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
-
Merging 5 Sites
Hi there We have 5 separate sites which handle different regions/niches that we work in, and we are planning to merge into one so we have a logical path for 301 redirects. The sites have DA's as follows: Site 1 - DA 36
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben10001
Site 2 - DA 31
Site 3 - DA 29
Site 4 - DA 27
Site 5 - DA 20 Does anyone have any experience with how the DA would flow through to the new site? Each site currently relates to a different niche that we work with, and we are planning to keep the content structured similarly, probably like this: https://newtoplevelsite/site1/products, https://newtoplevelsite/site2/products and so on. That makes 301 redirects easy and also gives us more control in managing users and different teams in Wordpress. We would link the different niches through the top menu and links within the pages. Is there a better solution? Would it make more sense to have https://newtoplevelsite/products/site1, https://newtoplevelsite/products/site2, and so on? Thanks for the ideas0 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Hit By Penguin...Wait for recovery or do i change domains?
Hey Guys Would very much appreciate all opinions on our following situation, we have an .uk based ecommerce sports nutrition site www.cardiffsportsnutrition.co.uk Previously we worked with an SEO, that to put it simply did not follow webmaster guidelines(money anchor heavy, bad links etc), we reached some very good ranks too quickly and subsequently after the first penguin we where hit. We didn't receive any link warning or manual penalties just what i am assuming algorithmic...Rankings and traffic drop significantly, but not business ending. Since the first penguin we have done very little to no SEO, some unique content, re-writing of product pages, lots of social activity and didnt really lose much traffic after that, some small ups and down after refresh s and a slight slow decline on some keywords. Come Penguin 2.0...things that where still ranking for have now dropped even further, impressions in webmasters is now down over 50% and we have a had a wkly but not drastic drop in traffic since then. Over the last couple of months we have obtained some good quality links, have added lots of great unique content that has been shared significantly and generated some great traffic to our blog, added more unique product pages and category pages. But organically things are starting to look pretty grim apart from our brand keywords and everything is still in a slow decline and no increase in impressions in webmasters either jsut small drops We have been working to remove the poor quality and toxic links that the previous SEO built,getting anchor text corrected and collating information on the whole process ready to submit a file of links to disavow tool. which we are planning to do within the next couple of wks. Now i have read some successful stories and some not so successful one, so im starting to think of how to deal with this worse case scenario, If our domain is too damaged by the previous SEO guys We have the same domain name but on the .com that will help us carry over our brand name directly, but my concern is even though we have not had any manual penalty and not 301'd the .com back to the .co.uk or any other form of link will the penalties be carried over to the new domain just on the basis of brand association. We wouldn't plan to redirect any of the .co.uk traffic back to the .com but rather focus on our already strong ablate less converting traffic from the likes of twitter and facebook and run a small PPC campaign for some brand keyword to help buffer the traffic loss. While we focus on building good quality links and putting up plenty of new quality content on the site on the new domain that does not have any poor quality links back to it. What im trying to avoid is carry on spending time money and effort on the .co.uk domain for the next 3/4 months and continue to lose traffic slowly and then have to switch the domain anyway. I plan to wait and see for the next 4-6wks after we run the dissavow to but October time would be time i would have to make a decision and go for it. Any advice or opinions would be appreciated marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSN0 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
Does this make sense to recover from panda?
Hello guys, our website was pandalized on 9/27/2012 and we haven't been able to recover since then. I've fixed as much as possible when it comes to poor content, and we have been getting high quality links consistently for the past 3-4 months. Our blog had some duplicate content issues due to categories, tags, feeds, etc. I solved those problems before the past 2 refreshes without success. I'm considering moving the blog to a subdomain, more than PR, I'm interested in recovering from panda, and let the blog grow on its own. What do you think about that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DaveMri0 -
What is wrong with my site?
I could use suggestions/input. My site is consistently being beaten by doorway pages with zero to no content. In fact, on the keyword "lawrenceville plumber" I am being beaten by a KID with a blank wordpress installation. I really need help determining what my issues are and what I can do to help. According to all of the graders, ranks, etc my site is great. I have written tons of unique content, have added a blog unique articles and self-helps. Please help! My site is www.akinsplumbing.net. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0 -
Blog - on the domain or place on separate site, now that Panda ranks for bounce, TOP, depth of visit
Over 10 years ago, we decided to run our blog external to our main website. contrary to conventional wisdom then, we thought we’d have more control/opps for generating external anchor text links, plus working in a bona fide blog software environment (WP). As we had hoped, the blog generated alot of strong inbound links, captured inbound links of it own from other sites and I think, helped improve our SERPs and traffic. Once the blog was established and with the redesign of the website, we capitulated, and finally moved the blog onto the main domain. After reading a number of pieces on Panda and the new reality of SEO, sounds like bounce rates (in particular), time on page, and other GA measures may have a more profound influence on google rankings now. Given that blogs are notoriously for high bounce rates (ours is), low time on site, depth of visit, seems logical that it adversely affects our site averages for the main domain). Is it time to re-consider pulling our blog off the main domain to reassert the ‘true’ GA measures of the main domain? I guess it still gets down to the question... is the advantage of all the inbound links to the blog on the main domain of greater value than moving the blog off-site and reasserting better 'site stats' for google's pando algo? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahw0