Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Do I need to create a new <loc>for each separate page (eg www.example/de and example/de/2ndpage) or just for each separate URL or Folder?</loc>

That was very helpful, thanks a lot, i did not realise there was a sitemap annotation available, so I just need to add the code indicating each different version + href lang to each language pages' site map?

Hi,

We plan to create sub-folders for our german, spanish and italian language versions. If we do will this pass rank juice to the new sites, but at the same time badly effect our main site, regards link juice/serp?

Or is this not such a huge factor in people's experience?

Many thanks.

James.

Hi Ryan.

I guess I would assume this is a Penguin issue now, perhaps thinking it a manual penalty was incorrect and a little ignorant of myself.

I think it is caused by bad links, in my opinion the content is written normally, there are very few issues with it and it is quite varied and updated. Our links were from an SEO company who always vowed their methods were totally adhering to google, but that was before penguin.

Over the last month or so the SERPs have started to go up, after some natural link building with related sites with the same language (French). And some extra additions to the content.

We have been contacting the deemed 'spammy' link websites to ask them to remove, one out of a few hundred have so far.

(Is 'disavow' still a tool we could eventually use in your opinion?)

I guess we are a little in the dark as to if the site is penalized, or if the link juice from the spammy sites has disappeared after penguin, which I guess would be the better reason fro serp loss for our site.

Hi Ryan,

Just to follow up...

We got our response from Google today, the confirm no manual penalties from Google.

'We've reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site because any ranking issues that you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the web spam team.' (Google)

Would this indicate just an algorithm change, in this case would you still recommend disavow and removing links, they say we should not send another reconsideration request, so we are not really sure where to take it from here.

Many thanks,

James.

Thanks for the info.

Hi we are still waiting for our new rankings, since Tuesday, I understand there is a problem, but when will it be fixed?

Thanks.

James.

Thanks Marcus, I know it is solid advice, we have taken it on board and plan to use it.

Sorry to disturb you again, would this be a good first contact message on the reconsideration form?

'Our rankings dropped for this site. We are trying to do everything possible to make it compliant with Google's guidelines - please can you tell us if there is any manual action taken on the site that we can fix.'

James.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer! It is really appreciated. So even if no warning message was received by us, you recommend firstly sending a reconsideration request, just asking them if the site has been penalised, in the very beginning, while we are still in the process of removing links?

And then is the answer is 'yes' sending another recon request when we have done our best at removing any spammy links?

Hi Agree with what your saying, one other reason not to address the penalty is that we have not received any warning on webmasters. The ranks are now lets say 10 - 20 further down in the serps than they were originally. But have gained perhaps 20 - 30 in the last few months.

Some people have mentioned in the past that sending a reconsideration request could do more harm than good, (I don't know if that is true, just something I read).

Is it worth just removing links with no reconsideration request? Or is that essential?

Time and money is less of an issue, we just want to do what is best for the site.

Hi everyone.

We were hit on the 5th Oct with manual penalties - after building some good links and building good content we saw some gains in our SERPS, not to where they were, but they are definately improving for some low competition keywords.

In this case would people recommend still trying to remove bad links?

We have audited our links and identified ones which seem spammy.

We were going to go through a step by step process, emailing bad link providers where possible, and then sending a disavow for any links we were not able to remove.

If we have started to see gains through other means is it wise in people's opinion to start contacting google?

We watched Matt Cutts video on disavow usage and he states not to use it unless in extreme situations, so we don't want to 'wake the beast'.

Many thanks.

James.

Thanks Sha,

We will definitely look into removing links where possible ourselves.

One thought though, if the site is not necessarily 'penalised' but instead the bad links have just been demoted, would it make more sense to not send a reconsideration request? often people have said that this just raises an alarm bell to google if not totally necessary?

And if not sending a recon request, then should we not also send a disavow?

I think this a kind of dilema that many people face when seeing drops but not being sure of an actual manual penalty.

James.

Hi, thanks for the answer, so the best thing to do, even if we have had no warning, is to 1st send a reconsideration request, then regardless of what they say, manually try to remove 'bad' links,

After this use disavow for the remaining bad links, then send a new reconsideration request explaining what we did manually to try to help the site. (if they confirm a manual penalty) or do not send a request again if they did not confirm a penalty?

Would this be a logical method?

Hi I agree, I am assuming we have been hit by some sort of penalty, but don't know the best way to deal with it.

For example should we disavow bad links, then send a reconsideration request, or is it enough to just disavow, beef up strong relevant links (like Vikas said - with less keywords) and hope for the best. Some of our sites crept back one one or two pages, but the other all dropped below page 100.

Is the reconsideration request required in people's experience?

Many thanks!

James

We dramatically dropped serps after Oct 5th, but did not receive a warning about bad links on google webmasters.

Is it a good idea to find and collect the worst links and disavow them? As there was no warning we can only guess links were the problem, but it seems likely. However we do not want to send any requests to google if no warning was sent.

Can disavow be used in this way, or should we do more manually?

(We are hoping remove links + increase very solid links + optimize for key words will help revive serps)

Many thanks.

James

That what I would have initially thought but it took down all 4 of our foreign pages at the same time which have EMD, leaving the original site which has no EMD.

I am guessing that all effects of the updates don't happen exactly on the day

it dropped to pretty much below 50 -70 after the 5th fro all its SERPS that were originally in the top 10. The English version was not touched. The written content I can guarantee is unique.

I think one thing that is clear is that there are no clear answers, you can trawl through sites. forums, blogs etc, and find 100's of conflicting suggestions, reasoning and advice. I agree that the EMD update was not classified as a penalty, but I think if you dig a little deeper you will see that some legitimate websites were severely hit by this update, mainly in niche markets on relatively new websites. Agreed that this is often down to bad content, but not always. Could it be that the update is not actually that accurate in finding the exact 'spammers' that Google was aiming for. Of course people need to work hard, not take short cuts and do research, but sometimes there is more to it.

