Hi Marcus
Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
It's time to bite the bullet and start re-writing all the content!
Simon
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Hi Marcus
Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
It's time to bite the bullet and start re-writing all the content!
Simon
Hi Marcus
I know this sounds like Penguin but this issue kicked in nearly a year before Penguin was announced which is why I'm thinking Panda.
Thanks for taking a look Simon
I hope someone can shed some light on this as I've been pulling my hair out so much there's hardly any left!
Background: 12 year old website that for about 10 years had Top 3 rankings for 100's of phrases but rankings first dropped off August 2011. Panda seemed to be the cause but finding the exact issue is hard. We are an online travel agent and every hotel page has duplicate content copied from other websites. This has not been changed although lots of sections in the site still rank well, so do the hotel pages themselves. Lots of internal duplicate issues have been resolved but with no effect.
Our old style link, link, link all day long with our 2-word main key phrase as anchor text has given us an unnatural backlink profile but no message has been left by G about this in WMT (yet).
Internal link structure is poor with all pages linking back to the homepage with our 'money' 2-word phrase in 3 places.
Penguin wiped two thirds of all our backlinks back in May 2012.
Why then, do we still rank for our 'money' phrase on the homepage when it has some extra words included and becomes long tail?
e.g.
CityName Apartments (money phrase) - Now ranks page 2-3
CityName Apartments to rent for the night - Ranks #2 on Google in all countries
To make things more confusing other pages rank really well for similar money phrase
e.g.
CityName Apartments Offers - Ranks 2nd on 185,000,000 results (not homepage)
It seems only the homepage is effected (where 95% of inbound links point) but if the site wide duplicates or unnatural link profile was flagged it would effect more than one page of the site. Wouldn't it?
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