Slowly recovering from algorithm penalty
-
Hi ,
over the years a website we took over was hit by an algorithm penalty (a combination of penguin and panda).
We managed to bring rankings back (after 6 months) from page 5/6 to page 2 after we used the google disavow tool.
now for the past 9 months we have been stuck on page 2..
is there anything you think can be done to bring it back to page 1?
- we are building quality links now and moved away from low quality links other link builders were making. We are managing the process much closer and ensuring we maintain good standards of links.
- also making the pages flatter and merging short page content to larger content pages
- now we are looking at site structure and creating structured internal link flow
is there anything we should be aware of and any recommendations to get back on page 1..
this is a tailor-made travel related website with a small selection of destinations
-
hi thanks for the reply
I also believe panda may have hit the site.. do you think just removing this kind of content is good enough to rank the site better.. we have gone to the extent of removing pages we found high duplicate ratios.. hoping that will help.. also we are merging page content to make them larger, more in-depth rather than multiple pages for small subtopics..
cheers
Ram
-
These are tough to comment on without actually seeing some of the links. These might all be ok, but I could see any of these having the potential to be unnatural links. I wish I could offer more but I do think it's possible that current link building activities are bringing you down.
Another thing that I see commonly is that sites can still be slightly suppressed by Penguin if they have not done a thorough enough disavow. Again though, that's tough to comment on without digging in quite a bit deeper.
It's also possible the site has other things holding it down such as Panda.
And then another possibility could be that this is just where Google wants to rank the site. Travel is a very competitive niche. It used to be that anyone could be top 10 for any subject if you could get enough links, but these days Google wants to show websites that users want to see and I would imagine that there are a lot of big brand travel websites that you are competing with.
-
hi
we are aiming at travel related websites which their own link profile is for travel sector.
Our online marketing is a combination of travel directories, some business directories, some link exchanges, guest blogs where appropriate, press releases and UK based PR in national publications.
All are checked for their neighbourhood, trust flow and relevance where they are not national household brands
thanks
-
OK, that's good. Sometimes ahrefs reports old links as new ones.
Can you give some examples of the types of new links you are building?
-
Yes these are bad links we have disavowed .. our disavow was very thorough.. In fact we suspect maybe too thorough for short terms gains but more a long term strategy that has currently redduced our domain authority but cleaned up our link profile immensely
-
This is a question that's tough to answer without spending a couple of hours digging in to the site. But, I had some thoughts.
we are building quality links now
That makes me uneasy. If you are building links then there is a good chance you're still doing things that are against the quality guidelines. There are a few self made links that can be acceptable such as valid industry directories. But, in most cases any link that you can build on your own is not a natural one.
Here are some new links that I see according to ahrefs:
http://www.expatfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/p=94262/ - a link from a forum profile. Not natural.
http://medranks.com/travel/packages/page-1.html?s=A - Ouch. Hopefully this is an old, disavowed link that ahrefs picked up.
http://www.huludirectory.com/computers_and_internet/discussion_forums/reference/acronyms_and_abbreviations/shopping/major_retailers/ - same as above.
Now it's possible that those are old links that you have disavowed, but my first concern would be how you are going about getting links to the site now. Again, if you're building them yourself rather than doing things to attract them then you're probably doing more harm than good.
-
hi, if anyone would be amazing enough to want the url to help us i can repost it for you.
thanks
-
It'd be super helpful if you could share your site URL, then our community can get even more specific with answers.
-
Hi,
I can't answer you anything very confidently that If you do follow set up strategy then your site will come up from page 2
page 1 . There is a very recent post on this published by Neil Patel on search engine Journal, he suggested some good
strategy that can help you in this situation.
