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Penguin 4.0 and homepage level penalties
Hey folks Looking to get some input from what other people are seeing with Penguin 4.0 and historically penalised sites. We have three sites we are looking at currently - all had historically brutal penguin penalties. All have done extensive clean up and are respectable businesses and have seen some manor of recovery or improvement. However, we are seeing issues at a homepage level with these three sites in that the homepage currently does not rank for the main terms but an inner page does in it's place (but not as well as we would expect given everything else). This applies to a single keyword on all three of these sites - add a modifier to that keyword and they rank top of first page (often 1st place). Example of modifiers being 'installer', 'uk', 'supplier' etc. That main keyword though only ranks top of 3rd page in this instance and it is an inner page and not the homepage which is the best fit for the targeted term. Question Is anyone else seeing this? Sites that have gone from no visibility in top 50 for a previously abused term that are now seeing some visibility page 2 / page 3 for the big terms and top of page 1 visibility for those terms + modifiers. Thoughts This seems a bit odd to me and hard to understand in light of the Penguin 4.0 announcement if there is no demotion and only devaluation of bad links then why would a single page still be seemingly so heavily effected how can an algorithm that focuses on devaluation of bad links still be granular as this seems to be a penalty of sorts that effects a specific page for a specific keyword (the one most abused historically in terms of link building). two of these are big companies, biggest in their industry in the real world with lots of high visibility clients like TV shows, IKEA etc. Lots of natural highly authoritative links, good content etc - we are digging in further but certainly looks like they have their house largely in order. Note We have one other client that I believe is seeing something similar on an internal page and that page was the main link target for spammy links of old that are now removed. However, it appears Google has a memory regarding even these removed links. I mention this primarily as I don't believe this is homepage specific but rather that is the case as the homepage was the main link target historically. Summary These sites are seeing movement - huge movement. Not exactly what we would expect though given the extensive clean up and talk around how this release of the algorithm works. Be interested to see what you are seeing out there folks and if anyone has seen anything similar. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus0 -
Did I get hit with a panda update?
I have a site that is a marketplace. We don't own any items, the sellers fill everything out and then it goes up on the site. Many of our sellers also have their own sites and just send us a spreadsheet with all of their items and we bulk upload. In that case what we are putting up is very similar to what they already have up on their own site. I used the Fruition penalty checker and they seem to be suggesting that we got hit with some penalties for Panda and Quality Content. With the Google Algorithm it is hard to know for sure what we got hit with. Is it possible Google sees us as one of those crappy scraper sites? Is there anything we can do? We never see the items so I can't add to peoples description.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Algorithm Penalty?
I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. The URL in question is: http://goo.gl/9lGqxDSince this website was relaunched around the same time as the Panda algorithm update, it's dropped from the 1st page of results down to page 6 or lower. Essentially, this website no longer ranks well in the Google UK for relevant keywords to the business when combined with the place names in it's geographical operation areas.It's worth noting that the website ranks very well in other search search engines such as Bing! The website had a lot of spammy links which we've requested to be removed from the respective site owners. Most of which are either non-responsive or want extortionate amounts of money to remove the links so we have used Google disavow links tool. We suspect the site is being penalised as a result of the spammy inbound links something which is supported by the fact that only the new pages or pages with fresh content are ranking (http://goo.gl/D1NpxH). However, Google Webmaster tools reports no messages or critical issues.On the whole the website is updated occasionally. The writing is very easy to understand, it's quick to load, URLs are clear and the titles and descriptions are partly optimised.We're believe that our only option is to abandon the current domain and completely rewrite the content for a new domain. Does anyone else have any ideas how we can fix this before we go ahead?Many thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chichesterdesign0 -
Using the right Schema.org - & is there a penalty in using the wrong one?
Hi We have a set of reviewed products (in this case restaurants) that total an average rating of 4.0/5.0 from 800 odd reviews. We know to use schema/restaurant for individual restaurants we promote but what about for a list of cities, say restaurants in boston for example. For the product page containing all of Boston restaurants - should we use schema.org/restaurant (but its not 1 physical restaurant) or schema.org - product + agg review score? What do you do for your product listing pages? If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie1 -
Duplicate Content - Panda Question
Question: Will duplicate informational content at the bottom of indexed pages violate the panda update? **Total Page Ratio: ** 1/50 of total pages will have duplicate content at the bottom off the page. For example...on 20 pages in 50 different instances there would be common information on the bottom of a page. (On a total of 1000 pages). Basically I just wanted to add informational data to help clients get a broader perspective on making a decision regarding "specific and unique" information that will be at the top of the page. Content ratio per page? : What percentage of duplicate content is allowed per page before you are dinged or penalized. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
403, 301, 302, 404 errors & possible google penalty
William Rock ran a Xenu site scan on nlpca(dot)com and mentioned the following: ...ran a test with Xenu site scan and it found a lot of broken links with 403, 301, 302, 404 Errors. Other items found: Broken page-local links (also named 'anchors', 'fragmentidentifiers'): http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#null anchor occurs multiple timeshttp://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#US not found Could somone give us an output of that list, and which ones of these errors do we need to clean up for SEO purposes? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1 -
Penalties for site going down often?
I have a client with a site that ranks for some very competitive terms who consistently has server issues and the site goes down for a day at a time. Each time this happens his site seems to drop in site wide rankings and then stay there for months without ever fully recovering. Only part of the rankings are usually recovered. Has anyone else seen this trend? Is it something Google keeps on record without fully removing any penalty addressed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0