What´s the penalization extent applied by Google?
-
Hi!
I still don´t get this web site penalization applied by Google due to duplicate content.
My site has many of pages that were among the first positions for top keywords (A Photoshop web site).
Those pages were linked by sites like LifeHacker, BoingBoing, Microsiervos, SmashingMagazine, John Nack, and many other well known blogs.
After mid February 2012 everything went down the drain. I lost half of my traffic and my well ranked pages are now almost nowhere to be found.
I have plenty of ads in some pages of my site, and duplicate content (amazon product description only) in other pages of my site.
So, the good quality pages my site has, are no longer considered as good quality just because I have some duplicate content or ad filled pages?
I´m not complaining. I´m trying to understand this.
Google needs to serve good information to their visitors. But since they found some trash in my site, they decide to remove both the trash and the good information from the search engine?
That doesn´t sound logical to me. Why don´t they just remove the trash and leave the good content?
Of course, I understand that information is added everyday and some may come up with something better than mine, but dropping 40 or more places in the ranking sounds more like a penalty to me.
Again, I´m not complaining (although it sounds like I am!), just want to understand the reasons behind this.
Thanks,
Enrique
-
Yes, thanks Anthony. I will post back as soon (soon..?) as I find something.
Enrique
-
sometimes what you call natural google calls spammy or unnatural. Just sayin. Good luck. Post back with your findings. Im interested to see how things work out for you. Best regards.
-
Yes, thanks, I will check that. I was planning to add nofollow to the amazon pages, I will also check the anchors, but since they are all natural, any change I make will look artificial.
Enrique
-
Have you tried removing the amazon data feed from those pages? Just to see if that's is in fact what is impacting your rankings? What about the thousands of natural links pointing to your site? Are they all using varied anchor text or is it just five for your five main pages? If just five that could also be affecting your ranking.
-
Yes, I know that's the thing to do, but you must agree with me that it's something unnatural.
I have thousands of incoming links, and only exchanged or asked for less than 20 of those. The rest are natural. If I spend time analyzing links it would be something absolutely artificial.
The same goes with quality pages. Let's say that I have four or five pages that are the most referenced in my industry (just and example, of course). Visitors that read those pages get really good, top class information. But I have an Amazon datafeed in my site.
Suddenly, the information of those top quality pages are hidden from search results in Google because my site has an Amazon datafeed?
I know it's a simplistic example, but it can be translated as:
"A good article isn't good anymore just because of a site penalty"
It seems that Google is saying something like "Hey, you can't read this amazing article because it is from a site has lots of junk. So suck it up and read this article of a lesser quality but from from a pristine site!"
It is not about my site anymore, but about trying to understand the concept of it all. And of course it is an extreme example, but I think it is relevant.
-
No, google does care about good quality pages. Its just if you throw in a bunch of bad pages they dilute the goodness of your good pages. Once you clean yp duplicate content then i would suggest running a report on your inbound links. Check to see if your anchor text is spammy, or concentrating on only a few choice keywords. When it comes to link building you want to spread out the keywords to there isn't one or two money keywords banking on the anchor text.
Also, I would remove any inbound links from questionable directories. Once you do that I wold think you should see some significant gains in rankings.
-
Thanks! So it is clear that Google doesn´t care about single, good quality, pages with good quality links.
A good quality page needs a quality site to back it up.
Is that the criteria?
It sounds reasonable to me, but very difficult to repair.
Just for the records, my site isn´t trash or low quality, but it is an old site and has some quirks from old times: lots of directory entries with little content and datafeeds that used to work very well some years ago.
-
The trash part of your site affects the site as a whole, not specifically just the trash parts. If they did just that, then you would still benefit from using trash to promote your good pages.
Now from what I understand about penalties, there is a manual penalty and an algorythm or natural penalty.
The algo penalty can be easily fixed by addressing your penalty issue, which would be duplicate content. Clean up all duplicate content and you will be on your way to flying under the penalty radar so to speak. However, you will still need to add more quality content to make up for the removed or cleaned up duplicate content.
Once that takes place you should notice your ranking drop stabilize, and over time begin the crawl back up. This would be a good time to implement other strategies like social media and quality link building.
