Penguin or coincidence?
-
We have several country specific sites set up as folders of our main domain. We use hreflang tags to get the relevant site served in each country, with mixed success. In about 60% of searches the US site appears.
Beginning in late October our rankings for the US have slowly, but reasonably steadily dropped. Each week we'll see 10 or so keyword rises and 15-30 keywords drop. Generally by 1-3 places. This is much more movement than we were seeing in the months prior to this.
Is this a result of penguin, or just coincidence? The US subfolder is the only one which has seen drops overall, the rest have actually improved slightly during this time period. I would expect any impact due to Penguin to effect the whole domain?
I've been checking through our backlinks and we do a have a handful of bad links, along with a 100 or so which look a little odd and not completely relevant. I have contacted sites and had some of these removed, and created a disavow list with the worst of the rest. I haven't asked for the site to be re-considered yet.
We haven't had any message in webmaster tools re: bad links or similar.
Cheers.
-
Looks like Page Rank for all our key product listing pages has taken a hammering. They're all getting a PR of 1, even though our domain authority remains ok (it has dropped too, but not as dramatic).
-
What we're seeing is a lot of yo-yo'ing. This week we had 30 SERP drops and 17 rises, which has been typical for last month. Prior to that we'd see about half of this.
e.g. 'home security cameras' SERPs since mid-Oct has been: 4, 4, 8, 4, 7, 6. This is pretty typical of what I'm seeing. We've not made any real content or site changes in this time.
Traffic wise there has been a 3.5% dip in search over the last few weeks. So not huge.
-
There was an algo update at the end of october that wasnt really reported on. About 3 days before the end of the month.
If it started there, then I dont think that's penguin. That's something else.
I can't really help with that if it did happen within that time frame. I don't have enough data to say what to specifically check so be sure to do the usual onpage audits/speed/links and go from there. If it happened to your subfolder, then I would worry about the whole domain. I would however, check the whole search results for the affected sub+keywords, what changed, where the competitors are, were videos added, are there more "authority" sites showing, were those ranking and linking to me affected and so on.
Good luck!
-
Until and unless someone directly from Google chimes in, it's always guess-work because we don't have access to their many algorithms, let alone the database that shows how an individual site is assessed by them.
In your case, it MAY be a Penguin issue, however if you're seeing a steady decline, that's not likely to be Penguin. Penguin is most often seen as an immediate major drop over a single day or a very short time-period.
On the other hand, I've seen countless sites that have had ongoing declines, and in every case, that's been due to a cascading trigger effect situation.
For example, if a site is weak overall, and then an algorithm update (one of their many algorithms, including but far from limited to Panda, Penguin, Above the Fold, EMD...) might flag a site as "deserves to have ranking drops". Then once that happens, as the full spectrum of their other algorithms then get updated, that "now flagged" site is more vulnerable to those other subsequent algorithms that get refreshed.
If you go back far enough in the Google Analytics timeline for Google organic visits, you can often see where a decline first began and pinpoint it to being "near enough" to a known Google update as that "trigger" point. Yet you can't always because they make hundreds of updates every year, and most are not announced or given a name.
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 post Penguin update
As recent Penguin update makes quick move with backlinks with immediate impact; does Disavow tool also results the changes in few days rather than weeks like earlier? How long does it take now to see the impact of disavow? And I think still we must Disavow some links even Google claim that it'll take care of bad backlinks without passing value from them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Community Discussion: What changes are you seeing as a result of Penguin 4.0?
We've been waiting on the latest Penguin rollout so long it would have been appropriate for Google to launch it with a creepy meme titled "I'm baaack." But now that it's here, what changes are you seeing to the websites you monitor or manage? We'd very much enjoy hearing you stories, thoughts and proposed courses of action below in the comments. If you need to get up to speed on Penguin 4.0, Dr. Pete's post, Penguin 4.0: Was it Worth the Wait?, is a great place to start, as is the latest Whiteboard Friday by Rand: Penguin 4.0: How the Real-Time Penguin-in-the-Core-Alg Model Changes SEO. RS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ronell-smith3 -
Penguin 2.1\. Bad links removed - do I need to wait for next Penguin upgrade to see recovery?
Hi - I have read conflicting advice about this issue - after taking action and removing bad links following a Penguin 2.1 hit, will the site need to wait for the next Penguin upgrade before the link clean-up has any effect? Or will the cleaning of the links be acknowledged and "rewarded" with a ranking improvement before that (assuming all bad links were cleared out)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StevieD0 -
Possible Penguin 2.1 fix - Anybody tested this?
Possible Penguin 2.1 fix? This happened to client site - Stay with me - this takes some explaining… A clients home page is set as index.html Which in domain settings goes to the root address: http://www.domain.com/ But is a setting on a domain/hosting - you can set any page to the root- I always link directly to the root address (the second one) So if you set the new root page as http://www.domain.com/index.htm --- going to the root - essentially is a new page- any previous poor linking would be then broken and would have no effect So it would be a matter of changing the domain settings to use the index.htm page (which would function exactly the same- internal link structure of site goes to the root) thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
Following Penguin 2.0 hit in May, my site experienced another big drop on August 13th
Hi everyone, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May. This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame. On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google. At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction. So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner. However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs : Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added. As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!! I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached. In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs. So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business. However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions) My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process. I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design. I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My website is ConcertHotels.com. Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Penguin Update, what I've noticed
Hi Guys, I have spent 2 days looking at our site and competitors after the update, 3 things jump out straight away for us. I am in the travel industry and still on the first page of the major KW's but in the 8 to 10 region, was 2 to 5. 1. The sites that have moved up both have shops selling merchandise which is not the main focus of their site, anyone else spotted sites with a eCommerce section have benefited from latest update? 2. Sites we have links from, although they look like a travel sites, maybe be themed differently by Google. Anybody know a good tool that will help determine what theme a site is? Images, design and content don't always seem to be a good indicator, I think back links to the domain has a big effect on the site you get the link from. Any tool that will help speed up this process would be great. We need more quality links from travel sites (or at least what google thinks is a travel related site). 3. The competitors who have done well seem to have 45% links to home page, we only had 28% so we are focusing now on links to home page. We don't really stand out from the top 10 sites in any other way in terms of other indicators like branded keywords vrs money making kw's. Any thoughts or feedback would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty0 -
Really, is there much difference between an unnatural links warning and Penguin?
We know that the unnatural links warnings are manual and that Penguin is algorithmic. (I'm not talking about the latest round of confusing unnatural links warnings, but the ones sent out months ago that eventually resulted in a loss of rankings for those who didn't clean their link profiles up.) Is there much difference in the recovery process for either? From what I can see, both are about unnatural/spammy linking to your site. The only difference I can see is that once you feel you've cleaned up after getting an unnatural links warning you can file a reconsideration request. But, if you've cleaned up after a Penguin hit you need to wait for the next Penguin refresh in order to see if you've recovered. Are there other differences that I am not getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Who is beating you on Google (after Penguin)?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google. I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this.
The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories. 1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering. Now it is not the homepages that are beating me. In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do. 2) Nobodies. Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old. Has anybody else noticed this? I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web. Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO? If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building. But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.| Thanks!0