Start over or try to recover?
-
I have a question about a site that was making good money while it was ranking, but no longer gets traffic.
This site did 3 things that might have gotten it in trouble:
1. Targeted keywords often showed up twice in the URL. So the url would be something like http://mydomain.com/keyword/keyword-included-in-title/
2. It got links from low-quality sites, including blog networks like (the now dead) BMR
3. It got lots of links with the same anchor text
The content quality is actually pretty good.
I don't know if the site got penalized by Panda, Penguin, or perhaps lost rank because of something else. What I can tell you is that the rank loss was gradual - one page at a time starting at the end of March and ending this month.
So the question is - in such a case:
Is it best to start over using good SEO practices?
Or is there a way to recover the sites?
-
I agree with Marcus, it depends on what kind of links your website does have. It generally sounds like to me, that you over optimized your website.
If you do have plenty of good links, it would simply be an issue of getting rid of the "crappy links" however if you do have a ton of these now non-indexed links, it might be best to start with a new page. -
Just be procedural. Deindex the other site, check it has gone, (site: query), create your new site. If the content does not existing somewhere else, it is not duplicate.
-
Thanks. What about duplicate content? Do I just ask Google to de-index the old site?
-
It sounds like you have some good content. If if is original then move it to a new domain if you can't get rid of the bad links.
-
Without a look at the link profile itself, it's hard to make a call on this. If there are lots of good to honest links smothered by some junk then yeah, recovery may be worth fighting for. But... if the link profile is just junk, and it's going to be hard to clean up, well, you are better suited by just burning that house down and starting again.
-
I think that a lot of people are in the same boat as you so don't worry, many sites have began the road to recovery after the recent updates.
To de-index a URl from Google, go into Google Webmaster Tools for your website, then go to 'Optimization'>'Remove URLs' then type in the old URL and Google will remove it from the search engine completely. This mayy take a couple of days though.
I would also then create a new sitemap once you have done the new pages and submit this through Webmaster Tools also.
Matt.
-
I think I will do this because I don't know what else I could do. If I don't change the url - then I have the keyword in there twice no matter what I do. And it would take forever to dilute the bad links. Just one more question. How do I ask Google to de-index the old URL? Remove it from my sitemap?
-
What I would do is to delete the old page and then create a whole new page. Because the old page is no longer on the server it shouldn't be punished for duplicate content. Just make sure that you ask Google to de-index the old URL and index the new one.
Bear in mind though that this is really a last resort method. But if you are having no luck at all with recovering from Penguin then this method could be more effective than just waiting it out.
Let me know how it goes and if you need any more info then just let me know.
Matt.
-
Thanks, Matt, for your response.
Creating a new page might be the best approach for me.
If I do that - should I remove the old one? Can I use the exact same content? I don't want to get into duplicate content issues.
-
Hi There,
I have been having trouble with the same thing and have found some good advice throughout the process of recovering.
One method that I have heard people suggesting was to change the URL of the page that is affected and then set up a redirect to the new page. From personal experience, I can tell you that this doesn't work. It is simply a very short-term fix (i.e., a few days if your lucky), then Google will start punishing you for the redirected page.
If it is only specific pages on the website that are being affected, try to pin-point the exact aspects of those pages that could be deemed as black/grey-hat. If it is the case that some of your webpages are ranking then you can take solace in the fact that your whole website hasn't been banned. So there is still hope to recover.
Try using OSE to check out all of your different anchor text and links, as well as looking through webmaster tools. If you can, contact these websites to have your link completely removed because at the end of the day, if your not ranking because of these links then they may as well be removed completely.
You could also attempt to remove your old pages that have been punished and create new URLs completely (don't redirect the old pages, simply delete them altogether) and just use the old content that was on them. This way you will get rid of all of the links to the punished page, and start a fresh new page with your old content. Re-index the pages through Google and slowly but surely, you will eventually start ranking again. Obviously this is not possible for your homepage, so maybe use this methods for some of your other pages and then put most of your effort into sorting out the linking profile on your index page.
I hope this has helped slightly and good luck!
