80% of traffic lost over night, Google Penalty?
-
Hi all.
I have a website called Hemjakt (http://www.hemjakt.se/) which is a search engine for real estate currently only available on the Swedish market. The application crawl real estate websites and collect all estates on a single searchable application. The site has been released for a few months and have seen a steady growth since release, increasing by 20% weekly up to ~900 visitors per day.3 days ago, over night, I lost 80% of my traffic. Instead of 900 visitors per day I'm at ~100 visitors per day and when I search for long, specific queries such as "Åsgatan 15, Villa 12 rum i Alsike, Knivsta" ( <adress><house type=""><rooms><area> <city>), I'm now only found on the fifth page.
I suspect that I have become a subject of a Google Penalty. How to get out of this mess?</city></rooms></house></adress>
Just like all search engines or applications, I do crawl other websites and scrape their content. My content is ~90% unique from the source material and I do add user value by giving them the possibility to compare houses, get ton of more data to compare pricing and history, giving them extra functionalities that source site do not offer and so on. My analytics data show good user engagement.
Here is one example of a Source page and a page at my site:
Source: http://www.hemnet.se/bostad/villa-12rum-alsike-knivsta-kommun-asgatan-15-6200964
My Site: http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/55860-asgatan-15/So:
-
How do I actually confirm that this is the reason I lost my traffic? When I search for my branded query, I still get result. Also I'm still indexed by Google.
-
If I am penalized. I'm not attempting to do anything Black Hat and I really believe that the app gives a lot of value to the users. What tweaks or suggestions do you have to changes of the application, to be able to continue running the service in a way that Google is fine with?
-
-
because you have no backlinks you have six total and your site apparently has an incredible amount of duplicate content after running it through screening frog and site liner you have a ton of broken links as well.
From only scanning 250 pages total I was able to come up with quite a few huge issues
with out the www.
400 Bad Request:
Top Issues
1,301 pages were not scanned.
772 broken links were found.
Your site is missing an XML Sitemap.
WWW vs. non-WWW: Server error.Your Pages
250 pages scanned of 1,551 found.
Normal Pages: 67
Skipped, Redirect: 10
Errors: 173
Not Scanned: 1,301Duplicate Content
Duplicate Content: 15%
Common Content: 59%
Unique Content: 25%** the complete PDF report is right here http://cl.ly/WF4O will**
http://www.siteliner.com/www.hemjakt.se/omrade/centralt/?siteliner=broken
OSE backlinks http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hemjakt.se%2F
After using the elite addition of Ahrefs ( the different editions offer different abilities) Summary of links found for www.hemjakt.se
You have roughly 2 domain backlinks total from utilizing both tools I would run it through MajesticSEO but I do not see the point.
you need to fix the problems with your site I have a guess as to how you are ranking, but I do not believe it was natural.
If you had built that many pages on a website and really gotten only about 5 or 6 backlinks out of that only 2 our from domains/ IP's to link to your site total I would find that impossible to believe.
You have clearly scraped them or somebody else has been doing a lot of scraping and you may not know about it.
Here is a lot of information I hope this helps,
Thomas
-
I would say that your site goes against the Google guidelines in regards to thin content: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604719?hl=en
Part of the description of thin content includes "automatically generated content" and "copied content".
Have you checked your Webmaster Tools console to see if you have been given a thin content penalty? Check Search Traffic --> Manual Actions. If there isn't one though, then Panda is probably still the culprit.
-
If your site is only a couple of months old, it's possible that you initially had a honeymoon boost and now you're seeing the traffic you would normally get. But, I think that there is a more serious issue.
According to Google there are over 72,000 pages of your site indexed. How many of these pages contain useful and UNIQUE content that users can't find anywhere else on the web? If you're crawling other people's sites and publishing their content as yours then you're just asking to be demoted by the Panda algorithm. The only thing that doesn't exactly fit with this is the date. As far as we know the last Panda update was May 20. Still, this is my best guess.
"My content is ~90% unique from the source material and I do add user value..."
I would not agree here. In the examples that you gave me, I see that the majority of the actual content (i.e. the text) is 100% copied from the original source. There are several issues with this:
1. Google will see that the vast majority of your site contains content that did not originate with you. This is a sign of low quality and Google will not want to display your site over the originator of that content.
2. Copyright issues. Do you have permission to scrape these sites?
I haven't had a thorough look but from what I've seen, I don't think that this business model will work.
-
Oh yes - I'm sorry about that. So the duplicate content issue still applies, and now I've tested your website - it is quite slow but not as bad as the example I gave. I'd still recommend improving the speed.
Do you link to the website you're scraping the content from? Do you have permission to publish it?