Now if its a manual penalty, then you need to clean up all duplicate content and ask for a manual review, and pray. Manual penalties are heard to overcome and will require much more work. Sometimes its best to just start with a new domain from scratch.
Hope this helps some.
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
-
Google Increases Titles and Meta Descriptions Length
So, we now know that Google are changing the Title and Meta Desc length limits to 70 and 200 respectively. Does this mean we all need to jump to immediate attention and modify all our current pages OR, do we wait?
On-Page Optimization | | dynamyt1000 -
Moz Crawl Shows Duplicate Content Which Doesn't Seem To Appear In Google?
Morning All, First post, be gentle! So I had Moz crawl our website with 2500 high priority issues of duplicate content, not good. However if I just do a simple site:www.myurl.com in Google, I cannot see these duplicate pages....very odd. Here is an example....
On-Page Optimization | | scottiedog
http://goo.gl/GXTE0I
http://goo.gl/dcAqdU So the same page has a different URL, Moz brings this up as an issue, I would agree with that. However if I google both URL's in Google, they will both bring up the same page but with the original URL of http://goo.gl/zDzI7j ...in other words, two different URL's bring up the same indexed page in Google....weird I thought about using a wildcard in the robots.txt to disallow these duplicate pages with poor URL's....something like.... Disallow: /*display.php?product_id However, I read various posts that it might not help our issues? Don't want to make things worse. On another note, my colleague paid for a "SEO service" and they just dumped 1000's of back-links to our website, of course that's come back to bite us in the behind. Anyone have any recommendations for a good service to remove these back-links? Thanks in advance!!0 -
Google directs people to the wrong page on my site.
My site is split up into sections about different services my company offers. My problem is, when someone does a search for one of those services, My site's main page comes up rather than the page devoted to the particular service they were searching for. What can I do to make the pages about a specific service rank above my main page?
On-Page Optimization | | bradgmo0 -
Google picking up old pages
I recently redesigned a site that had all the keywords it was ranking for going to the home page. Now I have specific pages for each of these keywords but I'm seeing the home page (not the page that, if I do an on page optimization by hand in MOZ gives me an A rating) showing up in the auto reports (assuming pages Google sees for these keywords related to the url) as F's. They're all pointing to the home page. I've redirected the old index.html home page to the new but I suspect the reason is actually these pages (were) ranking for these terms (though none too well - all but one were not in the top 50 and one was 45) because these rankings are all dropping as well. I'm at a loss, with the site replaced, as to how to correct this and tell Google these keyword phrases all have their own pages now. I've dug through this forum and the only applicable answer I can see would be to add these phases to the home page (where they all rank for now) with anchored links to their new (A rated by Moz for these terms when I hand enter them) singular pages? Or is it just a waiting game?
On-Page Optimization | | adworksofboca0 -
Can Rankings in Google differ so much from computer to computer.
I was telling my friend via facebook to go on my website, I told him to search 'nightlife forum' in google. To which, I believed it was 11th, top of second page. On his computer, its currently ranking at 1st place is it possible to have a difference of 10 places? even though he lives in the same city as me. Would be good to see what it ranks on your computers too google "nightlife forum" look for www.talknightlife.co.uk (don't get confused with the .COM one out there) Cheers Guys
On-Page Optimization | | Lukescotty0 -
Do footer links apply too many on-page links?
We tend to put a a lot of links in the footers of some of our websites (e.g. www.AlohaWhistler.com). Our CAMPAIGNS report is showing that several pages on such sites have "too many on-page links". We understand the logic that having more than 100 links per page is "too much". Does this also apply to footer links?
On-Page Optimization | | RoyMcClean0 -
Woah, my A-grade optimized pages that were on the first page have all vanished outside the top 50 in Google... is this Panda?
Yep as mentioned, I had some pages hit the top ten pretty quickly after ensuring they were A-grade for pretty uncompetitive keywords however, today, all bar 2 have just vanished from the top 50! All were ranking in Google.co.uk and I know we were predicting the Panda update to hit soon but WOW! My client is understandably a little upset, what on earch do I tell him and what should I do about it? Cheers! jT
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
How to get Google images traffic?
How to get Google images traffic? Take a look at traxnyc.com and sugest what we can improve. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0