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Hi Chris,
Daniweb did recovery for a short period, but then lost their traffic again, there is more here: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/HiGVM9h2ioE%5B1-25-false%5D
I know google is planning to soften panda, and about time too.
thanks,
julian.
I dont like to comment on specific details because I simply don't know what works and what doesn't.
The best thing you can do is look at what is ranking and do your own version of that. If it's currently ranking well (and has done for a long time) there is a very chance that google likes it. But bear in mind that sites with very high link juice and brand awareness can get away with stuff that your brand won't be able to.
If it was penguin you won't get a links warning.
If you have been hit by panda or penguin a reconsideration request wont help.
I would totally redesign your homepage. I don't like looking at it at work, it feel almost like a porn site. Plus the there are nearly 70 h2 headers which feels spammy and there is very little content.
Panda is like a black hole, once you are sucked in there are very few sites who escape.
Chances are you will never get all your rankings back. Sorry but thats the state of play, e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491
Also you are up again some big players:
your domain authority is only 34
The good news is that http://www.iwantpants.com/ is only 31 and in 4th place.
No one fully knows how to beat panda, but you need to improve you content, add more content, basically make users love you site, stay on your site longer, etc. Google refers to these 23 questions: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
Your aim is to make every page of your site HIGH QUALITY. If you cant make a page high quality delete it.
The first thing you should do is try to identify what the penalty is. Try this: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
Once you know which penalty you have you will be able to make a plan of action after doing more research.
Basically if you have been hit by panda it because your content is not good enough, and if you have been hit my penguin you have some/a lot of un-natural links.
Hi Ken,
You didn't read my message. I've already do that. It tell you the total, e.g. 6080, but you can see all the pages. You get 10 results per page, but it only went up to page 69, so only 690 paged shown.
I want to see all pages.
Hi mozers,
In WMT google says total indexed pages = 5080. If I do a site:domain.com commard it says 6080 results.
But I've only got 2000 pages in my site that should be indexed.
So I would like to see all the pages they have indexed so I can consider noindexing them or 404ing them.
Many thanks,
Julian.
Should be as quick as google re-crawls the robots.txt.
Best thing you can do is add a couple of links to sites that are crawled daily, to encourage google to visit your clients site as soon as possible
Could be:
Link building is changing / has changed. Google is getting tougher, so make sure you read recent advice as old advice could get you in trouble with google.
This is a good recent guide: http://moz.com/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide-updated-for-post-penguin
Panda is probably the worst penalty to have. Very few site ever recover, even though site owner have spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to solve it. e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491
In this video, about 12.43 - matt cutts is clear, if you think its low quality 404 it, in other delete it.
May I ask why you want to keep these 180,000 pages live? And why are you planning to add another 100,000 pages? Surely they cant be high quality pages?
Thanks Lily.
Redirecting old sites is unlikely to give you a rankings boost, especially if they have changed hands and have expired / dropped. You really need to buy them before they expire and don't change two many details.
Think about seomoz.com to moz.com - all the link juice have been transfered, and so it should, its just a rebrand, same servers, so owners, etc. But if they brought so ramdon site and redirect do they deserve the link juice? No, and google doesn't think so either.
What are you trying to achieve by buying dropped domains? Are you planning to redirect them to your own sites for link juice? If you do that be very careful, there are lot better ways to get link juice.
To check a domain I would:
that should do it.
Hi Jason,
Yes I've heard a lot more stories like that too. Which is how it should be, you fix the problem and google then gives you your rankings, traffic and revenue back. But with Panda it doesn't seem to work that way, even though Matt Cutts says it does, which is frustrating, annoying and unfair.
The lack of response to this question seems to confirm my fear that its impossible to get out of panda.
Julian.