I'm assuming at this stage you don't have any messages from Google in WMT about penalties. Can you pinpoint any onsite changes you made before the traffic drop?
Considering the duplicate content on your site I'm surprised you ranked so well and saw the traffic increases you did - so with your absence of links perhaps the website is at it's natural position at the moment. I have no experience of real estate websites or the Swedish market and competition within it though.
You could consider adding some unique content to the homepage and other location pages - something useful for users. If I was moving to a new city I'd want to know about the different neighbourhoods and which area suited me - which areas are quiet, near to parks? Which have good (public) transport links, might be noisy, have amenities nearby? These could be expanded into really useful standalone location guides, with pictures, maps and more info added.
-
Not sure what you are talking about. There are no links in the footer, there's no footer. On category pages there is a infinity scroll and on normal pages there are no footer at all.
On a normal house page there is only about ~55 <a>tags. </a>
-
Hi Alex thanks for your response.
That is not my website you are linking to, that is the source website that I crawl the content from in the example above.
The domains are very similar so easy to mix up.
Hemjakt.se is my site.
Hemnet.se is the source that I crawled.So in this case if you want to do a Pingdom Speed Test on that page, you should do it on the following URL: http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/55860-asgatan-15/
But to answer the rest of your question:
- No there have been no significant speed changes to the website according to Google Analytics Speed Page. The last bump when speed times was increased temporarily was 2 weeks ago and only for 1 day.
- The site is hosted on Amazon with a CDN for all images. The site is not perfect but there have been a lot of time spend on making sure that the load times are decent and that the site get a OK score in Google Insights Speed Test.
Here is the Overview page from my Google Analytics to display my Bounce Rate and so on.
Regarding the Bounce Rate. It was ~66% when I had 0 goals set for the site. When I set up goals such as completing forms, viewing the gallery of each house etc the bounce rate dropped to ~38%. That is the reason for the bounce rate drop. -
Footer links are not usually an issue unless you're using them for keyword spamming e.g. you have a load for different locations: "buy house london", "buy house manchester", "buy house liverpool" etc. You won't get a penalty for having over 100 links on a page so that's unlikely to be the issue either.
I've had a quick look at your website and there are two major issues I picked up on:
- Duplicate content - you say you crawl websites and your content is "90% unique from the source material". The content would be better if 90% of it was unique to your website only. I searched Google for a block of text from one of the links you provided and 5 websites appeared. Google doesn't like duplicate content - maybe your website does provide value to users but how can Google's algorithm know this if all it sees is duplicate content? Perhaps your site had poor user metrics (e.g. people pressing back to return to the search results page after a short period of time on your website) so Google demoted it. Can you see any evidence of this in Google Analytics?
- I tested http://www.hemnet.se/bostad/villa-12rum-alsike-knivsta-kommun-asgatan-15-6200964 on Pingdom Speed Test and "Your website is slower than 92% of all tested websites" - has a recent change caused that slowdown? Is the site registered with Google Webmaster Tools? If so, can you see a change in page speed, crawl rate etc.? Google Analytics can also report on page speed. That's very slow and if it's a recurring problem the first thing I'd fix.
While I was browsing this happened to me twice "Just nu har vi tekniska problem".
-
Remove some footer links. More footer links cab be affected any kind of website.No more then 100 links per page.
-
What? Not sure what you're talking about.
Here is an example of a page on my site:
http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/59873-soldatgatan-13-b/ -
As per my knowledge can you delete footer links then i am sure you will rank again.
You putting more and more links in footer.
Thanks,
Akhilesh
-
What is your suggestion to solve it?
I truely think my application can add a lot of value to the users by giving them a chance to find a lot of data at the same spot, instead of having to navigate to a bunch of other sites. Since I also get access to "Big data" I can add a lot of value to the users by displaying price history from multiple sources.
I'm not trying to do anything shady or black hat. I'm just trying to create a search engine for real estate. Obviously that will generate a lot of content and many pages in a short amount of time.
What am I doing that is against the Google Guidelines? I doubt that "Adding pages too fast" is a reason to give a penalty, but more suspicious activity that would indiciate that a closer look by Google would be needed to see if any spam is going on.
-
Means in your website no instances (Inbound links). I think you create more pages in very short of time that's the reason behind this.
-
I have done no linkbuilding for this site. I have only focused on building a strong crawler and with ~60'000 pages/houses indexed I have been able to rank well on long queries with low competition, and thereby getting good traffic without any linkbuilding.
Moz reports 0 links and from my Google Analytics report I have only been getting some referral traffic from Reddit, a post that has now been deleted. All other traffic is organic search traffic. So I highly doubt that there are any "bad links" that is causing this punishment.
