How to tackle google penguin algorithmic penalty?
-
My Website ranking went down mid of april, I sent a Reconsideration request and the reply was :
“ We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture.”
My site was classic asp and i change that to a new word press theme
I change the site structure and created new fresh content on the entire site focusing on user experience.
But still no positive result in the ranking.
I further did a test and created 3 new landing pages that target long tail keywords with low competition.
Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages.
Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route I would like to if anyone could help me should i buy a new domain and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back
My link profile according to open site explorer is 190 links from 74 domains and domain authority is 31.
Can anyone help please
-
Regarding the 301s, I originally thought you were talking about redirecting your penalized domain to a new domain. I'm not 100% sure on what you are doing here, but as mentioned by Ian, don't redirect 404s to your home page...create a custom 404 for that use.
If you've got pages you want to get deindexed, you can tell Google in your webmaster tools to removed certain pages from the index.
I didn't have time to do a complete check of your backlinks but you can be pretty certain that if you've been hit by Penguin you've got an issue with backlinks. If you look at your site in OSE, and order the links by anchor text you can see that you've got a high percentage of anchor texted links as opposed to url links. That's where I'd start - get some of those anchor texted links changed to url links for a start.
-
Thanks for your answer,
I think will take few months after i have remove those links.
Will it have any impact if i do some infographics and artciles, the things is how can you make radiator cabinets interesting?
-
Hi Ausaf,
I wouldn't have the home page be the 404 page. Create a separate page. The odds of something getting mixed up are far too high.
Remove any links that are even remotely spammy. That includes all the links you have with 'classic radiator cabinets' as the link text - you're far too optimized to that term and Google's bound to pick up on it, if they haven't already.
-
apart from my brand keyword , I do not have any ranking at all.
used to ranking on first page for keyword
radiator covers
radiator cabinets
but now no where to be found
-
Thanks Marie,
i have removed all 301 redirect from htaccess, Now any 404 page goes to home page with notfound 404.
http://www.classicradiatorcabinets.co.uk/
do you know how long will it take to get these .asp pages to de-index from google,
I cant see any spaming link apart for 2 directories zezoo.com which they have already removed. I am not sure which links to remove?
Thanks again for you help.
-
Well that certainly sounds like Penguin!
We're still really in the infancy of knowing how to recover from Penguin. Most SEOs would tell you (and they're likely right) to get rid of as many spammy links as possible (or change to nofollow, or possibly change anchor text to your url as opposed to a keyword.) And then, it will also help to get good natural links to your site. One thing that is important to know though is that we don't have many good documented stories of recovery so no one really knows exactly how to recover.
If the vast majority of your links are unnatural (i.e. lots of anchor texted keyword links) and you think it would be impossible to get rid of them or change them or dilute them out with good links, then yes, starting over may be the best thing to do.
btw if you think you can recover, then do a cleanup and wait...you can't recover until there is a refresh of the Penguin algorithm.
Whatever you do, remove the 301 from the old domain to the new!!!!! A 301 will carry 90-99% of the link equity from the old domain so you are essentially just pointing those spammy links at your new domain and you'll go under again with the next Penguin refresh.
And one other thing...if you are starting new and if your content is the same as the old domain, make sure you remove the old domain from the index otherwise you'll have duplicate content issues.
-
I had a site tank in January 2012. Non-branded search traffic was down almost 50% that month (the previous 6 months had all been very steady at the higher traffic level) and that has remained ever since.
I did some analysis in Analytics and found the unique keywords driving traffic went down from around 3,800 to 950. Our big keywords and rankings remained and actually got stronger but the long-tail traffic almost completely disappeared.
This type of scenario seems in line with Panda rather than Penguin as other commenters have noted. What would be the best way to address a situation like that?
-
Hi Marie,
Thank you so much for your reply , I wanted to say " good answer" but it wont let me cause i already done 3.
I just checked on google analytics, the traffic drop occurs exactly on 24 april., Organic traffic went from 70 to just 9 visit. One mistake ive done is i already set 301 redirect , should i remove them or should i change the urls, and wait for them to get index again. Just want to try it before starting all over.
Thanks very much for your reply.
-
I'm probably just repeating some of the great answers given so far, but here's my thought.
Are you absolutely sure this is Penguin? Your traffic drop would have to be on or immediately after April 24 if that was the case. If it was prior to April 24 then this is not Penguin so I wouldn't be so quick to go deleting links!
There was a Panda update April 19th and April 27, so if your drop coincides with one of these dates then I'd be doing more research into Panda which is primarily about on site quality, lack of duplication, etc.
How new is your domain? If you were only up and running for a couple of months and then had a traffic drop it's possible you had a honeymoon boost and your site is now back down and that would have nothing to do with a penalty.
>>Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages.
That can be a normal traffic pattern.
Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route I would like to if anyone could help me should i buy a new domain and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back
You really need to figure out what the problem is first. If you have a Penguin penalty and you've got too spammy a backlink profile to clean up or dilute with good links then, yes, starting over is a good idea. Don't 301 the old to the new cause you'll end up in the same place. If you've got a Panda issue then you should be able to recover without starting a new domain. Whatever you do, don't just slap the same website up on a new domain.
It's also important to know how big of a traffic drop this is. I've seen people freak out at what would be normal day to day changes or seasonal changes or something like a 5% drop in traffic.
There are other possibilities too such as malware issues with the site. Or a robots.txt or accidental noindexing, etc. etc.