This is what you are looking for: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
In this video matt cutts says: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IzUuhTyvJk about 15
"once we re-run our data (every few weeks) if we determine your site is of higher quality you would pop back out of being affected"
Panda has effected thousands of sites and a lot of smart people have been working on the problem for about 2 years since the first panda was launched, but I can only find 1 site that has "popped back" to their original rankings. e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491
Apart from Motortrend.com I can't find any sites (of reasonable size) / case studies of sites that have solved the panda problem, and were definitely hit by panda. Which doesn't feel right, some people have deleted a ton of pages, redesigned their site, improved their content, etc with no success. Therefore is it a pointless exercise? Therefore, is it better to simply give up and start a new site?
I would be interested to hear of the sites that have resolved the problem with Panda. I can hardly find any examples of Panda recovery examples.
Submit and forget it.
If you do get listed great but don't expect to and certainly don't think it will make much difference to your rankings.
If you are pinning you hope on dmoz you are going to be disappointed.
Be careful, very careful. Matt Cutts has already warned about possible future penalties for people abusing rich snippets.
My understanding is that panda is about low quality and thin content. Are your news posts either thin or low quality content? If not why worry?
I can understand the problem with bounce rate, but two points: 1) your article might still be interesting for the person who searched for it. 2) you can promote your latest news stories at the bottom of the post and in the right nav, e.g. look at how the dailymail.co.uk right nav is filled with juicy news stories which I'm sure increase the pages read on their site and decreases the bounce rate, e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2326088/Prince-Harry-delights-staff-surprise-visit-Chelsea-Flower-Show.html
How many people search for "no1 android phone"? No many, so why put it in your title?
I would do some keyword research and target those terms.
Also the link to spaceships and laser beams from this page is mis-formed http://www.thislittlemama.com/2013/03/21/stephanie-keeping/
Rounds up posts are just fine. The problem is if they are is a close group of people who just recommend each other, it looks un-natural. E.g. these are fine:
http://www.threethriftyguys.com/2013/05/friday-finds-510/
http://coolmaterial.com/roundup/friday-link-roundup-123/
Its find to recommend your friends, but not all the time. Also once you have a few links from a site additional links from the site site become less valuable so you want to have a bigger a bigger pool of sites that link to you.
The dropped seems to have started with Panda 3.2, why do you think that is not the problem?
Did you get any messages in google webmaster tool? e.g. un-natural links warning, etc?
What is your url? You might not want to supply your url, but its would help people here tell you what is wrong.
Considering your traffic has been down for nearly 18 months and you have been unable to fix it, it would be wise to either ask here or pay an SEO to do an audit. e.g.
Yes before sept 2012 it was beneficial to have a keyword rich domain, but not anymore. In fact a domain like yours which is keyword rich, super long, and with two hyphens might be a red flag to google. If you are serious about this website I would change the domain name, it is horrible.
Read these:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data
http://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340
Google is pretty good at determining the original source of content.
Did you publish the content on your site first? If not, you will need to rewrite the content on your site to make it unique.
Also consider how often you site is spidered by google, if its every two weeks and you published the content on amazon a week after publishing on your own site google will probably view amazon as the original source of your content because it saw it there first.
You make it appear on just one page, it just requires some coding.
Firstly, the name of the site is:
cycling-jersey-collection.com or cycling-jersey-collection, it isn't cycling jersey collection. That is just keywords you want to rank for.
Having cycling jersey collection on every page is not useful, I doubt you will ever build a brand with the domain cycling-jersey-collection.com - 25 characters including two hyphens is horrible.
Only one page of your site will rank best for "cycling jersey collection" so just put it in one title tag.
It sounds like a blogroll link, so it shouldn't harm the sites.
But if the area on the page is titled: sponsored, advertising, etc, google will know the link is paid for and if it's not nofollowed it could be a problem.
Is the link paid for? If yes, be careful. Also review the other links around it, if it's surrounded by other external links that aren't relevant be careful.
Hi Stephanie,
Firstly, google doesn't really have "rules", instead they publish "webmaster guidelines", you should read and understand them, see here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
In the purest sense yes you have broken this guideline:
"Avoid participating in link schemes"
Read here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
I don't think you and your friends intended to "manipulate your site's ranking in Google", but that is how it looks to google, you intended to sent traffic to each other from your current readers.