Matt.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Trying to escape from Google algorithm ranking drop
in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates). since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings. We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages. we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80). we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions. we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content. we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords. We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower. 1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at. 2. we are even considering going to a new domain and 301'ing all pages to this domain in an attempt to shake off the algorithm filter (penalties). has anyone done this? how long can we expect to get at least the same ranking for the new domain if 301 all urls to it? do you think its worth it? we know the risk of doing this, and so wanted to seek some advice. 3. we have on the other hand considered the fact that we have disavowed so many links (70%) that this could be a cause of the page two problem, however we are link building according to moz metric standards and majestic standards with no benefit.. do you think we should increase link building? Advice is appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Recovering from Black Hat/Negative SEO with a twist
Hey everyone, This is a first for me, I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar situation and if so, what the best course of action was for you. Scenario In the process of designing a new site for a client, we discovered that his previous site, although having decent page rank and traffic had been hacked. The site was built on Wordpress so it's likely there was a vulnerability somewhere that allowed someone to create loads of dynamic pages; www.domain.com/?id=102, ?id=103, ?id=104 and so on. These dynamic pages ended up being malware with a trojan horse our servers recognized and subsequently blocked access to. We have since helped them remedy the vulnerability and remove the malware that was creating these crappy dynamic pages. Another automated program appears to have been recently blasting spam links (mostly comment spam and directory links) to these dynamically created pages at an incredibly rapid rate, and is still actively doing so. Right now we're looking at a small business website with a touch over 500k low-quality spammy links pointing to malware pages from the previously compromised site. Important: As of right now, there's been no manual penalty on the site, nor has a "This Site May Have Been Compromised" marker in the organic search results for the site. We were able to discover this before things got too bad for them. Next Steps? The concern is that when the Penguin refresh occurs, Google is going to notice all these garbage links pointing to those malware pages and then potentially slap a penalty on the site. The main questions I have are: Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1) Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? (https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598410?hl=en&ref_topic=4596795) Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit? Would love some input or examples from anyone who can help, thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Etna0 -
Recovering from Pinguin Penalty
We have big issue with a website who has been hardly penalized by Pinguin on october 4th. After a lot of try to remove bad links and sending two disavow files, none of our actions has improved our situation. We're wondering if this solution might be good : changing the domaine name Keeping the same content Not using Webmaster tools and redirect 301 and wait until the site will be fully indexed Build new links Please tell us your opinion and solution. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | webit400 -
Have just submitted Disavow file to Google: Shall I wait until after they have removed bad links to start new content lead SEO campaign?
Hi guys, I am currently conducting some SEO work for a client. Their previous SEO company had built a lot of low quality/spam links to their site and as a result their rankings and traffic have dropped dramatically. I have analysed their current link profile, and have submitted the spammiest domains to Google via the Disavow tool. The question I had was.. Do I wait until Google removes the spam links that I have submitted, and then start the new content based SEO campaign. Or would it be okay to start the content based SEO campaign now, even though the current spam links havent been removed yet.. Look forward to your replies on this...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Should i buy this domain because it has a keyword that im trying to rank for?
Im trying to rank for a keyword and i saw that this domain is available the top listing under this search team is a domain authority 14 and according to seo site explorer has 1 page linking to it and its a no follow link. Would it make since to buy this domain optimize it and forward it back to my main site or is this bad to do.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gslc0 -
Trying to determine if my site was de-indexed...
I ran a search using the allinsite:floridainboundmarketing.com command and found that virtually all of my pages are not being returned in the results. I'm one of those who (foolishly) used ALN blog network for a few months, got the unnatural links notice in WMT and on advice of other SEOs (including some here) I ignored it based on the idea that if my SERPS dropped due to alog update that a request for reconsideration was of no value. As I watched my SERPs dropping I was confident that it was simply because those links were no longer being counted and overall link profile was poor, so the results started dropping. I've not read where G has gone back and started de-indexing pages for such sites but it may be happening as (unless I'm wrong) my site is gone... Anyone got any ideas? Am I searching correctly?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sdennison0 -
Still not Recovered from Caffeine
In June of 2010, we lost rankings for four of our best key terms for our website http://tinyurl.com/6e73q52. No other terms were majorly impacted, so our assumption was that is was either due to Caffeine or a filter on those terms. We have worked with several companies using various strategies since then with little or no success. We later found that their linking strategies were less than white hat (I'm being polite) The best advice I was given recently is that we were over-optimized for those four terms (life insurance, life insurance quotes, term life insurance, term life insurance quotes) and we need to balance that out by linking with other terms. I know this will not be a fast process. My problem is I see many of my competitors in this extremely competitive space using black hat (grey at best) techniques and rising quickly to the first page of Google. Some of the SEO companies working with my competitors offered help to us, which I consider ethically questionable. These four terms convert the best, as you would imagine, so it has become very cut-throat in this competitive environment. We want to keep our hats white, as we are interested in longevity, not a quick hit and run (our site has been live and working for 8-plus years, by the way). I have become extremely gun-shy and generally suspicious of working with a new SEO company, so my question (finally) is: I would like some recommendations and success stories you have had with working with SEO companies (white hat only). Thank you for listening to my rant.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rdreich490 -
Has anyone been able to recover a site from that was slapped by panda?
I have a client that the only thing I can determine is over optimization of a couple anchor terms which the person no longer ranks for..I tried mixing up with brandname , brandname.com and a diversity of links but nothing seems to budge anyone have a similar problem?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | foreignhaus0