Penguin 3.0 - Very minor drops across the board. Don't think its a penalty, any ideas?
-
Hey All,
I just can't figure this out. My site has been ranking well for years, i've never done anything suspicious with it and since the penguin update, my rankings have dropped across the board but only by about 4 - 8 places each, some terms have went up from nowhere to page 8 etc.
I don't think i've been hit with a penalty, so I don't know what the problem is or how to recover from it. Does anybody have any ideas on what could be wrong?
Update: Perhaps some sites that were linking to mine have been hit with a penalty?
Update 2: I just found myself somehow in some spammy link network for 600 sites that looked identical, I don't know how or why my website is in this! I have disavowed all of these links 5 days ago, no change to rankings.
-
Yeah, if sites that are linking to you have been hit then you may lose rankings. Penguin may have devalued some of your links as well (not the same as penalised, be aware), which would also lose you rankings.
Like a previous commenter has said, wait a week or so before panicking.
Look at onsite stuff as well, really a site doesn't need that many links if the content and site are well built and follow best practice. (by not many links I mean not many high value ones - you'd need thousands of poor value ones to rank well - but you'd always be looking over your shoulder for a big fat penguin chasing you down!)
Also, look at your competition - what's happened to the sites that share your vertical? Has any of them suddenly shot up in the serps? Maybe they've had a penguin penalty lifted and you're the collateral? Sometimes we lose ranking because another site in the same vertical does something better than us - hard to admit I know, but worth bearing in mind.
Best of luck with this!
Amelia
-
Thanks Lesley, your not the only person to suggest this weirdly. I just think I should be doing something in the meantime, I have no idea what the issue could be. Would it be possible that sites linking to mine were hit by the updates and thus effected me slightly?
It happened on the Weekend Penguin was released, but it doesn't look like Penguin.
-
There are so many variables with SEO, I would give it at least a week unless you have seen a huge drop.
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
-
Hi. Has anyone seen a drop in their PA recently? We have over 40 clients and 80% dropped and it has been like this for the past 2 months. I wanted to check if other websites are also experiencing this drop or is it just us?
I'm specifically asking for drops happened in the last 2 months, because before that we had a normal trend. Some websites would go up in their PA rankings and some would drop. But seeing 80% of our clients drop like this is just weird. Just wanted to see if other market leaders are also having the same issue so I can stop attributing it something X-Filish! Our clients are all .EDUs if anyone was wondering. Also the maximum drop has been 4 points in a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AP_Search0 -
Crawl and Indexation Error - Googlebot can't/doesn't access specific folders on microsites
Hi, My first time posting here, I am just looking for some feedback on a indexation issue we have with a client and any feedback on possible next steps or items I may have overlooked. To give some background, our client operates a website for the core band and a also a number of microsites based on specific business units, so you have corewebsite.com along with bu1.corewebsite.com, bu2.corewebsite.com. The content structure isn't ideal, as each microsite follows a structure of bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx, bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx and so on. In addition to this each microsite has duplicate folders from the other microsites so bu1.corewebsite.com has indexable folders bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx but also bu1.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx the same with bu2.corewebsite.com has bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx but also bu2.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx. Therre are 5 different business units so you have this duplicate content scenario for all microsites. This situation is being addressed in the medium term development roadmap and will be rectified in the next iteration of the site but that is still a ways out. The issue
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImpericMedia
About 6 weeks ago we noticed a drop off in search rankings for two of our microsites (bu1.corewebsite.com and bu2.corewebsite.com) over a period of 2-3 weeks pretty much all our terms dropped out of the rankings and search visibility dropped to essentially 0. I can see that pages from the websites are still indexed but oddly it is the duplicate content pages so (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx or (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4/home.aspx is still indexed, similiarly on the bu2.corewebsite microsite bu2.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx and bu4.