An Unfair Content related penalty :(
-
Hi Guys,
Google.com.au
website: http://partysuppliesnow.com.au/We had a massive drop in search queries in WMT around the 11th of september this year, I investigated and it seemed as though there were no updates around this time.
Our site is only receiving branded search now - and after investigating i am led to believe that Google has mistakingly affected our website in the panda algorithm. There are no manual penalties applies on this site as confirmed by WMT.
Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results. This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.
Typing a products full name into Google (tried a handful) our site is not in the top 100 or 200 at times, i think this further clarifies that we are penalised.
We would really appreciate some opinions on this. Any course of actions would be great. We don't particularly want to invest in writing content again.
From our point of view it looks like Google is stopping our site from ranking because it's getting mixed up with who the originator for our content is.
Thanks and really appreciate it.
-
Hey Jarrod,
I'm afraid there isn't anything you can actually do to tell Google you are the original author of your content, other than the tips Remus mentioned.
However, there is a service that you can use to help you identify sites that are duplicating your content. It's called Copysentry and it automatically scans the web to check for content duplication. You could use this, in conjunction with DMCA take down requests (as mentioned in Remus's post) to help to defend against this in future.
-
Hi guys,
Thank you all, for your kind advices. We have planned to re-write our content (product descriptions). Now, we will write 2 types of descriptions. 1 for our site and 1 for our affiliates (who promote our products). We hope Google won't confuse it this time.
As we are going to write the content again. I am still afraid, it could be stolen again. So, is there a way that we could tell Google that we are the originator of this new content???
If there isn't any solution, I think, we would lose our ranking again. Right??? I don't wanna lose our efforts again. So, can you suggest any concrete solution???
thanks again guys
Jarrod -
Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results.
I saw the same thing. There is your problem.
This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.
Although google says that they are "pretty good" at attributing content to the creator the truth is that the suck at it.
Lots of people have this problem. Guard your content so it doesn't get out to affiliates and shopping engines. This means strongly enforced rules for your affiliates and blocking crawlers from your site - but allowing google in.
-
In addition going forward you should always ensure you have two types of content. A set of content you use on your site, and another set of content that you supply to affiliate sites and any other sites you supply products too.
I know this isn't much help now, but its something you should do in future to prevent such issues.
-
Hi Jarrod,
You are in a very complicated situation. I hope you can find a solution.
This video posted by Matt Cutts a wile ago might help you with a few additional tips:
How can I make sure that Google knows my content is original?
- DMCA request: http://www.google.com/dmca.html
- Google News source attribution metatags: link here
- Or even spam report like Matt Cutts suggests.
-
Hi Jarrod,
The first thing I noticed, a lot of pages in your site don't contain a rel=canonical tag. For example, this one: http://www.partysuppliesnow.com.au/view-products/96/LED-Furniture
We know that Google is not particularly good at identifying the original source of a content. So, you can report the sites that scraped your content to Google (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en). That'll let Google know about the issue and hopefully lift the penalty off your site and penalize the other site.
Another issue could be the Authorship setup on product pages. It's considered as Authorship abuse. Generally, you don't want to link a Google+ profile with a site's homepage and other generic pages.
I've had some experience with Panda. I can say no-indexing is very effective in fighting Panda. If you know about a significant number of low-quality pages in your site, that you wouldn't prefer to open as a searcher, you should add a meta no-index tag in the section of those pages. It takes some time to get out of the Panda box.