Another problem is duplicate content, it sounds like your group is publishing the same content on each other's sites. This is not good, please stop and also consider going back and removing all duplicate content, just leave the original live.
I assume you are posting here because your traffic and rankings on google have dropped is that correct?
Finally, I think you need to keep your blogging friends but also to make some new ones. If there are 10 blogs in this group and you all interlink to each other and on a regular basis it isn't going to look good in google's eyes.
I dont think it's a critical issue either way.
If the links are there for natural reasons, e.g. good user navigation then 200 links can be helpful. It gets you were you want to be more quickly then a waterfall type of nav.
E.g the Dailymail.co.uk homepage is massive, 900+ links on its homepage according to: http://linkcounter.submitexpress.com/
And no one can tell me that the dailymail.co.uk doesnt rank well, according to alexa it's the 133rd most popular site in the world.
In theory less links on the homepage means that more link juice is sent from the homepage to each page you link to, so if you only have 100 pages you want to rank, there is not point in having 200 links on the homepage, e.g. remove links to external sites, facebook, and put links to less important pages, e.g. jobs, team, etc on a single "about us" page. etc.
Yes that all makes total sense.
It's a real shame that google are so harsh on new sites. New sites need traffic from google like a baby needs oyxgen, and without it they might not be able to survive.
Happier is self funded and about 6 months old, and still losing money every week. I've thought about pluging the plug a fair few times. I'm not sure how much more money to invest, I might be just throwing good money after bad. Sorry whinge over.
Wikipedia updates content all the time and they seem to rank rather well.
From google's perspective they would rather rank up-to-date content, so yes its got to be a good idea to update. An old page might have links to it, and history with google, so if it had up to date content its got to be better than a brand new page.
Firstly I would like to say a big thanks, your advice and thoughts are greatly appreciated. It has taken the pressure off me a bit, I was panicing but now I'm just a little worried.
I will talk to the tech guys today about noindexing the single deal pages and using a simliar layout to the code pages plus the comment layout from facebook. I don't really want to it as those pages are great for the long tail, checkout the traffic to hotukdeals.com who have a single page for every code and every deal, e.g. hotukdeals.com/deals/adidas-vintage-airline-bag-50-off-15-00-adidas-co-uk-1542011
But I can't afford to carry on with the current drop in traffic so have to make same changes fast.
Man do I hate google at the moment, they rank so much crap and obvious spam in their serps, but penalise a site like happier.co.uk on we have spent a lot of time carefully designing, adding quality content and playing by the rules.
Hey Carson,
I really appreciated you taking the time to give such a well considered answer. It does make total sense. I feel the same that it's less likely to be a problem with links (which have built naturally and in an ethical way, therefore it would be really harsh to get a penalty for links).
I agree the problem could be thin pages, however to add a little more info into the mix.
We wanted to only display voucher codes, and not stuff the page with "deals" that add no extra value. We felt only showing codes in the codes category was a better user experience, than something like this: vouchercodes.co.uk/johnlewis.com - who just fill the page up with "deals" when there are no codes available - e.g. this is what we currently do http://www.happier.co.uk/codes/john-lewis - do you think it would be better to add a few "deals" even though the person visiting this page is looking for "discount codes"?
The deal page template is similar to the market leader's - e.g. hotukdeals.com/deals/rowntree-jelly-tots-randoms-160g-64p-pick-mix-150g-74p-fruittella-4pk-55p-mentos-1540682 - hotukdeals.com are in the top 100 sites in the UK according to alexa
In summary, I had considered the issue of thin pages before designing Happier.co.uk and knew it could be an issue, but there is only so much content user's want about a deal or code, and the market leaders seem to rank very well, so felt it would appear almost spammy to fill the pages up with more content, which I understand is opposite to normal advice for webpages.
Not sure about the nsfw content - I know we list sites like ann summers which is a high street brand in the uk which sells sex toys, etc, but as a high street brand I thought they were ok, plus everyone in this niche lists their codes and deals. But users can add content to happier.co.uk so I'm not 100% if more nsfw content is listed, I will check that out.
