Have I been Hit by a Penguin? No Warning in Webmaster / Some Pages still Rank

[speedingorange]

Hi all,

I have recently signed up to MOZ as I have seen a large drop in the turnover of a site I work with as well as a slump in visitors.

I know part of this slump is the transition from google product search from being free to paid and chewing through our adwords budget quicker.

The other part though seems a little more tricky, I have always been under the impression from reading online that an algorithm update would see a site destroyed for most terms and a notification generated in webmaster tools, however the site still seems to still rank for some terms, others however it has fallen off the face of the earth for.

As you can see in the attachment webmaster tools is showing much decreased visibility, and MOZ agrees with this. Key terms that have lost rank have done so by around 4-10 positions.

The content on the site has all been hand written by myself, however some of the pages are a little "stale" so I am currently running through re-writing every product page on the site (1000 products or so) all my product pages grade a minimum B with 99% A on the Moz page grader.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that fresh content should assist in getting google interested again?

However my real questions is, Is this Penguin? or is this just stale content?

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[speedingorange]

Thanks for the detailed response, It is very much appreciated.

[GregB123]

Hello speedingorange,

You wrote:  "I have always been under the impression from reading online that an algorithm update would see a site destroyed for most terms and a notification generated in webmaster tools, however the site still seems to still rank for some terms, others however it has fallen off the face of the earth for. "

I think you have it backwards. The Panda update, which is NOT algorithmic, is the one that would that would "see a site destroyed for most terms and a notification generated in webmaster tools".  The Penguin update, which IS algorithmic, is the one that would cause "site still seems to still rank for some terms, others however it has fallen off the face of the earth for".  And a Penguin penalty does not result in a Google Webmaster Tools notification.  (That is my understanding. I'm sure someone will correct me if I am mixed up, And I am OK with being corrected.)

Two of my sites are suffering from what I believe is Penguin damage. For both the damage is a lot of rank lost for only a few keyword phrases. Other phrases continue to rank normally. When I did a bunch of keyword research (using Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic results blended together) I found that the few keyword phrases that I severely lost rank for had both:

1. a high percentage of Follow links using exactly those phrases as anchor text, and
2. links from sources that didn't really pertain to the anchor text or to our website.

My understanding is that these are the type of things that Penguin will bite you for. So we did remove or change a few of the anchor text links, and did a Google Disavow on most of the remaining links. We did leave a few anchor text links that were from good pertinent sites. This was done in early June, and we still have not seen any results. I have read that we will not see any big results from submitting a Disavow file until Google updates Penguin again. So we are keeping our fingers crossed until then.

Couple of quick things to explore if you are going to try a similar rescue. First, we did not pay any attention to our NoFollow links since they supposedly do not effect rankings. Second, we did create a nice file of follow links from all our link research, and used it as an additional submission with the Link Detox tool (the spreadsheet report from that tool is very valuable when checking for overoptimized anchor text). Third, we disavowed entire domains rather than individual links because we heard that was most effective.

Good luck!

[speedingorange]

I will give it a read.

Many THanks

James

[Chris.Menke]

It's not stale content.  As the dates in the graph appear to correspond to Penguin 2.0, I'd be thinking along those lines.

Google algorithm change history: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

[RomeoMadrid]

I really recommend you to read this Case Study. It's quite long, but it will help you to understand how to use this and some other tools to find out if you where a Penguin's Victim.

http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/elearners-penguin-2-0-penalty-analysis/

[speedingorange]

Thanks Romeo,

I will be sure to check this out ASAP.

[RomeoMadrid]

Hello  speedingorange,

You can use this tool to find out if you have any Toxic inbound links. https://www.linkresearchtools.com/members/signup.php?product=linkdetox

Once you've discovered it, you can ask to Disavow them from your Google Webmaster Tools account and wait a couple of weeks to have them removed.

Good luck,

Romeo.