If think many people were effected, when you search 'EMD penalty' you get 496,000 results. The question is how to respond to a huge drop in SERP, and sometime a business can not afford to make changes and wait and see if google will reverse anything, because often this simply does not happen.

Only on Google, Yahoo and Bing are not effected, no updates were made in particular, especially not to every site, but it happened on the 5th around the time of a Google update. also all 4 lost sites were 3 keyword EMD's with dashes, which we are thinking might have been the cause after doing some research on recent updates? The site not effected was not an EMD and was an authoritative original version.

It is a shame Google never make it clear what they mean by 'low quality content' as I believe like many others the content on my effected sites were of a high standard, i.e informative, well written, updated etc. There also appears to be different levels of EMD - regards how many key words they contain, how many dashes, if they are .com .net etc.

Also the age, authority, page rank of the site might have a bearing.

With this is mind if a site gets wiped off at what point should someone try to recover it, obviously if a few positions are lost its fine, if its below page 100 then it probably requires a different response.

I would say from reading people's comments from the last week that many people have dropped several pages simply due to the EMD update.

I wouldn't agree >Carlos, Google officially say they are changing the weight given to EMDs, 'tweaking' the algorithm. But if you read people's comments on the results it seems quite widespread and many people's sites with good content they have worked hard on and rely on as a business have simply disappeared. It is not the case that SERPS have been mildly re-adjusted, but in many case disappeared all together, for all SERPS.

When the effect is like this it renders a person's business useless. In that case should they blindly look for good links, improve content for a non disclosed google set of 'rules' and try to please google, without even knowing what they did wrong in the first place regarding content.

In some cases the fastest way to recover the business (not the URL) might be to start a new URL, move the site and start linking. If the site was not so established before, this would probably be the fastest solution in many case, instead of waiting patiently in case google change their minds.

After some research I would say my site have been hit by an EMD penalty, it seems many other people have faced the same.

It would be very useful to know how to deal with this, many topics discuss the reasons behind it, but few have a realistic response for fast action.

I am in two minds - one would be to try and improve content etc, but this is subjective and could take any amount of time, or never resolve the issue.

The other would be to move the content to a new URL, which poses the question, should I do a 301 redirect, or would this just transfer the penalty?

If no redirect, then I am proposing starting fresh - as the sites hit by EMD penalties are deemed 'low quality' this might be the fastest way to recovery.

If I move the old content to my established main site as a sub folder, would this cause any problems?

Many thanks for people responses.

Hi there are a few things which are strange that make me unsure of the reasons for the drop regarding the links

Firstly it happened to all our 'foreign' language URLS at the same time. All were on a different URLs with different IPs but shared the same coding and template, however we thought this was fairly normal for many websites who have different language versions.

Secondly we did not receive any warnings from Google on webmasters.

Thirdly the drop happened to all our key words, there is nothing even close to 50 on the SERPS now, but the sites are all still indexed.

The original English website has been left untouched.

Hi,

Is there a way to tell if a site has been penalised for it's links?

Our site dropped last Friday, and we would like to rule out links, as we plan to move the site to our main site and re-direct the links, unless Google would punish the new url due to this.

Our old site does not show any warnings for the link, and neither does our Google WM account, the only thing we have to go by is a big drop in SERP.

Many thanks.

Quime.

Can an EMD update remove SERPS for all keywords, or just the exact matches? We recently lost all our foreign language domain serps, roughly on the 4/5th

Hi all,

Another suggestion was given for our fall in SERPS.

Recently Matt Cutts announced that EMDs would be hit by new algoritms.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-20-15789.html

Only our site with exacts matches...

cours-telephone-anglais, curso-ingles-telefono, kurse-englisch-telefon, and corso-inglese-telefono

were hit.

Does anyone else have experience of this?

Would a solution be to create new URLS and redirect? Or would a redirect carry the penalty over? Is there anyway to fix that sort of penalty?

Many thanks for your help.

Hi thanks for the reply,

Should we not have any shared scripts, how can we avoid this, just by removing them? Ideally we need the pages the same, but with different language versions, while not being punished.

I will make all the changes you suggest.

The Geo-targeting was not done for all, but we did it today.

The drops were on Google regional and com search engines.

Would these changes lift the penalties, or are they more permanent sometimes?

You would not suggest subdomains and moving the foreign pages to the main site?

Also I have just been told that having 'dashes' in the URL has become an issue, has anyone ever heard of that??

Many thanks

Hi, thanks for the reply,

The sites were interlinked, (a link at the top going to the other language pages on each)

There was link building involved to a greater or lesser extent, the Italian page not for several months, the French and Spanish quite recently.

They are hosted on the same host account but on separate I.P addresses.

On the webmasters we have not seen any messages warning us of anything.

Hi all,

We have a website www.phoneboxlanguage.com with 4 different language versions (Spanish, French, Italian, German). We have all the different versions on totally different URLS. E.G the French URL is www.cours-telephone-anglais.com. Recently this month we saw a huge drop in SERPS for all the 'foreign' language pages.

This had happened before for the Spanish and French, which we put down to keyword density issues, so created new URLS for those pages.

However now all 4 foreign pages have dropped.

Could this be due instead to a penalty for duplicate sites?

The content is obviously different due to different languages, but the coding and templates for the sites are the same.

How can we find out this is the case and what should we do? I was thinking after some research on the forum to create subfolders in the original (phoneboxlanguage.com) and then create 301 redirects, from the old dropped sites, or would their penalties be bad for our original site, if this were the case?

We are obviously very keen to not further damage the site and the original site which remains o.k.

Many thanks for your kind help.

Quime.