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx are indexed but no pages from the BU1 or BU2 content directories seem to be indexed under their own microsites. Logging into webmaster tools I can see there is a "Google couldn't crawl your site because we were unable to access your site's robots.txt file." This was a bit odd as there was no robots.txt in the root directory but I got some weird results when I checked the BU1/BU2 microsites in technicalseo.com robots text tool. Also due to the fact that there is a redirect from bu1.corewebsite.com/ to bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4.aspx I thought maybe there could be something there so consequently we removed the redirect and added a basic robots to the root directory for both microsites. After this we saw a small pickup in site visibility, a few terms pop into our Moz campaign rankings but drop out again pretty quickly. Also the error message in GSC persisted. Steps taken so far after that In Google Search Console, I confirmed there are no manual actions against the microsites. Confirmed there is no instances of noindex on any of the pages for BU1/BU2 A number of the main links from the root domain to microsite BU1/BU2 have a rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute but we looked into this and found it has no impact on indexation Looking into this issue we saw some people had similar issues when using Cloudflare but our client doesn't use this service Using a response redirect header tool checker, we noticed a timeout when trying to mimic googlebot accessing the site Following on from point 5 we got a hold of a week of server logs from the client and I can see Googlebot successfully pinging the site and not getting 500 response codes from the server...but couldn't see any instance of it trying to index microsite BU1/BU2 content So it seems to me that the issue could be something server side but I'm at a bit of a loss of next steps to take. Any advice at all is much appreciated!0 -
Is a Rel Canonical Sufficient or Should I 'NoIndex'
Hey everyone, I know there is literature about this, but I'm always frustrated by technical questions and prefer a direct answer or opinion. Right now, we've got recanonicals set up to deal with parameters caused by filters on our ticketing site. An example is that this: http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets?location=il&time=day relcanonicals to... http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets My question is if this is good enough to deal with the duplicate content, or if it should be de-indexed. Assuming so, is the best way to do this by using the Robots.txt? Or do you have to individually 'noindex' these pages? This site has 650k indexed pages and I'm thinking that the majority of these are caused by url parameters, and while they're all canonicaled to the proper place, I am thinking that it would be best to have these de-indexed to clean things up a bit. Thanks for any input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
Dropped from Google?
My website www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk appears to have been penalised by Google. I ranked fairly well for a number of venue related searches from my blog posts. Generally I'd find myself somewhere on page one or towards the top of page two. However recently I found I am nowhere to be seen for these venue searches. I still appear if I search for my name, business name and keywords in my domain name. A quick check of Yahoo and I found I am ranking very well, it is only Google who seem to have dropped me. I looked at Google webmaster tools and there are no messages or clues as to what has happened. However it does show my traffic dropping off a cliff edge on the 19th July from 850 impressions to around 60 to 70 per day. I haven't made any changes to my website recently and hadn't added any new content in July. I haven't added any new inbound links either, a search for inbound links does not show anything suspicious. Can anyone shed any light on why this might happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Content question about 3 sites targeted at 3 different countries
I am new here, and this is my first question. I was hoping to get help with the following scenario: I am looking to launch 3 sites in 3 different countries, using 3 different domains. For example the.com for USA, the .co.uk for UK , and a slightly different .com for Australia, as I could not purchase .com.au as I am not a registered business in Australia. I am looking to set the Geographic Target on Google Webmaster. So for example, I have set the .com for USA only, with .co.uk I won't need to set anything, and I will set the other Australian .com to Australia. Now, initially the 3 site will be "brochure" websites explaining the service that we offer. I fear that at the beginning they will most likely have almost identical content. However, on the long term I am looking to publish unique content for each site, almost on a weekly basis. So over time they would have different content from each other. These are small sites to begin with. So each site in the "brochure" form will have around 10 pages. Over time it will have 100's of pages. My question or my worry is, will Google look at the fact that I have same content across 3 sites negatively even though they are specifically targeted to different countries? Will it penalise my sites negatively?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanetc0 -
Why won't my sub-domain blog rank for my brand name in Google?
For six months or so, my team and I have been trying to get our blog to rank on page one in Google for the term "Instabill." The URL, http://blog.instabill.com, is a sub-domain of our company website and they both use the same IP address. Three pages on our www.Instabill.com site rank in the top three spots when searching our brand name in Google. However, our blog ranks 100+. For our blog, we are currently using b2evolution and nginx. We have tried adding static content on the home page, static content in the sidebar, static content on an About Instabill page, and optimizing blog posts for the keyword Instabill, but nothing seems to work. We appreciate any advice you can provide to us. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Instabill
Meghan0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
Site has no SEO done on it. It wasn't considered during design. What to do first ?
They opted for videos to explain to people what the website is about, but it ain't working for them. What steps would you take in order to get this site to rank higher without completely changing the design(changing design is out of the question they are low on funds). They also built a blog on wordpress.com and added a .me domain to it. For obvious reasons I'm not mentioning the website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ternit0