Regarding the crawler. I crawl other websites for real estate objects. I cache the HTML and I then filter out specific information such as price, number of rooms, address and so on.
I then publish this data with my own structure. This makes the data 87-90% unique if compared to the Source site. You can see example in the first post of this topic.
The 10-13% that is not unique, is the description of the real estate object which is usually a 1-2 paragraph text saying something like "This is an amazing house with 12 rooms with a great view that would be a perfect fit for the large family". This text is copied straight off. Which might be what gives me the punishment? Even if its only 10% of the page content. What do you think?
-
HI Marcus Lind,
Can you share me what activity have you done for SEO for this website and how much anchor and which anchor text created by you.
After that we can say clearly what is the exact issue.
-
Please note that I have not done any link building at all to the site, it's only 2 months old. There are no unnatural links, no keyword stuffing and no other black hat seo tactics used. No links have been purchased at all, so Penguin should not be relevant to this site.
I've attached an image of my Google Analytics Overview for the past months, and you can see how it has been naturally steadily growing day by day and then just taking a huge drop the last few days.
-
That's fantastic that you been keeping track of your Bing queries and it sounds like you've been hit by a penalty and going for. I am guessing
i can pull link data for you however my girlfriends want to kill me if I don't stop answering questions right now so look for my answer in about six hours of use
Ahrefs majestic SEO & Moz
-
Try running your queries in Bing and see how it compares. If you see the terms you ranked for earlier ranking well in Bing, then you know you've been hit by a penalty in Google.
That's what made it clear for a site I'm involved with and have been trying to recover for many months now.
-
I'm very sorry to hear that this is happened to you. Here is some information I hopefully helpful
This URL may say on the video that you have to be a member to see the video however you do not have to remember to read the transcript. Therefore read the transcript use the tool that tries to gauge now this is not 100% but it might give you a lot more insight into what's actually occurred. You have to have Moz opensiteexplorer.com and another tool like MajesticSEO.com or Ahrefs.com
I like Ahrefs however either one will do.Your first step is to Google “fruition Google penalty tool”,
https://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/
because that will bring up a cool tool that will show you whether or not you’ve been hit by Google Penguin, because there are several updateshttp://www.quicksprout.com/university/how-to-identify-and-recover-from-a-google-penguin-penalty/
So your aware this link shows a video that you may not be able to see you and I sure remember however because it is fully transcribed you have a exact how-to manual right below it.
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
-
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Overall traffic increasing but specific short tailed keywords decreasing any ideas?
Something very strange has happened regarding my website traffic when making a comparison to the first six months of 2012 and then 2014. Anybody got any ideas? From my Google analytics from 1 January 2014 to 1 July in other words six months my total traffic on my website was 30,209. Not provided source ( what does this mean ? ) was very high at 23,141 but two of the my main short tail keywords I've targeted in the past "Whitby holiday cottages “only equal 254 and "Whitby cottages" was only 176. When I made a comparison with the same time period below in 2012 the website traffic this year as gone up greatly by almost 20000, but the two of my money short tail keywords as gone down greatly! If I compare the same time frame for 2012 the overall traffic was only 13,380. Not provided source was nowhere near as high at only 1836 which is also much less than above in 2014 but the short tail keywords I targeted "Whitby holiday cottages was almost 10 times higher at 2005 and "Whitby cottages “much higher at 613. I ran the questionnaire on http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/quiz/ regarding Panda and particularly Penguin and its association with back links. The article says that Penguin didn't hit the overall keywords, but only specific ones if they been targeted on the following dates the time points of April 24, 2012 and May 25, 2012 which are known Penguin rollout dates. So when I checked the two short tail keywords above for those two dates the figures did seem to drop from 10 hits a day to 5 but then went back up immediately to approximately 10 hits a day during the two-month period which suggested to me that I'd not been hit by Penguin on those dates. So when you look at the comparison the first six months of 2012 and then 2014 there is no doubt that money short tail keywords of dropped off dramatically for me but the overall website traffic has gone up dramatically. Some of the increase in traffic will be down to time and more articles/pages etc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WhitbyHolidayCottages
The two short tail keywords I mention above I know I've dropped in Google rankings I used to be position three page one and the site is now position 10 so I would assume that's why I've dropped in traffic for those phrases.
Has anybody got any idea what's happened? I can honestly say that I've not noticed it in bookings on the website business seems about the same overall.0 -
Should I Even Bother Trying To Recover This Site After Google Penguin?
