Was my site hit by Panda or Penguin? Looking for diagnosis help
-
My URL is: www.westlakedermatology.com
Hello Mozers,
I'm looking for some help or guidance as to why my site fell off the "rankings cliff" on 9/5. In the forums I hear a lot of others with a similar issue, and some speculation it is due to a Panda refresh. However, looking at our site we have unique content with each page having over 300-400 words (so it's not light or duplicate content). We get a lot of leads that verbally tell us our content helped answer some of their questions so I'm pretty confident its good for users. Can anyone see an issue with the content on our site?
In terms of Penguin, I think our backlink profile is clean, our physicians do take part in providing content to various high quality and relevant websites/blogs. But we do not buy links or do anything in violation of Google's guidelines.
In terms of brand, we are the biggest dermatology and plastic surgery group in the Austin area. So any brand implications to search should be on our side.
Just looking for some sort of guidance or help, any suggestions would be great!
Thanks,
Adam Paddock -
Take a look at the Panguin Tool - http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
This tool uses the organic traffic from your GA account and overlays the dates of major Google updates. You can then see if a Google update resulted in a sudden drop in your organic search traffic. Once you know this you can look at what changed as part of that update and check this against your live site.
-
I think your brand name could be mistaken as it is quite long, but I don't think that would make much difference with your link profile. It just isn't natural.
I guess branding is built from a number of signals, such as social media, domain names etc. Those anchors differ from your domain and your facebook.
I suspect Google is more likely to see your brand as "Westlake Dermatology".
-
Hi Yiannis, thanks for the great feedback. Our actual brand name is Westlake Dermatology & Cosmetic Surgery (and some people commonly refer to us as Westlake Dermatology as we started off just in dermatology). So do you think it's a case of Google seeing it as over optimized anchor text when in fact it is our brand name?
-
Hi Christopher,
I think the answer is pretty obvious,the rule applies to anchor texts of specific keyphrases that are non branded. Google allows a higher threshold of brand name anchor texts because that's how people would naturally link to you. High percentage domain/brand match anchor text is generally a very good SEO practice (way before Penguin release).
In the case of our friend here we have an EMD and 80-90% of his overal link profile with exact and contextual anchor text links. Also the exact key phrase he down-ranked is around 10% of the profile. I am pretty sure that there is not a rule set in stone with % for NON-branded keyphrases but **from my experience (thus not necessarily a rule) **in the sector I work at when I had to deal with penalised sites this was one of the common features I dealt with.
Again, the answers are within his data!
Regards
-
Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much
I've seen comments like this before but I've never been clear on what it means. Does this rule apply to anchor text with brand names or the name of the website? For example, isn't it natural for the anchor text "Nike" to be frequently used for the URL nike.com?
Best,
Christopher -
Hi Jonathan, thank you for your response, I totally thought most of those site wide links you are referring to were no follow (at least they were no follow the last time I checked). But I just popped them in opensiteexplorer and it does seem to be follow now. I'll get that cleaned up and see if that helps
-
I recently had to deal with an identical case but I would never be able to tell you for sure unless I have a look at your google webamsters and google analytics data. Go and have a look at your site impressions, visits per and avg.position drops. Make sure that you have comparison on so you can see how your pages and keywords respond to last months.
Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much (have seen web sites with more not being penalised so this is not a rule) and it would be good to keep it a bit lower around 5-6%. That goes for your contextual anchor text links which in your case seems to be 80-90% of your profile.
All these ofcourse are guesses and speculation based on my experience, only your data will tell what happens but what Jonathan suggests above wont harm you, quiet the contrary it will improve your link profile.
-
I have had a quick look at your site via opensiteexplorer. It would seem you are a featured site for allaboutthepretty, which is generating huge numbers of unnatural links pointing at your site with identical anchor text.
My first port of call would be reviewing your link profile, and removing these spammy links. I suspect the 1139 links with "westlake dermatology cosmetic surgery" as anchor text is contributing to a penguin penalty.
