Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Was anyone hit by BOTH the 'Phantom' update as well as Penguin 2.0?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

446

nicole.healthline last edited by

I'm interested to know if Phantom was just a "pre-Penguin" 2.0 or if it was a completely different update. Thoughts?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Dr-Pete Staff last edited by

So, I've probably dug into "Phantom" as much as anyone, and I'm afraid the picture isn't very clear. I've heard of people who got hit by Phantom and then recovered at Penguin 2.0, people who got hit and then hit again, and I've seen multiple situations where people got hit by Phantom only.

My gut feeling so far is that this was an independent update and not a Penguin 2.0 test. They might both be related to link factors or seem conceptually similar, but I don't think Phantom was an early or partial release. It happened across data centers and appears to follow a pretty typical algo change pattern.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Does anyone have any experience with DakWak?

We are looking at using it as a translation service but I have SEO concerns. Does anyone have any experience or see any potential problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite

1
Penguin hit Website - Moving to new domain

Hey! I am working on a Penguin hit Website. Still ranking for all brand keywords and blog articles are still being returned in Google SERPs, but the website is showing up for only 3 or 4 money keywords. It is clearly a penguin hit as it was ranked 1st page for all money keywords before latest update (3.0). We already did a link cleanup and disavowed all bad backlinks. Still, the recovery process could take over 2 years from previous experience, and in 2 years, the site will suffer a slow death. Solution: We own the .com version of the domain, currently being served on the .net. We bought the .com version about 6 years ago, it is clean and NOT redirected to the .net (actual site). We were thinking about moving the whole Website to the .com version to start over. However, we need to make sure Google doesn't connect the 2 sites (no pagerank flow). Of course Google will notice is the same content, but there won't be any pagerank flowing from the old site to the new one. For this, we thought about the following steps: Block Googlebot (and only googlebot) for the .net version via robots.txt. Wait until Google removes all URLs from the index. Move content to the .com version. Set a 301 redirect from .net to .com (without EVER removing the block on googlebot). Thoughts? Has anyone went over this before? Other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FedeEinhorn

0
Organic 'not provided data' - strip out brand?

I cannot strip out brand data on the 'not provided' keywords in Google analytics. Is this not possible anymore? I understand we cannot get specific keywords but can we no longer strip out brand on organic traffic in Google analytics for keywords that are 'not provided' ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards

0
On-page optimization - Am I doing it well?

Hi Mozzers, I'm sitting here going through our site and optimizing all of our content.
For the most part we've just written without correct keyword research, so the content lacks focus. Here is a page I would consider finished - http://www.consumerbase.com/international-mailing-lists.html I have our KWs in the: URL Title Tag Meta Description Bolded in Content Image Alt Attribute. If I optimize my other pages like this, will I be good?
It feels a tiny bit stuffed to me, but SEOmoz's on-page tool gives me glowing numbers. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W

0
Panda Updates - robots.txt or noindex?

Hi, I have a site that I believe has been impacted by the recent Panda updates. Assuming that Google has crawled and indexed several thousand pages that are essentially the same and the site has now passed the threshold to be picked out by the Panda update, what is the best way to proceed? Is it enough to block the pages from being crawled in the future using robots.txt, or would I need to remove the pages from the index using the meta noindex tag? Of course if I block the URLs with robots.txt then Googlebot won't be able to access the page in order to see the noindex tag. Anyone have and previous experiences of doing something similar? Thanks very much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ianmcintosh

0
What would your Seo tactic's be for this

Hiya guys... Just a quicken, So my forum, talknightlife.co.uk is currently 10th on google for "nightlife forum" I have about 15 back links, 26 page autority. Now what i'm trying to do, which everyone else is doing, is trying to move it up a couple of spots maybe to 5th or something. What would your tactics be, I'm disregarding all the crap I read in the forums etc, you guys on here tend to have the best explanation. Let it rip 🙂 Cheers guys Luke.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukescotty

0
Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?

Hello there SEOMOZ'ers, Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened? My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered. I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered. I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed. I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten. I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened. If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland! 🙂 Thanks, Shane
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaneod

0
Could targeting 2 geographic locations decrease rankings?

Hello, I think that us targeting 2 different geographic locations (San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT) is negatively effecting the rank of some of our main keywords. My evidence for this: Since December our main keyword (NLP) dropped in ranking for nlpca(dot)com from about 19th to about 40th. This is about when we started to really target 2 different locations. Other main keywords dropped a lot as well, like the important term "NLP Training" Also, our name, nlpca(dot)com indicates NLP California (CA stands for California in Google) The other day we bolded a sentence with the words "Salt Lake City, Utah" at the top of our content and in one of Google's Databases (the one I was looking at) we dropped in rankings for "NLP California" where we used to be completely sitelinked (where we took up a lot of space at the top of the search). Also, we shot up to 1st on my datacenter for both "NLP Utah" and "NLP Salt Lake City". At the same time, our rankings for the term "NLP" dropped off the map. It has come back up, but we've also targeted California again. A lot of our anchor text has the word "California" in it. We're thinking about building a separate site for Utah and just linking to it from the California website when we need to. Does it sound to you, in your experience, that targeting both locations in our case is what's causing a decrease in rankings? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW

0