Affected by the Penguin 2.0...Lost Rankings!! Which one from the following causes did that?

[hninformer]

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.

[hninformer]

Hey Chris,

Even I had the same reaction when I first started with this company, Why would you need all these sites...With the exact same content. They have different plans and ideas or probably misguided by some SEO guy!

Regarding the vast number of links from the forum, None of the backlink tools like OSE, Ahrefs is showing those links apart from GWT.

I'm thinking to Disavow that forum's domain. Hopefully, that should work!!

Thank for the response.

[nurzhyk]

You must understand what Penguin is AntiWebSpam filter. You must control backlink profile of your site. Your profile must looking naturally. Not only your targeted keywords as anchor texts, not only backlinks on your homepage. For understanding structure of your backlink profile you can use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs (OSE on my opinion not perfect). And often after checking backlink profile I clearly understand what is wrong.

[Chris.Menke]

What's the purpose of having all those duplicate sites?  Why not just 301 them and eliminate that as a possible cause of the problem--especially if some of them are showing up in the results?  That would take care of #2, as well.  As far as #3, have you tried any other tools to see if you can look at those links--OSE, MajesticSEO, or Ahrefs?  Have you communicated with the webmaster there about them, documented it, and disavowed them?

[hninformer]

Hi Tom,

First of all, thanks lot for your reply.

Funny thing is, Despite having the rel="alternate" included in our international domains. Some of them are ranking and in fact outranking our .com domain pages for some keywords.

How is that possible?

And your suggestion about putting a nofollow for the footer links is something I'm thinking to do.

[TomRayner]

Hi Eduard

First of all, if your site was effected by the Penguin 2.0 update, then your duplicate page content wouldn't have been the trigger.  That has to do with the Panda algorithm (which is now part of the main algorithm), so if the drop came during the Penguin update, you could have a whole number of different problems with your site as well.

My advice would be to run your site through the Panguin tool: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

This will line up your organic traffic with announced Google updates - see if your drop matches up with the Penguin update.  If it does, then you have a whole number of things to check about the inbound links to your website.

To answer the questions you posted:

1. That should do the trick - the only problem is that by setting a canonical version you are instructing Google not to rank or consider any of the alternate versions. A more ideal solution in my opinion would be to rewrite the content for the other sites, ensuring no chance of a duplicate content penalty and giving the other sites a chance to rank.

2. I've seen this be a problem with Penguin before and every time I've seen it fixed the links have either been removed or have been made nofollow.  You may want to limit the amount of pages the footer links appear (just core landing pages) and also make them nofollow.

Hope this helps