Penguin 2.0 drop due to poor anchor text?
-
Hi,
my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update, and after years of designing my website with SEO in mind, generating unique content for users, and only focusing on relevant websites in my link building strategy, I'm a bit disheartened by the drop in traffic.
Having rolled out a new design of my website at the start of April, I suspect that I've accidentally messed up the structure of the website, making my site difficult to crawl, or making Google think that my site is spammy. Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, the number 1 anchor text in the site is "remove all filters" - which is clearly not what I want! The "remove all filters" link on my website appears when my hotels page loads with filters or sorting or availability dates in place - I included that link to make it easy for users to view the complete hotel listing again. An example of this link is towards the top right hand side of this page:
http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/agganis-arena-hotels/300382?star=2
With over 6000 venues on my website, this link has the potential to appear thousands of times, and while the anchor text is always "remove all filters", the destination URL will be different depending on the venue the user is looking at. I'm guessing that to Google, this looks VERY spammy indeed!?
I tried to make the filtering/sorting/availability less visible to Google's crawl when I designed the site, through the use of forms, jquery and javascript etc., but it does look like the crawl is managing to access these pages and find the "remove all filters" link. What is the best approach to take when a standard "clear all..." type link is required on a listing page, without making the link appear spammy to Google - it's a link which is only in place to benefit the user - not to cause trouble!
My final question to you guys is - do you think this one sloppy piece of work could be enough to cause my site to drop significantly following the Penguin 2.0 update, or is it likely to be a bigger problem than this? And if it is probably due to this piece of work, is it likely that solving the problem could result in a prompt rise back up the rankings, or is there going to be a black mark against my website going forward and slow down recovery?
Any advice/suggestions will be greatly appreciated,
Thanks
Mike
-
Go to majestic SEO, type your url in. If your keywords you got penalized for are over 10% diversity you are being penalized generally, however there are a few exceptions, but not many. I analyzed 440 sites and found that the highest was 2.47 for a site that didn't have keywords in the url.
Also, I suggest you read this http://dailyseotip.com/what-other-marketing-firms-want-you-to-believe-that-isnt-true/3356/ I see that you are really focused on Onpage SEO. I think this will help you understand more.
The next thing you may want to do is start contacting admins and deleting low quality links if you have them. Use OSE and figure out low quality links. There are only a handful of directories I recommend out their. I have a message from Google telling one of my clients to get rid of their directory links, it was and example link coming from a directory site to be exact. Never use a keyword at a directory site, always use Brand name or your URL.
Make sure your Disavow is your last resort and I highly suggest you get someone to do it that has experience in it. Many have messed this up and really hurt their website.
Have a great day.
-
Hi Mat,
thanks for your reply. I'll definitely change the link, but I agree that it would be harsh if it was the sole reason for the 30% drop in organic traffic.
There are definitely some directories linking to ConcertHotels.com - at one stage I used the SEOmoz list of directories and got my website listed on some of the recommendations from the list. But my strategy for the last two years has been to approach venue's own websites and ask if they'd be interested in linking to our nearby hotels page, as a useful resource for their visitors. This strategy has worked quite well for me, and to me it sounds like a very natural, sensible link building strategy. I'll certainly work through my list of backlinks, but I would hope that the majority of them are from very relevant websites (due to the strategy I adopted). I guess there could be a percentage that I have not had any control over however, and I guess I should disavow these?
As for the directories, should I now be disavowing directory links? I didn't think that the percentage of directory links to my site would be that high -I used the directory link strategy in the past to simply enhance the number of links to my homepage - the strategy I described above is one which achieve links to specific pages throughout my website, not my homepage, so I felt the need to grow the number of homepage links.
Thanks again for your help and advice
Mike
-
That link is not ideal, but I really do not believe that it would cause the sort of drop you are talking about.
If you think you have been hit by penguin 2 then I'd start looking at your backlinks with a critical eye. I just stuck your domain into majestic seo and I hit a lot of questionable directories pretty quickly. That might be unfair - I certainly haven't analysed in any depth. However I took 10 domains at random and 9 were sites that at best are not helping you much.
If you're looking for a cause of a drop I'd say you could do worse than going through your backlink profile.
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
-
Magento 2.1 Multi Store / SEO
This is quite technical but I'm hoping a Magento expert can clear this up for me. Currently my company has two websites on separate Opencart platforms. What I'm doing now is building a Magento website and using the multi store function as well as a few modules to combine the two sites, the aim being that the link juice is shared and I can focus my SEO efforts on the one site instead of two, thus reducing my workload while maintaining the benefits. This is the intended layout: www.domain.com www.domain.com/us I have created a sub-folder (not a subdomain) as this seems to be the best way to share link juice between the new, combined sites (as well as 301s from the old, redundant site). At the moment I have created 2 separate websites, stores and store views (see attached) and have configured it according to the Magento guide, so I know that technically this is correct but I need to make sure that I have done it correctly in relation to SEO. Is the sub-folder set up correctly for instance? Currently the only files to populate that sub-folder are a htaccess, error log and index.php (see attached). Also, is there anything I could be missing in relation to SEO within the parameters of what I am trying to achieve? Additionally, only one store view appears in the "change store view" section of the home page. This is causing me to question if I have set it up correctly, because I had assumed both store views would appear even if they were under different websites (attached). OR do I simply use the same website and create two stores and store views? Do I also need to create a separate database for each website/store/store view? I would very much appreciate if someone could help out here. Thank you. In1Gi7t pyfM03y nUQoMz1
Web Design | | moon-boots0 -
Questions in regard to putting 2-3 keywords in a title tag.