Hello all, I would like to get your opinion on whether I should invest time and money to improve a website which was hit by Google Penguin in April 2014. (I know, April 2014 was nearly 2 years ago. However, this site has not been a top priority for us and we have just left until now). The site is www.salmonrecipes.net Basically, we aggregated over 700 salmon recipes from major supermarkets, famous chefs, and others (all with their permission) and made them available on this site. It was a good site at the time but it is showing its age now. For a few years we were occasionally #1 on Google in the US for "salmon recipes", but normally we would be between #2 and #4. We made money from the site almost entirely through Adsense. We never made a huge amount, but it paid our office rent every month, which was handy. We also built up an email database of several thousand followers, but we've not really used this much. (Yet). In the year from 25th April 2011 to 24th April 2012 the site attracted just over 500k visits. After the rankings dropped due to Google Penguin, traffic dropped by 77% in the year from 25th April 2011 to 24th April 2012. Rankings and traffic have not recovered at all, and are only getting worse. I am happy to accept that we deserved our rankings to fall during the Google Penguin re-shuffle. I stupidly commissioned an offshore company to build lots of links which, in hindsight, were basically just spam, and totally without any real value. However they assured me it was safe and I trusted them, despite my own nagging reservations. Anyway, I have full details of all the links they created, and therefore I could remove many of these 'relatively' easily. (Of course, removing hundreds of links would take a lot of time). My questions ... 1. How can I evaluate the probability of this site 'recovering' from Google Penguin. I am willing to invest time/money on link removal and new (ethical) SEO work if there is a reasonable chance of regaining a position in the top 5 on Google (US) for "salmon recipes" and various long-tail terms. But I am keen to avoid spending time/money on this if it is unlikely we will recover. How can I figure out my chances? 2. Generally, I accept that this model of site is in decline. Relying on Google to drive traffic to a site, and on Google to produce revenue via its Adsense scheme, is risky and not entirely sensible. Also, Google seems to provide more and more 'answers' itself, rather than sending people to e.g. a website listing recipes. Given this, is it worth investing any money in this at all? 3. Can you recommend anyone who specialises in this kind of recovery work. (As I said, I have a comprehensive list of all the links that were built, etc). OK, that is all for now. I am really looking forward to whatever opinions you may have about this. I'll provide more info if required. Huge thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smaavie
David0 -
Whats up with google scrapping keywords metrics
I've done a bit of reading on google now "scrapping" the keywords metrics from the analytics. I am trying to understand why the hell they would do that? To force people to run multiple adwords campaign to setup different keywords scenario? It just doesn't make sense to me...If i am a blogger or i run an ecommerce site...and i get a lot of visit regarding a particular post through a keyword they clicked on organically. Why would Google wanna hide this from people? It's great Data for us to carry on writing relevant content that appeals to people and therefore serves the need of those same people? There is the idea of doing White Hat SEO and focus on getting strong links and great content etc... How do we know we have great content if we are not seeing what is appealing to people in terms of keywords and how they found us organically... Is google trying to squash SEO as a profession? What do you guys think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theseolab0 -
Google Results Pages. after the bomb
So, ever since Google "went nuclear" a few weeks ago I have seen major fluctuations in search engine results pages. Basically what I am seeing is a settling down and RE-inclusion of some of my web properties. Basically I had a client affected by the hack job initially, but about a week later I not only saw my original ranking restored but a litany of other long tails appeared. I wasn't using any shady link techniques but did have considerable article distribution that MAY have connected me inadvertently to some of the "bad neighborhoods." The website itself is a great site with original relevant content, so if it is possible, Google definitely recognized some error in their destructive ranking adjustment and is making good on it for those sites that did not deserve the penalty. Alternatively, it could just be random Google reordering and I got lucky. What are your experiences with the updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheGrid0 -
Geo-targeted Organic Search Traffic to a sub-domain
For a client of ours, we are likely to create a sub-domain that is to be targeted at a specific country. Most of the content on this sub-domain will be from the main site, although with some specific differentiation to suit that geographic market. We intend to tell Google through Webmaster Centre that the sub-domain is targeted at a specific country. Some questions: a) Any idea how long it could take before google gives precedence to the content in this sub-domain for queries originating from that particular country? b) What is the likely impact of content duplication ? What extent of differentiation is necessary from a search engine perspective? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ontarget-media1 -
Is Google stupid?
Why does buying links still work? I don't mean approaching an individual webmaster and cutting a deal, that seems to be nearly impossible to detect. But the huge link brokers, like Text Link Ads, Build my Rank or Linkvine, Google has to be aware of them, right? Can't they just create accounts to see the whole network, and ban the sites? Why wouldn't they just do that?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | menachemp0