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
-
Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website?
Hi, Can I know which keywords lost their top rankings on google a year ago if the client didn't checked the keyword rankings in his website? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Why some pages show schema and some don't in Google?
I notice Google displays the schema(reviews, price, availability etc.) in results only for some of our item pages in same category using same template. Any ideas why this is happening. They are created around same time - more than a year ago. Schema was also added a year ago.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rbai0 -
How much risk would there be with this 'repeating of a sentence' situation?
Hello, A business owner and design decision was made on a published article page to have a summary sentence/paragraph placed prominently with a unique font treatment in the article header along with the article's main imagery. Historical content that does not have this summary migrated with "the first sentence of the article" used for this introduction/summary sentence/paragraph. In both cases, where there is a unique summary and where the first sentence is used, the article text normally begins below a graphical element below the summary element. Thus, when the first sentence was used for the summary, the first sentence will repeat, relatively close together on each page where this happens. The question is: How much risk would i be taking on in allowing the first sentence of these articles to get repeated in close proximity on the page. I wanted to get some other perspectives on this unique situation. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JennyTTGT0 -
What Does Penguin Recover Look Like?
Is a recovery from Penguin immediate once Google recognized that you've fixed the problem or is it a slow and steady recovery? I think we may have fixed our issue which is why we're seeing an immediate spike in traffic from Google organic search results. Our daily traffic was up more than 100% in a single day. Is this a recovery? At which speed have other sites you manage recovered? EoZJDZ2.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | voicesdotcom0 -
Lots of city pages - How do I ensure we don't get penalized
We are planning on having a job posting page for each city that we are looking to hire new CFO partners in. But, the problem is, we have LOTS of locations. I was wondering what would be the best way to have similar content on each page (since the job description and requirements are the same for each job posting) without being hit by Google for having duplicate content? One of the main reasons we have decided to have location based pages is that we have noticed visitors to our site are searching for "cfo job in [location] but we notice that most of these visitors then leave. We believe it to be because the pages they land on make no mention of the location that they were looking for and is a little incongruent with what they were expecting. We are looking to use the following URLs and TItle/Description as an example: | http://careers.b2bcfo.com/cfo-jobs/Alabama/Birmingham | CFO Careers in Birmingham, AL | | Are you looking for a CFO Career in Birmingham, Alabama ? We're looking for partners there. Apply today! | | Any advice you have for this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | B2B.CFO0 -
Anyone managed to change 'At a glance:' in local search results
On Google's local search results, i.e when the 'Google places' data is displayed along with the map on the right hand side of the search results, there is also an element 'At a glance:'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeanAndrews
The data that if being displayed is from some years ago and the client would if possible like it to reflect there current services, which they have been providing for some five years. According to Google support here - http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1344353 this cannot be changed, they say 'Can I edit a listing’s descriptive terms or suggest a new one?
No; the terms are not reviewed, curated, or edited. They come from an algorithm, and we do not help that algorithm figure it out. ' My question is has anyone successfully influenced this data and if so how.0 -
Penguin Penalty?
The past 2 days, specific keywords Ive been ranking well for have disappeared. If I google specific with brand it still shows up. So I havent been removed from the index. Is it possible that I was hit by penguin without any type of notice in the webmaster account? Organic traffic dropped substantialy in the past couple days without any warnings. Any help greatly appreciated! Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
How to tackle google penguin algorithmic penalty?
My Website ranking went down mid of april, I sent a Reconsideration request and the reply was : “ We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture.” My site was classic asp and i change that to a new word press theme I change the site structure and created new fresh content on the entire site focusing on user experience. But still no positive result in the ranking. I further did a test and created 3 new landing pages that target long tail keywords with low competition. Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages. Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route I would like to if anyone could help me should i buy a new domain and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back My link profile according to open site explorer is 190 links from 74 domains and domain authority is 31. Can anyone help please
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0