Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website?
-
Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website and the methodology they used? I have a PR 5 website that lost more than 50% of the traffic in Google. I removed some of the wide site links at the best of my ability but I see little or no results so far.
-
hmmm...I went looking on your profile to see if you had listed a URL and having run your domain through Open Site Explorer, I can see that it is very likely that the bulk of your problems are coming from your site's external link profile.
Here are a few more blog posts that might help you to get a clear picture of things:
Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo by Dr Pete Meyers.
Anchor Text Distribution: Avoiding Over Optimization by Geoff Kenyon.
Bad Backlink Checking by Richard Baxter
and for something a little less intense, but that can help immensely if you are trying to get a picture of your own situation, Link Removal Flowchart by Bob Meinke.
Hope that helps,
Sha
P.S. The Google Algorithm Change History can also be very useful in checking whether changes in site traffic, rankings etc coincide with changes at Google.
-
Hi Sorin,
If your site tanked on 25th-26th April, then it is safe to presume that your site was indeed hit by the Penguin update. There was a smaller Panda update that happened on 18th April as well. If you have access to Google Analytics or rank trackers, you should be able to tell by looking at the dates whether it was Panda or Penguin.
Coming to the issue of your small website, I would agree with Sha. It would be most appropriate if you can disclose the affected URL on the forum for real helpful suggestions.
Penguin penalized everything that was on the 'over' side. It punished sites with over-optimization at each level. Be it links (internal and external both) or the covert keyword stuffing across web pages. Penguin's impact could be felt more extensively because it affected almost everything that an SEO would have done to boost site's rankings.
I guess, if you are really looking for non-generalized approach towards helping your cause, then website's url is much needed.
Best Regards,
Rajesh Dhawan
-
Hi Sorin,
There are a couple of very comprehensive blog posts that will give you some very good information on identifying and removing problem links. Both talk about issues and successes.
The first of these is Identifying Link Penalties in 2012 by Ryan Kent.
Ryan also provided some very detailed information in this Q&A thread.
The second post that provides real detail on a recovery is How W.P.M.U. Recovered from the Penguin Update by Ross Hudgens. As you will see from reading all of these, recovery will be heavily influenced by the actual elements that have contributed to the problem.
The most critical part of a recovery is in accurately identifying the issues that are contributing to the problem...one big thing to remember is that Penguin came accompanied by another Panda. I have seen instances of people making the assumption that they were hit by Penguin, when in fact Panda finally caught up with them. This is not to say that your problem is not from Penguin, but to emphasize that you need to make an informed analysis and be sure of the real issues before going down a path.
If you are unsure where to start, then you could post the site URL and those here can take a look and give you their thoughts.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
If it was panda its algorithmic, wait till Google re-crawls your site. Also keep in mind if you are removing links that you will need to not only remove them but replace them to regain rankings.
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
-
SEO QA automation of large websites
Can you share your experiences in managing SEO QA automation of large websites with millions of pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | terentyev
what are the things you are regularly testing for, besides the most obvious - hreflangs/canonicals, robots.txt, sitemap, non-200 status codes, redirect rules?
do you use in-house developed tools or external tools?
if external - which ones?
how do you run your QA automation scripts? external server or some online tools? upon every release or hourly/daily/monthly?0 -
Check website update frequency?
Is the tools out there that can check our frequently website is updated with new content products? I'm trying to do an SEO analysis between two websites. Thanks in advance Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
How do I know what pages of my site is not inedexed by google ?
Hi I my Google webmaster tools under Crawl->sitemaps it shows 1117 pages submitted but 619 has been indexed. Is there any way I can fined which pages are not indexed and why? it has been like this for a while. I also have a manual action (partial) message. "Unnatural links to your site--impacts links" and under affects says "Some incoming links" is that the reason Google does not index some of my pages? Thank you Sina
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SinaKashani0 -
How would the rich snippets be treated in AJAX website?
Hi guys We have started to rewrite our website http://www.edamam.com on AJAX, and the idea is to have all the website on AJAX in the next few months. Although it would probably be difficult to index even with the Google Crawling protocol, and some other issues might appear, the engineers insist that from technology point of view this is the best way to go. We have already rewritten the internal search result pages, e.g. http://www.edamam.com/recipes/pasta and last week we set the Google Crawling protocol for AJAX to some of the individual recipe pages to test it. I'd like to ask for you opinion on whether the rich snippets we have in the search results will be affected by this change? Are there specific actions we need to take to preserve them? What other hot tips you have for dealing with AJAX on any level of the website? Thanks in advance Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wspwsp0 -
Best practices for a local business move
My client is a chiropractic office that will be moving to the next town over in about 3 months. What are people's best practices on how to best accomplish this SEO-wise so as to not lose too much in terms of rankings, current organic traffic and citation listings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | easystreetint0 -
Convertinh Website for Mobile ?
Dear All, My website (a rental website where you can hire anything online) currently has approx 1/3 of it's traffic from mobile devices , ipads, iphones, blackberry , HTC etc etc. The bounce rate is slightly higher for these at 47% but we have not optimised our site to be mobile friendly as yet. This is something I want to do. Do we just make it fit well into a 320 pixel screen or should we do new wire frames etc and essentially make a cut down website just for mobile. One of the things I know we will do is to make it pick up someones location and retrieve results nearest to them but is there any other do's and don'ts when going down the mobile route ?. I seem to find conflicting infomation when researching this , one example is about using a different url for mobile , one site says it gets you more traffic whilst another says don't use a different url. Also does anyone know of any good tips or sites where I can get some useful info about making the site Mobile Friendly >? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Website structure question - linking to categories?
Hi there, I have a video website (user uploaded clips) which are sorted into 75 categories. Now, these categories have their own pages and 90% of the traffic comes from the category keywords. All 75 categories are linked from the homepage (which is obvious, right?) AND from all video pages. Now, my question is: from SEO point of view, it is OK to link to categories from the video pages, too? I am in doubt here because: 1. I tend to think it is OK because I get a lot of traffic for the category keywords. 2. I tend to think that isn't OK because I get almost no traffic for the video pages. Any thoughts? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasmin280 -
Anybody know good SEO success stories in the field of small business directories?
We are helping a small business directory in their SEO. They address 20 service categories(300 subcategories) with 60000 profiles. We are focusing on following elements: 1. Cutting the flab (they have 3.4 million pages indexed), but they get only 30000 visitors on the website. This will be done by removing long list of cities & by using "Nofollow". 2. Improve internal navigation & use Anchor texts 3. Focus SEO (Backlinks) at business category pages 4. Clean URLs, Titles 5. Implementation of Rich Snippets (Schema.org) 6. Cleaning data If we can not take traffic volume to 300000 in a month, this project will be considered a failure. Does any directory has achieved this recently? We are in first 2 weeks of the project and It will help us our "To do" list 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnyscapeInfocom0