients' sites could definitely be a problem, especially if you are using keyword-rich anchor text. Consider just using your brand name for the footer links, as that is relatively safe. Or consider just getting one or two links from your client sites from their homepage or "about" page.
-
I would nofollow your links.They're probably dragging you down because they're not natural.
This video is on topic from Matt Cutts himself http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuhSmwsL7s -
Did you look at your anchor text profiles for each word you´ve been degraded?. Ive seen that Penguin has good taste for overoptimization, especially on anchor text and low quality links.
I found this posts very helpful to overturned some Penguin attacks last year: Google Penguin AntiSpam. Another resource on strategies to combat the little penguin is right here.
You could also wait it out, maybe its not penguin, it just some SERP fluctuation. Good luck, hope the best!
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
-
Recommended action for site hit by penguin ?
What is more advisable, though there surely could be debate on this? Back in '07 till sometime around a year ago it seems our site got hit by google's updates, no manual action though, and have seen in past few months disavowed what we could find as well as deleted a lot of links. We are also working on getting word out on the brand as well and trying to get on some business websites to have articles and offer some discounts. Our keyword rankings seem stuck in limbo the past year or so though. Some main keywords for example seem stuck around page 8 when they used to be on page 1. Question is, can what seems to be a penguin update be recovered from? Is Google likely to refresh the algorithm? Also could starting a new site be more worth the investment - starting fresh with natural links, etc And if googles system could pick up that the site is run from same ip, etc. would they care? Also the keyword competition one of Moz's tools said around 46% if that makes a difference for one of the main keywords. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | xelaetaks0 -
Panda 4.0 Suggestions
My site was hit pretty negatively by Panda 4.0 and I am at a loss for the best way to address it. I have read like every article that I can and I know there is some duplicate manufacturer product descriptions but I don't hear many other ecoms complaining about Panda so I figure it must be something else. Also, the pages that seem most negatively affected are category and product list pages. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks! http://bit.ly/1plgOzM
Algorithm Updates | | Gordian0 -
Page 2 to page 1
I've found a lot of times it does not take much activity to get a keyword from ranking on page 3 of Google or further down to page 2 but there seems to be a hurdle from page 2 to page 1. It is very frustrating to be between 11 and 15 but not being able to make that push to 9 or 10. Has anyone got or seen any data to justifiy this?
Algorithm Updates | | S_Curtis0 -
Post penguin & panda update. what would be a good seo strategies for brand new sites
Hi there. I have the luxury of launching a few sites after the penguin and panda updates, so I can start from scratch and hopefully do it right. I will get SEO companies to help me with this so i just want to ask for advices on what would be a good strategies for a brand new site. my understand of the new updates is this content and user experience is important, like how long they spend, how many pages etc social media is important. we intent to engage FB and twitter alot. in New Zealand, not too many people use google+ so we will probbaly just concentrate on the first two hopefully we will try to get people to share our website via social media, apparent that is important should only concentrate on high quality backlinks with a good diverse set of alt tags, but concentrate on branding rather than keywords. Am i correct to say that so far? if that is the principle, what would be the strategy to implement these goals? Links to any articles would also be great please. Love learning. i just want to do this right and hopefully try to future proof the sites against updates as possible. i guess quality content and links will most likely to be safe. Thank you for your help.
Algorithm Updates | | btrinh0 -
Recovered from penguin/panda but which one?
