Penguin 3.0 Site Dropped after Update
-
Hi
We was hit by the Penguin update a long time ago and we lost a lot of traffic/positions because of this. For a long time we worked really hard to identify all off our links that may have caused us to recieve this penalty. After Months of work we submitted the disavow file and reconsideration request and in June 2014 we recieved confirmation from google in webmaster tools that the manual spam action had been revoked.
over time we then started to recieve more traffic and better positions in the serps, however since penguin 3.0 we have dropped again for a range of keywords. many going from page 1 to 2 or page 2 to 3/4
Any ideas what we should do here , any help will be really appriciated as I'm totally confused
We havent done any link building at all since the penalty / recovery
-
Hi Adam,
I recently experienced a rankings drop after P3, and here's some of the things I did to correct the problems. Before proceeding, I know that everyone says that Google must re-run Penguin to see any changes. However, from my experience, that depends on the way Penguin affected you.
If P3 penalized you by completely removing your site, then you're probably not going to see any recovery until Google re-runs Penguin. On the other hand, if you experienced a rankings demotions, as we both did, then you can take steps to fix it and will see results without Google re-running Penguin.
Obviously, this is an area of HUGE speculation. I know it seems like Google has stated that a Penguin penalty requires that Google re-run Penguin to see that penalty lifted. However, the Penguin algorithm is just one part of Google's algo, so it only accounts for a portion of what Google considers when deciding where to rank your site for a given keyword.
Further, I'm not focused on a P3 penalty, but rather a demotion. A demotion does not necessarily mean a penalty, but instead could indicate (1) links to your site were de-valued, thereby hurting your rankings, or (2) your competition cleaned up their link profiles and were rewarded, thereby allowing them to outrank you.
Regardless, here's what I did and I hope this helps you.
1. I used CognitiveSEO to go through my link profile. There are other similar tools out there, but I like this one.
2. After going through my link profile, I uploaded a disavow file to GWT. If previously disavowed links are still showing in your GWT, don't worry. They will still show in GWT, but will be marked as "no-follow."
3. Carefully go through your entire site. Ask yourself, "Is this a good user experience?" Be honest with yourself on this point. Is the content good/useful/informative? Is the site nicely laid out? Does the site inspire trust? In short, make it a great site.
4. Internal linking - huge area of opportunity. I would say carefully go through each page and ask yourself how to improve the user experience by internal linking.
5. Promote via social media. Also, carefully study your competition to understand how they are promoting their sites.
I know this may sound cheesy, but I really believe that Rand is correct when he tells us to "be awesome." If you make a great website and promote it, people will not only come to the site, but also come back to the site. Repeat business is everything.
Although I'm certain I experienced the same panic/stress/anxiety you did when you saw your rankings drop, I realized there was nothing I could except really focus on making a better site: content, U/X, conversion driven design, download speeds, social media, and a link profile that I wouldn't be ashamed of. I believe that if you do those things, you'll see an improvement in rankings.
I hope that helps.
-
Hi Adam,
It sounds like you went down the right route - however from experience you didn't necessarily need to disavow all links that contained commercial anchor text. Going forward I would concentrate on earning brand links.
Do you do a lot of social media? Which channels? How does your content go on there?
Matt
-
Hi Adam,
Yeah we are just down the road from you based in Mercury House
-
That sounds like a good plan. Disavow the bad links and make sure they are completely gone. Getting rid of bad links will help your DA as well as building high quality links.
-
Using that tool I have identified the drop is from the last Penguin update, I think if I start a campaign to improve the DA and PA for the Website by obtaining highly relevant links this should help. I dont really want to disavow anymore, we disavowed 1000s before and had the message in webmaster tools to say we had recovered.
I disavowed any that looked spammy and were not relevant and contains anchor text containing keywords not brand name.
Maybe its time now to start growing the DA and PA
Thanks
Adam
-
Thank you everybody , very helpful I have lots to go on there
Matt - I think we are just down the road from you if you are the same company
-
Hi Adam,
Out of interest have you run your sites analytics through the panguin tool? If you haven't come across this previously it maps all Googles updates against your organic traffic. The reason I mention it is because over the last month or so there has been a lot of change in Google and always worth checking every aspect.
http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
When you say you haven't done any link building - I would recommend you still look at working on earning links with great content. By the sounds of it you do a lot around your blog, how's that content doing in terms of social shares etc?
In terms of new links what is the just discovered function of opentsiteexplorer saying? Many new links discovered in the last 60 days?
-
"The Problem I have is the links that are shown in webmaster tools are links I have already disavowed but they are still showing as links to our site, so I am unsure if there are any new ones."
True you disavowed the links, but did the link manually get removed from the offending sites? Did you possibly remove some of the good links with the bad? How did you determine what was good, and what was harmful?
Short answer is: you need to analyze the sites that gained in rank, and put you on page two. Run a link profile check for opportunities, look at their on page content and back-end optimization efforts, and check your own domain for errors such as 404's, bad redirects, additional variations of URL's (duplicate content), etc. By just looking at a few metrics and focusing so much on your own past linking strategy you will stress yourself to death trying to figure out how to fix it. With a few updates over the past months, I would NOT tie all of your existing ranking issues to just one update, because of the penalty you just worked your way through.
-
If you can still see the links in GWT, then they are still connected to your site. Use Open Site Explorer to verify that. The blogs are good, however if the content is lacking on the other pages of the site that won't help them rank for keywords. Do you have any internal links from your blog to the other pages on the site?