There are some other spammy links as well such as "face list austin tx" 2138 links. You should try to avoid site-wide sidebar links from other sites that generate huge numbers of links. For instance mommypr site has alot of image links, and 3boysandadog site too.
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.westlakedermatology.com
Edit: Just to add, you don't have to remove good links that provide traffic, but do make sure they add rel="nofollow" to the sitewide links such as mommypr.
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
-
Mobile Site Panda 4.2 Penalty
We are an ecommerce company, and we outsource our mobile site to a service, and our mobile site is m.ourdomain.com. We pass the Google mobile ready test. Our product page content on the mobile site is woefully thin (typically less than 100 words), and it appears that we got hit with Panda 4.2 on the mobile site. Starting at the end of July, our mobile rankings have dropped, and our mobile traffic is now about half of what it was in July. We are working to correct the content issue but it obviously takes time. So here's my question - if our mobile site got hit with Panda 4.2, could that have a negative effect on our desktop site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Penguin recovery, no manual action. Are our EMD sites killing our brand site?
Hi guys, Our brand site (http://urban3d.net) has been seeing steady decline due to algorithm updates for the past two years. Our previous SEO company engaged in some black-hat link building which has hurt us very badly. We have recently re-launched the site, with better design, better content, and completed a disavow of hundreds of bad links. The site is technically indexed, but is still nowhere in the SERPs after months of work to recover it by our internal marketing team. The last SEO company also told us to build EMD sites for our core services, which we did: http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/ http://propertybrochure.com/ http://kitchencgi.com/ My question is - could these EMD sites now hurting us even further and stopping our main brand site from ranking? Our plan is to rescue our brand site, with a view to retiring these outlier sites. However, with no progress on the brand site, we can't afford to remove these site (which are ranking). It seems a bit chicken and egg. Any advice would be very much appreciated. Aidan, Urban 3D
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aidancass0 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
How come this site does so well?
Hi Guys, It's bugging the crap out of me why this site does so well http://www.stagedinburgh.com/ when I look at it's link profile its so weak and terrible plus many links comes from the sites they own. Somehow the site out ranks many sites for search terms like edinburgh stag party, edinburgh stag do, edinburgh stag weekends. Am I missing something? They seem to only have links from 13 domains and they aint great. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
Severe health issues are found on your site. - Check site health (GWT)
Hi, We run a Magento website - When i log in to Google Webmaster Tools, I am getting this message: Severe health issues are found on your site. - <a class="GNHMM2RBFH">Check site health
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
</a>Is robots.txt blocking important pages? Some important page is blocked by robots.txt. Now, this is the weird part - the page being blocked is the admin page of magento - under
www.domain.com/index.php/admin/etc..... Now, this message just wont go away - its been there for days now - so why does Google think this is an "important page"? It doesnt normally complain if you block other parts of the site ?? Any ideas? THanks0 -
Looking for guest blogging sites
Hello, Does anyone have a list or a few good guest blogging sites like Myblogguest.com and guestblogit.com (is this a good on?) where you get a link back in return for a quality post? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Load balanced Site
Our client ecommerce site load from 3 different servers using load balancing. abc.com : IP: 222.222.222 Abc.com: IP: 111.111.111 For testing purpose 111.111.111 also point to beta.abc.com Now google crawling site beta.abc.com If we block beta.abc.com using robots.txt it will block google bot also , since beta.abc.com is really abc.com I know its confusing but I been trying to figure out. Ofcourse I can ask my dev to remove beta.abc.com make a seperate code and block it using .htaccess
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tpt.com0 -
Scapers and Other Sites Outranking
Post panda, there is definitely more talk about scrapers or other (more authoritative) sites outranking the original content creators in the SERPS. The most common way this problem is addressed (from what I've seen) is by rewriting the content and try your hardest to be the first one to be indexed or just ignoring it from an on page standpoint and do more link dev. Does anyone have any advice on the best way to address? Should site owners be looking deeper into their analytics and diagnostics before doing the rewrites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0