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Site recovery after manual penalty, disavow, SSL, Mobile update = but dropped again in May
I have a site that has had a few problems over the last year. We had a manual penalty in late 2013 for bad links, some from guest blogs and some from spammy sites. Reconsideration requests had me disavow almost all of the incoming links. Later in 2014, the site was hit with link injection malware and had another manual penalty. That was cleared up and manual penalty removed in Jan 2015. During this time the site was moved to SSL, but there were some redirect problems. By Feb 2015 everything was cleared up and a an updated disavow list was added. The site recovered in March and did great. A mobile version was added in April. About May 1st rankings dropped again. Traffic is about 40% off it's March levels. Recently I read that a new disavow file will supersede an old one, and if all of the original domains and URLs aren't included in the new disavow file they will no longer be disavowed. Is this true? If so, is it possible that a smaller disavow file uploaded in Feb would cause rankings to drop after the May 3 Quality update? Can I correct this by disavowing all the previously disavowed domains and URLs? Any advice for determining why the site is performing poorly again? We have well written content, regular blogs, nothing that seems like it should violate the Google guidelines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robertjw0 -
Showing on page 25 for url keyword/ brand, is it a penalty?
Hi I have a site which shows on page 25 in G serps for the main brand keyword which is also the url its a .com and as far as I can see has no penalties and has unique content. The keyword itself has no competition and the site should be no1 in G for it. Our site domain is 11 years old.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MoneySite0 -
Are Incorrectly Set Up URL Rewrites a Possible Cause of Panda
On a .NET site, there was a url rewrite done about 2 years ago. From a visitor's perspective, it seems to be fine as the urls look clean. But, Webmaster tools reports 500 errors from time to time showing /modules/categories... and /modules/products.... which are templates and how the original urls were structured. While the developer made it look clean, I am concerned that he could have set it up incorrectly. He acknowledged that IIS 7 on a Windows server allows url rewrites to be set up, but the site was done in another way that forces the urls to change to their product name. So, he has believed it to be okay. However, the site dropped significantly in its ranking in July 2013 which appears to be a Panda penalty. In trying to figure out if this could be a factor in why the site has suffered, I would like to know other webmasters opinions. We have already killed many pages, removed 2/3 of the index that Google had, and are trying to understand what else it could be. Also, in doing a header check, I see that it shows the /modules/products... page return a 301 status. I assume that this is okay, but wanted to see what others had to say about this. When I look at the source code of a product page, I see a reference to the /modules/products... I'm not sure if any of this pertains, but wanted to mention in case you have insight. I hope to get good feedback and direction from SEOs and technical folks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Panda Recovery Question
Dear Friends, One of my customers was hit by the Panda, we were working on improve the tiny content on several pages and the remaining pages were: 1 NOINDEX/FOLLOW 2. Removed from sitemap.xml 3. Un-linked from the site (no one page on the site link to the pour content) As conclusion we can't see any improvement, my question is should I remove the pour content pages (404)? What is your recommendation? Thank you for your time Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharewarePros0 -
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
Just identified and reversed a severe footer links penalty - any similar experiences out there?
Just seen my first rather dramatic sitewide footer links penalty. Virtually all organic search traffic fell off site for 3 months. The footer links were a mix of keyphrases targeted at internal pages and keyphrases targeted at a handful of other associated companies (a group of enterprises owned by same businessman, with websites hosted in the same place). The website developers felt they were improving search engine visibility. Anyway, as soon as I started work with this client I requested immediate removal of the footer links and traffic immediately recovered to pre-penalty levels (within a couple of days). Have any of you experienced anything similar?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Panda recovery. Is it possible ?
Dear all, To begin, english is not my native language, so I'm very sorry if I make some mistake. On the 23th march 2012, Panda penalized my website (a coupon website) Avec-Reduction (dot com for the url). At this date, I have lost more than 70% of my traffic. The structure of the website was like an e-commerce website. Categories -> merchant page -> coupon page. The content was to thin for Google, I'm agree wit that. So, in may, I have made a new version. Here you can see the most important modifications : A smallest header (-100px height). 2 columns website (the oldest website had 3 columns) I have deleted the category menu with the list of all categories and the alphabetical menu. less ads on the website (since few days I have also deleted the 2 adense blocks) The coupons was promoted with the thumbs of the merchant on the home listing. Now I have few top lists in text only. I have deleted all the categories pages (one page by category of merchant, with the listing of all the merchants of the category). Now I have only one page for this. Same thing with the alphabetical pages. All these deleted pages have a 301 redirect. The 2 new pages (categorie page and alphabetical page) are on noindex. I have deleted all the promo codes pages, all the coupons are now on the merchant page (301 redirect used). I have create an anti-spam system for the review codes (I have a lot of spam on these forms, even if I cleaned every day/2days). Now, I have no spam. Visitors have now the possibility to put a note and a review for each merchant. This fonctionality is new, so not a lot of reviews for the moment. All the merchants pages without promo codes have a noindex on the robot tag. Since july, I have the possibility to use the "title" of each promo code. I can personnalised the promo code. On the same time, to have more content, I have the possibility to add sales or great promos for each merchants, not only promo codes. Affiliate links are created on JS which open a new window (a redirect page with noindex). That's the end of the most important changes on my website. I have a better speed page (/2 since july) because I have optimized my images, CSS, JS... At the end of july, I had health problem and the website has no update until the first days of october. Now, the website is updated every day, but between july and october I have no panda recovery. I have no duplicate content, I try to add the most content I can. So I don't understand why Google Panda penalized me again and again. Some of my competitors have a lot of keyword stuffing (4, 5, 6, ... 10 lines of KS on each merchant pages). Some of them have only affiliate merchants, automatic script to put coupons on websites), few "same" websites... I have less than 30% of affiliated merchant, I validate all the coupons or promo manually, I personalized all my coupons... So I don't understand what to do. I will appreciate all help. If you see problems on my wesite or if you know tips to have a panda recovery, I will be very happy to have informations. Many thanks for all. Sincerely, Florent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Floroger0 -
Has Panda 2.5 Hit?
I'm sure a few people have been asking this direct question throughout the forums but most of them are masked by indirect questions like "my traffic has dipped" and the like. Does anyone have a firm confirmation that Panda has hit? My indication that it has hit is that I'm experiencing a ~%30 increase in traffic to my e-commerce client from organic searches after this past weekend. We haven't made any significant changes to content besides daily postings, but even that doesn't account for a %30 spike that has maintained for 3 days straight. So again, what have you guys experienced? Anything to support this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | linztm0