So the good news is that for the first time since April 24th, one of our websites is back in the search results as of around December 12 but I am still unsure as whether it was panda or penguin (or both) that was impacting the site?? Note this was not a manual penalty. I diagnosed it as a penguin issue (drop on April 24th, aggressive on-page optimisation, around 10% of links from spammy directories like addyourfreelinks.com with anchor text built by a questionable agency), but on further advice it was thought that panda was also an issue because it is a hotel microsite so there was duplication with our own brand site and across third party travel sites and there were a number of pages with bare content. I figured it was a good time to clean everything up to address both. Here is a summary of actions taken: submitted disavow file on October 24th with all questionable links including actions taken and comments. Since then I have cleaned up some content so it is less aggressively targeting certain keywords. Amended several third party listings with duplicate content No follow,indexed pages that were directly duplicated with our brand site and over the last month have built a few good quality links. Cleaned up 404's in webmaster tools over the last week I have searched to see if there were any algorithm updates around December 12 but cannot find any mentions. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | jay.raman0 -
Penguin Update and Long Tail Keywords
Since the Penguin update, organic traffic for our site; oxygenconcentratorstore.com
Algorithm Updates | | chuck-layton
has dropped almost 25%. The thing I cannot figure out is that when I compare April 1<sup>st</sup> to May 15<sup>th</sup> (before the update) and June 1<sup>st</sup> to July 15<sup>th</sup> (after); 8 of our top keywords are up. Our 2 main keywords are up 15% and 11%. Where we lost most of our traffic is from our longtail keywords. We have almost 1000 longtail keyword phrases that we got visits from in the April/May period that we did not get in the June/July period. Is there a reason why our top keywords would continue to improve while we most of the longtail keywords?? If Google penalized us, won’t all of our keywords be dropping and just not the longtail. Any help/info would be awesome. Thanks.0 -
Panda / Penguin Behavior ? Recovery?
Our site took a major fall on March 23rd, ie Panda 3.4 and then another smaller one on April 24th, ie Penguin. I have posted a few times in here trying get help on what items to focus on. Been doing this for 13 years, white hat, never chased algos but of course learned as I went. As soon as the fall hit one expert said it was links, which I kinda doubted because we never went after them but we have some but only a handful in comparison to really good authorative links. I concentrated on cleaning up duplicate content due to tags in a blog that only had 7 posts (an add on section to the site) then focuses efforts on just going through and making content better. Had other overlapping content that I would guess would pass inspection but I cleaned it up. After 6 weeks no movement back up, another expert here said yes, he saw some bad links so I should check it out. So back to focusing on links, I actually run a report and discover questionable links, and successfully get about 25 removed. Low numbers but we have only about 50 that were questionable. No contact info on the other directories so I guess we are stuck. Here is where I just go in circles... When our site fell on March 23rd we had 13 of our main pages still ranking at number 1 and 2 on each keyword phrase. Penguin hit and they fell about 10 spots. EXCEPT, one... This one keyword phrase and page stayed on top and ranked at #1 throught he storm. (finally fell to #4 but still remains up there). The whole site is down 90%, we only have 3 fair keyword phrases really ranking out of 250. The mystery is that the keyword phrase that was ranking was the one that supposedly had way over the % of anchor text, 7% of our links go to that page. The other pages that fell on Penguin had no pages linking back. I have been adding blog posts to our site, I post one an in a few days it gets indexed, have one of those ranking at #2 for the keyword, moved up from #4 a week after posting it in the blog. (google searches shows 80K) Just seems like the site should bounce back if new content is able to rank, why not the old? Did other people hit by Panda and Penguin see a sitewide fall or are they still ranking for some terms? I would love to see some discusson on success stories of bouncing back after Panda and Penguin. I see the WP success story but that was pretty sudden after it was brought to Google's attention. Looking for that small business that fixed something and saw improvement. Give me hope here please.
Algorithm Updates | | Force70 -
Rankings moving in every 2 days.
Hi, I am seeing strange behavior of Google for my rankings. I have a very competitive keyword (I can't disclose because of NDA) but for example keyword like "Cameras" on google.co.uk , it stayed on #4 spot for years, we have been practising all good SEO techniques for this. From last couple of weeks, it goes to 9 then stays there for 2 days, then come back to 4 for 2 days, then go back to 9 & then after 2 days come back to 4 & it is keep moving like that... at the time of this post, this one is on 9. Our site have been on top for very competitive kws even like word "Camera" we are 2 which is stable... None of our other kws ranks are changed but only word "Cameras" is affected. I am not sure how & why this is happening, I have been following SEOMoz from long time & hope can find solution here. Note : Keywords used here are not actual, but carry equal importance Please let me know.
Algorithm Updates | | spopli0