A Tactical Guide to Making Old Pages Rank in Google Again @ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/tactical-guide-making-old-pages-rank-google/124575/
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
-
Recovering from Sitemap Issues with Bing
Hi all, I recently took over SEO efforts for a large e-commerce site (I would prefer not to disclose). About a month ago, I began to notice a significant drop in traffic from Bing and uncovered in Bing Webmaster Tools that three different versions of the sitemap were submitted and Bing was crawling all three. I removed the two out of date sitemaps and re-submitted the up to date version. Since then, I have yet to see Bing traffic rebound and the amount of pages indexed by Bing is still dropping daily. During this time there has been no issue with traffic from Google. Currently I have 1.3 million pages indexed by Google while Bing has dropped to 715K (it was at 755K last week and was on par with Google several months ago). I know that no major changes have been made to the site in the past year so I can't point to anything other than the sitemap issue to explain this. If this is indeed the only issue, how long should I expect to wait for Bing to re-index the pages? In the interim I have been manually submitting important pages that aren't currently in the index. Any insights or suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Determining the Cause of a Penalty
I received a link removal request from a site who said that they were penalized. I confirmed that they were #1 for the competitive keyword phrase that is also their domain name and now they are #10. Here are some things I noticed about the site: Over 2,500 linking domains. Dozens of high quality linking domains like Huffington Post and Mashable. Some off topic guest post links, e.g. on a SEO site. Guest post anchor text was usually their site name which is an exact match domain. Lots of top 100 resource pages that received good organic links. Infographics with links using their domain name as the anchor text. Relatively few spammy links according to Open Site Explorer. Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized? What do you think?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Confirmation of penalty
Hi, I have been discussing with friends about possible penalties on few domains [listed below]. I would appreciate if any of seomoz staff could check them and explain if these sites are penalized in full, or part of these websites are penalized or homepage being penalized, any identification of penalty being imposed, and how to get these sites restored. http://www.google.com.pk/#sclient=psy-ab&q=123businesslistings.com&oq=123businesslistings.com&gs_l=hp.3...4797.4797.1.5047.1.1.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c.1.8.psy-ab.xDG3ytsYUVU&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45107431,d.aWc&fp=db751f8c4669b6fe&biw=1441&bih=603 keyword searched=123businesslistings.com
Technical SEO | | ClaudioJudsoni0 -
How to Recover from the Exact Match Domain Update last weekend?
Hi, Our main website a geo exact match city dot com domain which is 18 years old got all its rankings washed away from top ten to 300th to 400th position plus on Google. We are still top 10 on Yahoo and Bing for the City term. The site is Dmoz listed , has quality updated daily content and no paid advertising or links of any kind. I joined seomoz today and noticed I via the page optimiser that the main keyword for the city which is the exact match domain was over optimised but its hard to talk about events and news in a city without mentioning the citys name lol Looking at the backlinks in the open site explorer tool I noticed alot of spammy links from chinese website and weird domains that were not related and am beginning to think I was the victim of a negative seo campaign. I submitted a re-consideration request with Google and they replied in the space of a few days saying that it was not a manual penalty and that it was down to there algorithm changing or perhaps I changed cms or made changes. There was no unatural links warning either. Funny thing is the website is wordpress based and we changed to a new theme 2 weeks ago and also moved to a new server. Just wondering people views on what my next move shoud be to try and regain our rankings on Google I already toned down the use of the city keyword on the homepage. Regards Tom
Technical SEO | | glenanail0 -
Could a large number of No Followed links in to my site have caused a penalty?
On 22nd Feb, I placed a text ad on a respected industry recruitment website. As the site has many pages, the webmaster made a point of NOFOLLOWING the links back to my site. 6 days later, my site lost 30% of its daily traffic overnight, and it's stayed there ever since. I looked on Webmaster Tools just now, and it says that there are 125,000 links coming in to my site from the site I'm advertising on (even though the links are NOFOLLOWED). Could this have triggered the fall in search traffic to my site? Thanks for any feedback.
Technical SEO | | tofftrader0 -
How to move a site slowly
I've got a site that I started back in 2001 (www.jaaroncaststone.com) to sell what I was making, concrete countertops and sinks. Well we're going to be discontinuing the concrete products in a month or so and want to start pointing all the links from the old site to a new one dedicated to a single product (www.jaaron-wood-countertops.com). I don't want to do a full 301 on the old site just yet but can I put a canonical tag on the index and about us pages pointing to the new site now so the search engines start looking that way or should I wait and do a full 301 when the day comes to pull the old site?
Technical SEO | | JAARON0 -
I think I have a penalty on my domain...
my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead. I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these. Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9. This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site. Any feedback would be gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Google Quality Algorithm Update
I'm curious what correlations or impacting variables SEO professionals have found that have increased or decreased ranking with the most recent algorithm change. It appears that many innocent sites have fallen victim, especially larger sites. It also appears that Google is maintaining that specific sites were not targeted... Meaning there must be proven characteristics.
Technical SEO | | douglaskarr0