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
-
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
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 -
Website Drops Some Traffic after Redesign. What's Happening?
What it is NOT: No Link was broken. I have used Moz, Screaming Frog, Excel, etc - there are not broken links. We have not added spammy links. We kept the same amount of links and content on the homepage - with an exception of 1 or 2. All the pages remained canonical. Our blog uses rel=prev rel=next, and each page is canonicalized to itself. We do not index duplicated content. Our tags are content="noindex,follow" We are using the Genesis Framework (we were not before.) Load time is quicker - we now have a dedicated server. Webmaster tools has not reported any crawl report problems. What we did that should have improved our rankings and traffic: Implemented schema.org Responsive design Our bounce rate is down - Average visit length is up. Any ideas?
Web Design | | Thriveworks-Counseling0 -
Web traffic tanked, not Penguin nor Panda...I am stumped...
I have had my current website for several years now, and traffic has been slowly building. 2010 = 49 hits a day, 2011 = 71 hits a day, 2012 = 157 hits a day. I target local traffic and local keywords around by business. I have kept up with SEO changes, using Facebook, social media, updated tags, and kept content fresh, added more galleries images, Auth tags & markup. I have 301 older sites that I have run in the past. Then early this spring everything dropped, slowly but surely, now I'm at 90 hits a day SERPS for my main phrase "boudoir photography" us at less than 50 according to MOZ. I have been watching the new Algo updates, and never had any issues because I don't spam article marketing, I don't buy links, I try to keep content fresh, I don't use directories...I designed the site for PEOPLE not SEO. I get major press about once to twice a year, newspapers still don't get links though.. grrrrr I get natural links through gallery shows, events, local blogs, art shows... So I thought it might be over the year I have slowly added too many less than 100 word pages? Media, Bio, Art I combined all into one page. One page with 300+ words VS 3 pages of 100 words. I did a 301 several pages and trimmed my menu down from 11 to 8 to help everything look cleaner and more eye pleasing...I started asking my friends/clients/collaborators for more links with no link text so they are natural...& not just "boudoir photography" Traffic is still dropping... What have I missed? www.bayareaboudoir.com
Web Design | | Squee0 -
Affected by the Penguin 2.0...Lost Rankings!! Which one from the following causes did that?
Hi Moz Community, we lost our rankings for almost all of our keywords due to penguin 2.0 I'm trying to rectify the situation by getting our rankings back and better. Here are the potential causes for our rankings drop. 1. My Company has the exact same site (in English) on different country-specific domains. companyname.com, companyname.ch, companyname.ca, companyname.nl etc.. We are using link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://companyname.com" **Would this solve the duplicate content issue? ** 2. All the international domains have footer links in the homepages, pointing to our main .com site. Google webmaster tools shows that every page on these international domains as a backlink source. Would that be a problem? Should I ask our web designers to remove those footer links from the international domains? 3. In the past, our company had a partnership with forum...Like the forum promotes our company's services. I don't know how did that forum promoted our site, But Google webmaster tools shows that we have some 25K backlinks from that forum!!! But when I try to visit those backlinks, none of those pages have any links to our site....Could they be hidden? Or Some thing wrong with GWT? I'd appreciate your valuable suggestions to help us understand the situation better... Thank you.
Web Design | | hninformer0 -
Can white text over images hurt your SEO?
Hi everyone, I run a travel website that has about 30 pre-search city landing pages. In a redesign last year we added large "hero" images to the top of the page, and put our h1 headlines on top of them in white. The result is attractive, but I'm wondering if Google could be reading this page as "white text on white page", which is an obvious no-no, especially if it could seem that we're trying to hide text. Here's an example: http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/ H1: Expert reviews of cheap hotels in Paris I should add that our SERPs for these city pages has dropped (for "Cheap hotels in X"), but it could obviously be related to other issues. Any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks! Tom
Web Design | | TomNYC0 -
Will updating our site from ASP .NET 3.5 to ASP .NET 4.0 negatively affect SEO?
I've checked out some of the other posts related to .NET upgrades, but none specifically address ASP .NET 4.0. I understand that there are many advantages to upgrading, but as with any change made to site code I want to be 110% positive that this upgrade will not affect how Google ranks my client's pages. Since the URL extension isn't changing (will remain .aspx), I'm thinking that there won't be much of an affect on SEO at all. In fact, I'm making the argument that the upgrade will only improve page rank. Anyone go through this upgrade and experience any immediate benefits or disadvantages? Thanks for your help!
Web Design | | FreightTEK0 -
How does the toolbar caclulate text to code ratio?
I am seeing some very weird text to code ratios on a competitor site (over 100%) through the Analyze feature on the SEOmoz toolbar. I'm wondering how that's calculated, and what my competitors might be doing to raise that ratio so high artificially. I need to turn in a report on this soon, any help is greatly appreciated!! EHR
Web Design | | EHR0