There are some crawl stats from GWT that spike on the same day our traffic drop, e.g.
Normal kilobyes downloaded per day about 15000, on 27th april it peaked at 45164. See attached image.
And finally, I was told that my IT guys fixed a problem with the meta descriptions the day before the drop in traffic, on most pages with the codes category, previously the meta desc what a templated one, but a handwritten one was in the db but not being used. So they changed that and now the handwritten one is being used. Personally, I can't believe that google would drop traffic to a site just because the meta desc was changed, especially as they are not suppose to use that in ranking a site.
So for the long reply but sometime a lot of info is needed, google is such a tricky beast these days. Here is a summary of my questions:
Do you think it would be better to add a few "deals" even though the person visiting this page is looking for "discount codes"?
Do the crawl stats, especially to spike in kilobytes per day, point at the problem?
Could changing the meta description be the cause?
Thank you for your time,
Julian.
I thought it was now normal for google to send out a "unnatural links" email, e.g. http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-on-how-to-locate-unnatural-links-pointing-to-your-web-site-148190
in the article is says "As you know, Google has been sendingunnatural link warnings to Webmasters for about a year now." dated 13th feb 2013.
So can it be a link penalty without a link warning email? By the way the links are natural and certainly not from thousands of sites, GWT is showing links from 292 domains.
if it was to do with links would I have got an email from saying that they found unnatural links? Then give me a chance to sort the problem out. Because I didnt I assume that links are not the problem.
The way I see it that a link on the footer of a client site is like you said "stealing juice from clients". It not a true citation like google really wants to see.
Read this: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2259674/Penguin-2.0-Forewarning-The-Google-Perspective-on-Links
Your clients are not currently recommending you, you are recommending yourself by putting a link in their footer. Sure you will get link juice but you also might get penalty. I would instead remove the links from the footer (not a great place for links) and instead ask them to write an honest review of you in their plan, or on a supplier page, their about us page, or some other suitable page.
Hi Rich,
28000 sounds a lot but if a site adds us to their blogroll and they have 28000 pages that would account for all the links.
We done the following types of links building:
Also we have done, some guest posting on related and quality niche blogs, listed the site on some directories (not many), and some general out reach.
Has your rankings dropped as well?
And when you say "so would it be best to go back and remove all of the links from the templates of our websites and just leave the dofollow links on the homepages of our websites" do you mean leave a link to bluetone media on just the homepage of your client sites and not other sites you own?
If you only have 50 links and all are from paid directories it won't looks good or natural.
The way I see it is this... if the directory is quality and charge not for inclusion but for the editors time to review your site then its not a "paid link".
Check out this video from matt cutts: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-explains-how-google-handles-paid-directories-video/40511/
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the answer.
Yes it an affiliate site, but these types of sites can do amazing well in terms of rankings and traffic, check these two:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/vouchercodes.co.uk#
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hotukdeals.com
and of course http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/retailmenot.com
They are all similar sites. Maybe linking out from the homepage was not a great idea, but I thought it was user friendly, e.g. user see a code, so they click and go directly to merchant and get the code instead of going to deeper page, then get the code. In fact, I just checked and that is just how retailmenot.com works, which to my knowledge is most popular coupon site in the world.
I'm still dazed and confused.
Hiya guys and girls,
I've just spent 6 months, a lot of blood sweat and tears, and money developing www.happier.co.uk.
In the last weeks the site started to make a trickle of money, still loss making but showing green shoots. But then on Friday the traffic dropped due to my rankings on google.co.uk dropping.
Visits:
Thur 25th april = 1950
Fri 26th april = 1284
Sat 27th april = 906
So it looks like Ive been hit with some sort of penalty. I did get a warning on the 20th april about an increase in the number of 404 errors, currently showing 77. I've now remove the links to those 404 pages, ive left the 404 pages as is, as was suggested here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools. Could that be the reason?
We have spent a lot of time on site design and content. We think the site is good, but I agree it has a long way to go but without income that is hard, so we have been struggling through. Any ideas on the reason/s for the penalty?
Big thanks,
Julian.