Hi all, Here is the situation. There are two services A and B in the page. B is more like a complement to A (they have something in common). C is the umbrella term over A and B. However, our company focuses more on A (70%) than B (30%). Questions: 1. Can I rank the keyword A for the page, while the page has B? (e.g. A | brand name) Will it hurt the seo, with B being in the page? 2. If I write the title tag this way: A | B | brand name . Will A and B dilute each other? 3. How about this: **A | C | brand name **(the idea behind this: We focus on A, but also include C because we have B in the page.) Does this make any sense? I am a newbie to SEO and I realize that could be confusing. Thank you for any support and explanation.
Web Design | | Raymondlee0 -
Google text-only vs rendered (index and ranking)
Hello, can someone please help answer a question about missing elements from Google's text-only cached version.
Web Design | | cpawsgo
When using JavaScript to display an element which is initially styled with display:none, does Google index (and most importantly properly rank) the elements contents? Using Google's "cache:" prefix followed by our pages url we can see the rendered cached page. The contents of the element in question are viewable and you can read the information inside. However, if you click the "Text-only version" link on the top-right of Google’s cached page, the element is missing and cannot be seen. The reason for this is because the element is initially styled with display:none and then JavaScript is used to display the text once some logic is applied. Doing a long-tail Google search for a few sentences from inside the element does find the page in the results, but I am not certain that is it being cached and ranked optimally... would updating the logic so that all the contents are not made visible by JavaScript improve our ranking or can we assume that since Google does return the page in its results that everything is proper? Thank you!0 -
Hi, I have a doubt. If we want to hide unwanted text in a web page its possible with "" tag. And my question "does a search engine crawl those text? help me.
I want to hide a lot of text behind my site page. I know its possible with that tag. But in what way a search engine looks at those text? Hidden or they are crawled and indexed.
Web Design | | FhyzicsBCPL0 -
Is this causing me to drop in rank?
Today I noticed I was dropping (pretty big jump) for some keywords, so I checked out the source of a page, and noticed that my source code has two canonical urls. One to the home page, and one to the /page-title. I just changed themes recently, and the dropped happened after I changed themes. Is this what's causing me to drop in rank for certain terms? You can view the source here: http://noahsdad.com/physical-characteristics/
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
What is the difference of HTML5 and web 2.0? What is web 2.0 and is this better for seo?
A little bit confused with the new stuff. The web 2.0 webpages are so much better? What changes?
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
$100 to who discovers why our rankings drop
I'm offering $100 to the SEO that pinpoints why our rankings dropped. Here's details: Some very good people have this site: nlpca(dot)com and it has dropped for many of it's keywords, including the keywords "NLP" "NLP Training" and many other keywords. We dropped from 19th to 42nd for the term "NLP". Here's what I'm doing about it: (1) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the titles reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more. (2) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the URLs reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more. (3) We're redoing the home page as (1) above. (4) We're fixing the 404s (5) We're shortening the titles that are too long, and we're thinking of reducing the home page keyword count to 3 keyword phrases, although 4 keywords work in all of our other sites that have the keywords showing up at least 3 times in the content. If it is something else, and you pinpoint it, and if because of you, we rise back up to around 19th (more or less) again then we'll give you $100 payable via paypal as a thank you. I'm going to leave this question 'unanswered' until this is resolved.
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Switched From Wordpress, Traffic Dropped In Half
Hello, Thank you for taking a look at my issue. My site: http://www.getrightmusic.com A month ago, I switched from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine. The reason being I wanted a more powerful membership functionality with media uploading. After I switched, my traffic basically dropped in half. I was averaging around 4-6,000 unique visitors per day and now I am at about 2,000 per day. I resubmitted a new sitemap to Google webmasters. I also set up 301 redirects on my top 80 urls that were ranking well and driving traffic in Google. Not only did Google kick me off of my top spots in the SERP's, but I no longer get indexed as quickly as I used to. With the old Wordpress site I would get url's indexed within minutes. Now they aren't even getting indexed really at all. Is this a normal occurrence when switching site designs and systems? Do you think Google will just take a little time before they give me back some respect? Is there anything I should be doing to get back to ranking and getting indexed faster? Thanks for any help or any insight you may have. Jesse
Web Design | | getrightmusic0