-
Thanks Monica
The Problem I have is the links that are shown in webmaster tools are links I have already disavowed but they are still showing as links to our site, so I am unsure if there are any new ones.
I can see websites on page 1 do have a higher DA and PA, but there are sites above us that have a lower DA and PA that us when running them through open site explorer
we are DA - 43/100 PA - 49/100
One above us is DA - 17/100 PA - 22/100
The Content on the site isnt too bad, we have content on most pages and we have 1000s of blogs on the blog page on the same site
-
The way that Penguin works is that after you have been hit by the update, your "black cloud" effect on rankings aren't removed or reevaluated until the next update.
Two things could have happened here, the first being that others who were slapped with a penalty have seen improved rankings after the update , significant enough to knock you out of your rankings. The second being that your link profile is still lacking, so while you didn't receive a penalty, you still were negatively effected by this update.
Here are the steps that I would take;
Run your site through Webmaster Tools to make sure that you know all of the links to your site, and evaluate them for quality.
Use Open Site Explorer to evaluate the link profile of the websites that are outranking you right now. Do a competitive analysis to see if there might be some growth opportunities for your link profile. Freshness is important. If you haven't added any links in awhile that could be a problem.
Do a checkup on the content on your site. With a recent Panda update starting to effect a lot of sites it could be that Penguin isn't the culprit in your case. It could be that people seeing a ranking boost from the Panda update are outranking you because they have more quality content AND an better link profile.
Content and Linking, some would say, are the two equally most important parts of SEO. That means one can't be successful without the other. That is part of why guest blogging and featured reviews are a favorite link strategy. Write content that others want to link to. That is the simplest, most effective linking strategy I can think of.
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
-
Do you think profanity in the content can harm a site's rankings?
In my early 20's I authored an ebook that provides men with natural ways to improve their ahem... "bedroom performance". I'm now in my mid 30s, and while it's not such an enthralling topic, the thing makes me 80 or so bucks a day on good days, and it actually works. I update the blog from time to time and build links to it on occasion from good sources. I've carried my SEO knowledge to a more "reputable" business, but this project is still interesting to me, because it's fully mine. I am more interested in getting it to rank and convert than anything, but following the same techniques that are working to grow the other business, this one continues to tank. Disavow bad links, prune thin content.. no difference. However, one thing I just noticed now are my search queries in the reports. When I first started blogging on this, I was real loose with my tongue, and spoke quite frankly (and dirty to various degrees). I'm much more refined and professional in how I write now. However, the queries I'm ranking for... a lot of d words, c words (in the sex sense)... sounds almost pornographic. Think Google may be seeing this, and putting me lower in rankings or in some sort of lower level category because of it? Heard anything about google penalizing for profanity? I guess in this time of authority and trust, that can hurt both of those... but I wonder if anyone's heard any actual confirmation of this or has any experience with this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | DavidCapital0 -
Are links from inside duplicate content on a 3rd party site pointing back to you worthwhile.
In our niche there are lots of specialist 'profile / portfolio' sites were we can upload content (usually project case studies. These are often quite big and active networks and can drive decent traffic and provide links from high ranking pages. The issue im a bit stuck on is - because they are profile / portfolio based usually its the same content uploaded to each site. But im beginning to get the feeling that these links from within duplicate content although from high ranking sites are not having an effect. Im about to embark on a campaign to re rewrite each of our portfolio items (each one c. 400 words c. 10 times) for each different site, but before i do i wandered if any one has had any experience / a point of view on with wether Google is not valuing links from within duplicate content (bare in mind these arnt spam sites, and are very reputable, mainly because once you submit the content it gets reviewed prior to going live). And wether a unique rewrite of the content solves this issue.
Algorithm Updates | | Sam-P0 -
Added the Review rich snippet and rankings have dropped?
Hi Mozzers, I am really surprised what happened here. I conducted a small campaign by adding reviews rich snippet to 10 different microsites(covering different locations). Today I was checking if the snippets were showing up correctly in the SERPs and noticed that most of these locations with review snippet dropped in the rankings? How weird is that? Can anyone explain what happened here? Has anyone experienced this? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Changes in Google "Site:" Search Algorithm Over Time?
I was wondering if anyone has noticed changes in how Google returns 'site:' searches over the past few years or months. I remember being able to do a search such as "site:example.com" and Google would return a list of webpages where the order may have shown the higher page rank pages (due to link building, etc) first and/or parent category pages higher up in the list of the first page (if relevant) first (as they could have higher PR naturally, anyways). It seems that these days I can hardly find quality / target pages that have higher page rank on the first page of Google's site: search results. Is this just me... or has Google perhaps purposely scrambled the SERPS somewhat for site: searches to not give away their page ranking secrets?
Algorithm Updates | | OrionGroup1 -
Google Dropped 3,000+ Pages due to 301 Moved !! Freaking Out !!
We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
Algorithm Updates | | David_C
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.mystie.com/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!0 -
Client's site dropped completely from Google - AGAIN! Please help...
ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there) Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research... in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs... He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone. Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened. We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site. They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon) There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway. SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again. We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did... AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again. So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"... Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -
Algorithm Updates | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Ranking well for main key terms but site traffic has dropped sharply?
Hello All, Just a quick question. Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings. The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change) I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories. Put in place before I started here 🐵 Any help truly appreciated. Regards Tim
Algorithm Updates | | TimHolmes0 -
Panda 2.3 features
So, its official that Panda 2.3 is out.. Has anyone found the fine print on what this "version" focused on?
Algorithm Updates | | malachiii0