Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks everyone for answering my question!!!

Hi Tuzzel

Thanks for your reply. Are you sure there are no duplicate content risks?, I thought that, since google had already indexed the original content, finding the same content in a different (newer) site will cause the later to be considered "duplicate".

I hadn't thought about the 302 redirects, that's not a bad idea :).

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

Hi Thomas

Did you agree with the SEO people a list of KW to rank on?. I just ran a simple search with some kw on google.co.uk and the rankings I found were

aluminium school signs    5    
safety signs    50+    
school sign company    7    
school signs    50+    
school signs in aluminium    5    
we love school designs    50+

So you are at least on first page for some of the KW in your title tags and that describe your business. This is not what you expect to see if your website drops to the 10th page of Google's results.

Try downloading a program called "free google monitor" from cleverstat, Use it to find your ranking for the KW that are important for you. You probably still rank well enough on them.

In my opinion the SEO company is giving you a vague list of what they will do. The activities they list are not wrong, but since they lack detail I would not be comfortable with giving my business to them. I think they are not being straightforward with you on what happened, why it did and what is it exactly that they will do about it.

You should probably get a quote from some other (quality) SEO companies.

Cheers

Jorge

OK, Thanks Lynn

Hi Chris

Thank you for your answer.

The website is new so I really cannot compare it to last year. According to google trends there is some seasonal variation for the main keywords used on the site, but nothing as brutal as an 80% variation.

The SERPS have gone down considerably, I have been tracking the weekly positions using many sources (including MOZ), they were slowly but surely descending from the 4th to the end of October.

Linkbuilding has been done using high quality, human curated directories. Normally I would not consider them spammy, but you never know. Google had detected about 60 backlinks before the penalty.

I have not received a manual penalty notification from Google

Hello David

If you have only a couple of hundred backlinks to analyze, you're probably better off doing the analysis yourself "by hand". If, on the other hand, you have many hundreds/thousands of links, you may use an automated tool such as: http://www.linkdetox.com/tour/.

I haven't used the tool myself, but seems to cover most of the operations necessary to get rid of links.

Good Luck

Jorge

Dear Community

In early October, I noticed a sharp drop of the rankings of the main KW of a website I manage: idee-sol.fr. This, of course I immediatelly attributed to penguin 2.1.

While researching on the experience other webmasters have had with this unfortunate situation, I noticed that most of them had very sharp drops of traffic in a relatively small time, e.g.: a drop of 80% in a couple of days. But on idee-sol, the drop looks less steep yet equally worrying. Was the cause of this traffic/ranking drop due to penguin 2.1 exclusively or to penguin + something else (or not penguin at all?)

I'm including an image of the "non paid search" report of analytics.

dPnphnr

Luke

Apart from the tools mentioned above, I use copyscape premium to identify duplicate text (in the body of the page), I also find these tools very useful:

Xenu Linksleuth: very good for finding duplicate tags in your page's headers (title, description), and for many other tasks that require crawling your site. And the tool is free!

Screaming Frog: Another web crawler and very good tool for finding duplicate tags. It is a paid tool (about 77 GBP per year) but has a couple of features that Xenu does not have.

Cheers

Jorge

This is very odd.

I propose the following: ask your SEO company to put into writing what they told you by phone and to send it to you. I can give you and unbiased opinion if you send me their reply by private message. Please note that while I'm not an authority in SEO and I do not do consulting, at least I think I can help you determine if your SEO company is telling you something that makes sense or not.

Also ask them to give you a detailed quote on this 1250 quid job to "fix" your site's position. I agree with Bex when he writes that the amount is extremely high for such a job.

Cheers

Jorge

Hello

What was the developer's argument exactly? I mean, did they give you more information or just told you: "hey, you changed the logo and now you're on page 10"?. I think it is preposterous and unprofessional to say such a thing. A simple change of a logo should not wipe out your rankings.

Did you notice the drop yourself or did the developer inform you of it? Who does the rank tracking usually?. Do you have access to your Google Webmaster tools? If so, have you received a message from Google informing you that your site was being hit by a manual penalty?

I concur with Auke

Hi Kerri

Does the URL change with each "reload"? ex:

www.mypage.com/page1

www.mypage.com/page1/index.php?sort=time_remaining&sort_direction

If the pages have different URLs but basically the same content presented in a different way, then you might have a problem.

Can you give us the URLs in question? it might help me/us to better understand the situation.

Thank you Gentlemen!!!

Greetings Mozzers.

I have seen a couple of pages that use canonical tags in a peculiar way, and I wanted to know if this way of using the tags was correct, harmless or dangerous:

What I've seen is that on some pages like:

www.example.com/page1

There's a canonical tag in the header that looks like this

link href="http://ww.example.com/page1" rel="canonical"

It looks as though the tag is "redirecting to itself", this seems useless (at least to me). Is there a case where this is actually a recommended practice? Will using the canonical tag in this way "hurt" the page's ranking potential?

Cheers

Jorge

Hi Mark

All things being equal, the closer to the beggining of the tag your KW are, the better in terms of SEO.

Now, remember that the title has to make sense, because it and the description tag of your page appear in SERPs. Try to write them so that the user is enticed to click on your SERP entry.

Thank you for your answer Kevin, and especially for the numbers ;).

Hello everyone!

In your experience, how many of your visitors' browsers completely block cookies including those of Google Analytics ?

Hi Tom

Thanks for your answer. And yes, this jagged edge (saw tooth) pattern changes with the timescale. Sorry about the attachment, here it is again http://imgur.com/c9w4IkF

What i would really like to know is: does someone does NOT see this pattern in their daily traffic?. I would find it remarkable if everyone showed the saw tooth pattern,  independent of industry.

Cheers

Hi Iskender

I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your site.

I Agree with Dan's opinion: Had your site been sandboxed, you would not find it in the SERPs.

Check out the Mozcast http://mozcast.com/, which tracks the changes in Google's search algorithm. Maybe there is a match between the moment the algorithm changed and your rankings fell.

M

Greetings Mozzers

This sounds like a dumb question, but it's bothering me just the same and I would like to think what the fine community of SEO experts at MOZ thinks

I have taken a look at the traffic curve for about 20 different sites in very different industries (home improvement, wedding party supplies, pet feeding systems) and it seems to me that they all show a saw tooth pattern, more or less like the one below.

Greetings

I agree with you, freelancing sites like odesk or elance can be a bit of a jungle.

Here´s what I've done when I've needed a freelancer from those sites:

• Browse the list of Freelancers, use the site's filters to select freelancers that have high rankings in areas that you need.
• Contact the freelancers directly, do not to post an open ad because you will be flooded by low quality offers.
• Ask your potential freelancers about their experiences in projects such as yours, see if they ask questions about your site and your project. the best freelancers usually ask good questions.
• Finally, I would advise that you start small, give a specific linkbuilding assignment to the 2 or 3 freelancers you like the most, for example: "create 5 or 6 links from a site with x PR or in Y industry" and see what they deliver, this way you can determine what the quality level of the freelancer is before committing to a long term (and potentially expensive) partnership.

Good Luck

Masoko

I agree with Lynn

It will be best if you spend all the energy required for deploying the plan (as stated in the question) into generating content ON YOU WEBSITE that will add value for the user.