So, to sum up, can you determine the exact day that your drop happened, and how severe was it?
-
Do you know the exact date you traffic went down. You could have been hit by Panda. There were two Panda updates before and after Penguin in April.
Try this analysis to get a better understanding if you were hit by Penguin or Panda:
-
I wish i could do that but i just wanted to know if there a way out of it. Is there any other solution.
-
Thanks for your reply, I did check but i cant see any obvious spam network links coming to my site nor 1000s of links from one domains, there were a few which i have requested them to remove although they have replied that they have removed but it is still showing on webmaster tools.
-
You know what, Ausaf, one of my sites was in a similar situation. In April it tanked, and there was no warnings from Google and no obvious reason for the fall. No deathly hallows links to my site that I could find. It may be that certain sites that were providing you juice were devalued by Google, and caused your drop. Quality link building might help.
I tried everything I could think of for 2 months, tried to get questionable sites to unlink, added new content, fixed a few minor html errors, and nothing budged it. The site just seem to fall further. In mid June I just started a new site with a well chosen domain name, rewrote the content, carefully built a broad variety of new links... and voila! I'm back on page 1 (result #3 currently). I was previously #1, but I tell you after 4 months of this I'm glad to be on page 1.
Sometimes its good just to start over if you're able to.
I know that 2 months is nothing in SEO time, but when you're running a business it's an eternity. I couldn't afford to wait around a year and hope. If the other site comes back, great. If not, we have plan B.
-
Are you sure this is a Penguin penalty? If so, the only fix is to find and remove all incoming links that appear even remotely spammy, and it doesn't sound like you've done this yet. Penguin is all about incoming links, not onsite structure.
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
-
Whats up with the last google update.
I have numerous clients who were at the top of page in the top 3 spots. They all dropped to page 3 or 4 or 2 and now they are number 1 in maps or in the top 3. Content is great on all these sites. backlinks are high quality and we do not build high quantity, we always focus on quality. the sites have authorship information. trust . we have excellent content written by professionals in the industry for each of the websites. The sites load super fast. they are very mobile friendly. we have CDN installed. content is organized per topic. all of our citations are setup properly and no duplicates, or missing citations. code is good on the websites. we do not have anchor text links pointing to the site from gust posts or whatever. we have plenty of content. our DA/PA is great. Audits of the website are great. I've been doing this a long time and ive never been so dumb founded as to what google has done this time. Or better yet what exactly is wrong with our clients websites today that was working perfectly for the last 5 years. I really am getting frustrated. im comparing my sites to competitors and everything's better. Please someone guide me here and tell me what im missing or tell me what you have done to recover from this nonsense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waqid0 -
What Google algorithm hit my website? Graph attached.
Please check the below URLs and let me know which algorithm hit my website. I collect the data from 3 different tools. http://i.imgur.com/ImljFmO.png http://i.imgur.com/aWxqOdj.png http://i.imgur.com/PqhhruN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Reporting Webspam to Google
We are in ecommerce, and there are a few review sites that are dominating the rankings for our products. The sites are very good - very well written content (2000+ words) and visually appealing sites. The 2 main culprits are clearly black hat. One site's backlinks are pure spam, and the other is buying footer and sidebar links. Will ratting them to Google have any impact? If not, any suggestions on how to compete? Our competing pages are product descriptions, and creating a 2000 word product description seems inappropriate. Also, all of these products are brand new, and due to extensive media spends, the search volume is very high. Since they are beating us to the punch by getting good content posted first, they are proving difficult to displace.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Apps content Google indexation ?
I read some months back that Google was indexing the apps content to display it into its SERP. Does anyone got any update on this recently ? I'll be very interesting to know more on it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoomGeek0 -
Blocked from google
Hi, i used to get a lot of trafic from google but sudantly there was a problem with the website and it seams to be blocked. We are also in the middle of changing the root domain because we are making a new webpage, i have looked at the webmaster tools and corrected al the errors but the page is still not visible in google. I have also orderd a new crawl. Anyone have any trics? do i loose a lot when i move the domainname, or is this a good thing in this mater? The old one is smakenavitalia.no The new one is Marthecarrara.no Best regards Svein Økland
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sveinokl0 -
How to promote some links on google
Hi our site is http://www.mycarhelpline.com If people search on our site in Google by typing - Mycarhelpline they see links - why mycarhelpline, contact us and about us how can we put some other key pages by replacing above pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Link Building Post Penguin?
I really am lost as to what to do these days.. The problem with my industry is the whole idea of link bait isn't very lucrative. There are no bloggers either, so guest blogging also isn't a very good option. Seems to me like the best thing I can do is just publish content! So, publish a lot of quality content? LOL, sounds like that's right up Google's alley. Where do you publish your content, and what would you say has shown the best results for you personally? We called an SEO company, Arteworks, a few days ago (Friday), and they really didn't go into any details about how they build links. We called them because I saw a post that you commented on, here, and it recommended a few companies at the bottom of the post. (Arteworks being one of them) Really, this is where I get so dang confused... The goal is to build links like the old days, except only use unique content, diversify your pages, and anchor text? Sound about right? Or, should I only create content on my site? Thanks in advance for your time and advice!! Sincerely, Tyler Abernethy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
What is next from Google Panda and Google Penguin?
Does anyone know what we can expect next from Google Panda/Penguin? We did prepare for this latest update and so far so good.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jjgonza0