Regards,
Rohit
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
-
Disavow without penalty
Hi fellow Mozians, I have come up with a doubt today which I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have always been convinced that the disavowal tool can be used at any time as part of your backlink monitoring activities- if you see a dodgy backlink coming in you should add it to your disavowal file if you can't get it removed (which you probably can't). That is to say that the disavowal tool can be used pre-emptively to make sure a dodgy link does do your site any harm. However, this belief of mine has taken a bit of a beating this morning as another SEO suggested that the disavowal tool only has en effect if acompanied by a reconsideratiosn request, and that you can only file a reconsideration request if you have some kind of manual action. This logic describes that you can only disavowal when you have a penalty. This theory was backed up by this moz article from May 2013:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk
https://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool
The comments didnt do much to settle my doubts. This Mat Cutts video, from November 2013 seems to confirm my belief however:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc It seems perfectly reasonable that Google does allow pre-emptive disavowal-ing, not just because of the whole negative seo issue, but just because nasty links do happen naturally. Not all SEOs spend all their waking hours building links which they know they will have to disavowal later shoudl a penalty hit at some point, and it seems reasonable that an SEO should be able to say- "Link XYZ is nothing to do with me!" before Google excercises retribution. If, for example you get hired working for a company that HAD a penalty due to spammy link building in the past that has been lifted; but you see that Google periodically discovers the occasional spammy link it seems fair that you should be able to tell google that you want to voluntarily remove any "credit" that that link is giving you today, so as to avoid a penalty tomorrow. Your help would be much appreciated. Many thanks indeed. watch?time_continue=86&v=eFJZXpnsRsc0 -
Should We Remove Content Through Google Webmaster Tools?
We recently collapsed an existing site in order to relaunch it as a much smaller, much higher quality site. In doing so, we're facing some indexation issues whereas a large number of our old URLs (301'd where appropriate) still show up for a site:domain search. Some relevant notes: We transitioned the site from SiteCore to Wordpress to allow for greater flexibility The Wordpress CMS went live on 11/22 (same legacy content, but in the new CMS) The new content (and all required 301s) went live on 12/2 The site's total number of URLS is currently at 173 (confirmed by ScreamingFrog) As of posting this question, a site:domain search shows 6,110 results While it's a very large manual effort, is there any reason to believe that submitting removal requests through Google Webmaster Tools would be helpful? We simply want all indexation of old pages and content to disappear - and for Google to treat the site as a new site on the same old domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | d50-Media0 -
Is hidden content bad for SEO?
I am using this plugin to enable Facebook comments on my blog:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
https://wordpress.org/plugins/fatpanda-facebook-comments/ This shows the comment in an Facebook iFrame. The plugin author claims it's SEO friendly, because the comments are also integrated in the WordPress database. The are included in the post but hidden. Is that bad for SEO?0 -
Product pages content
Hi! I'm doing some SEO work for a new client. I've been tasked with boosting some of their products, such as http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/self-propelled-rear-roller-rotary-petrol-lawnmowers/honda-hrx426qx. It's currently #48 for the term Honda Izy HRG465SD, while http://www.justlawnmowers.co.uk/lawnmowers/honda-izy-hrg-465-sd.htm is #2, behind Amazon. Regarding links, there's no great shakes between the pages or even the domains. However, there's major difference in content. I'm happy to completely revamp it, I just wanted to check I'm not missing anything out before starting to rewrite it altogether! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Keep older blog content indexed or no?
Our really old blog content still sees traffic, but engagement metrics aren't the best (little time on site), and as a result, traffic has gradually started to decrease. Should we de-index it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Penalty recovery gone
Back in August we got a manual penalty lifted by Google for spammy links that we never created. This had been affecting us for almost a year. For about six weeks our traffic bounced back up to pre-penalty levels - between 60 and 120% greater a day from Google search traffic. Since then, our Google organic traffic has decayed to the point where yesterday we were back below our penalty level and we don't have a new penalty. Can anyone give me some advice about what may have caused this? Link to our site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
Frequent FAQs vs duplicate content
It would be helpful for our visitors if we were to include an expandable list of FAQs on most pages. Each section would have its own list of FAQs specific to that section, but all the pages in that section would have the same text. It occurred to me that Google might view this as a duplicate content issue. Each page _does _have a lot of unique text, but underneath we would have lots of of text repeated throughout the site. Should I be concerned? I guess I could always load these by AJAX after page load if might penalize us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress0 -
Having Content be the First thing the bots see
If you have all of your homepage content in a tab set at the bottom of the page, but really would want that to be the first thing Google reads when it crawls your site, is there something you can implement where Google reads your content first before it reads the rest of your site? Does this cause any violations or are there any red flags that get raised from doing this? The goal here would just be to get Google to read the content first, not hide any content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900