Hit by Google
-
My site - www.northernlightsiceland.com - has been hit by google and Im not sure why. The traffic dropped 75% last 24 hours and all the most important keywords have dropped significantly in the SERP. The only issue I can think of are the subpages for the northern lights forecasting I did every day e.g. http://www.northernlightsiceland.com/northern-lights-forecast-iceland-3-oct-2012/ I have been simply doing a copy/paste for 1 month the same subpage, but only changing the top part (Summary) for each day. Could this be the reason why Im penalized? I have now simply taken them all down minus the last 3 days (that are relevant). What can I do to get up on my feet again? This is mission critical for me as you can imagine.
Im wondering if it got hit by this EMD update on 28 sept that was focusing on exact match domains http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4501349-1-30.htm
-
Hmm how did e.g. normal local newspaper then survive - most news articles are some 200-300 words of orginal text + 1-2 images. The rest are ads and excerpt of other relevant news etc. As far as I understand the article you send then it is about “above-the-fold” i.e. the only think you see when you land on a page are ads as the main source. On my site I only use the sidebar - in similar manner as newspapers - and the rest is simply information on various travelling arrangement possible. That is what a niche site this is all about - collecing all of this into one place and solving the travelers problems of finding it in various places. This creates value for the end-user.
-
Placing the nofollow will not necessarily solve the problem, that Google for example does not classify the remaining content on your website good enough to rank well.
If you take any page on your site and strip out external links, there is hardly any original content left.
I would read this article which covers the user experience and algorithm change from January, and I think Google has demoted your site based on that.
-
Irving - thanks a lot for pointing me into the direction of the "follow" on the paid ads. Very helpful - I thought I had it covered with no-follow but found out it wasnt. So probably that is the main reason for the penalty. Did you see any other violations on the guidelines? - i was trying to fix all the "not found" errors etc yesterday:) Again thanks a lot for the help:)
-
I though the newest versions of Wordpress automatically takes care of this canonical tag issue?
-
Correct - the no-follow link needs to be on the outbound link
-
I have discovered something interesting. I read article on paid ads: http://www.feedthebot.com/bad-ads-affect-rankings.html
It says it is ok to have ads as I thought but it needs to have a no-follow. Then I looked at my code and it seems like the no-follow tag is at the wrong place so it is not no-follow - isnt this correct? Here is a typical code in a widget on the side:
| id="text-12" class="widgetblock widget_text">class="textwidget"><a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>http://www.hotelranga.is" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-ad','http://www.hotelranga.is-special-offer-new']); "> |
| | src="http://www.northernlightsiceland.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HotelRanga30off.jpg" width="280" height="280" border="0" style="border:0px solid black; margin-left: 2px;margin-top: 1px; margin-bottom: 1px;" rel="nofollow" alt="northern lights forecast" align=middle /> |
| | | -
it aggregates into one place all the offers the local industry has into one place. That is the main value. Not necessarily creating a lot of text on each provider e.g. a hotel. People see this teaser - and if they like the teaser they click through to the local provider to learn more.
-
Im not really having much of a link building strategy - it has normally just happened naturally e.g. other sites point to this site as the most informative northern light site in Iceland and also because Im the only one giving nortern lights forecast in the country etc.
-
I think you should build out your content - for example if you look at this URL there is hardly any content on it and a large count of external links. One could almost argue, that your site being an intermediary has no real value to a user.
-
Thanks a lot for your feedback. Im a bit of a new in this all so all feedbacks are very valuable for me:) thx thx
It does not look like the crawl rate has dropped. Looking at the webmaster - pages crawled per day - the graph is quite similar as before.
Yes I have some errors - i did not consider them material - primarily "not found" errors but yes some others. Did not know how to fix it
Im a typical aggregation site for some local travel businesses - so no affiliate - but yes just like any other company these local travel companies want to advertise their business and I set up content so people can find all the tours etc at the same place. All the content is orginal and in fact it simply gives a view of how much of these services are available.
Not sure what Irving means by "having follow links to paid advertising" - is it against the guidelines to have ads companies pay for? It is just the same as having google ads that companies are paying for?
-
I don't think it is the canonical. I would first look at GWMT (crawl rate dropped? errors increased?) and then look at Google Analytics as well.
For what it's worth, your current site has duplicate keywords and descriptions and plenty of errors (JavaScript).
You could have very well been dropped due to a manual review - your site looks very much like an affiliate with plenty of advertising and not much original content (that was at least my initial opinion)
-
Just to clarify the canonical tag issue - you have a slash in the canonical tag www.northernlightsiceland.com/, but the htaccess redirects all slashes to no slashes.
-
You are violating Google guidelines in several ways including having follow links to paid advertising.
You need a good SEO review - take this for example:
Canonical tag on homepage is rel="canonical" href="http://www.northernlightsiceland.com/" />
but then http://www.northernlightsiceland.com/ redirects to http://www.northernlightsiceland.com
-
There was recently EMD and Penguin update. What was your link building strategy? If you builded your links everytime with same anchor text or was building links to low quality directories or social bookmarks?
There are many factors that may affect your website. I advise you to do a advanced review on Google webmaster guidelines here:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
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
-
My posts are ignored by google not sure why
I have been investigating this problem for some time now and there must be a technical problem. My posts seem to be ignored by google. For example, if i put this title of my article in google, other sites come up instead of my website Lincolnshire Caravan Owners Struggle To Compete With Haven https://www.in2town.co.uk/skegness-news/lincolnshire-caravan-owners-struggle-to-compete-with-haven/ I am trying to find out what technical problem I have that is stopping google displaying my post. Can anyone advise me on what tools to use and how to find out what is going wrong
Technical SEO | | headlinesplus0 -
Google Six Pack Meta Descriptions
Anyone know of some good resources on the way to control the meta descriptions in the Google six pack for a branded search. Google appears to often bypass the meta description and pull random text from the page. We have tested this by adding the brand name to the meta description and this appears to help but doesn't always sort the issue. You often get the same results with the site comand. It not really an SEO issue more a branding one. Anyone get any ideas or resources they can point me at?
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Google Analytics - Custom Variables
Hi guys, I'd appreciate any advice with this one. At the moment I'm in the process of arranging a URL re-structure. I was wondering what the best way would be to track the performance of the old URLs against new ones? We will be ammending the URLs for any new property pages which go live on our website but leaving the old URLs in play for any old properties listed. We're taking this approach for the moment so we can conduct analysis on the change. It has been mentioned to me that placing a 'setvariable' in the code of pages with the old URLs and ones with the new URLs would be a way of tracking performance. However, my knowledge in this area is a little bit grey. Any advice? Cheers, Mark
Technical SEO | | MarkScully0 -
Why my ranking on google just disappeared
I have my website ranked on page one probably in top 6, but all of a sudden around 3-4 months before my website just disappeared for that keyword. Any suggestions? Keyword: Brass rod, brass rods webpage url: www.jayjalaramext.com/brass-rods/ and the website itself www.jayjalaramext.com Is it over optimized? or optimized more often which lead to bad history? or any panda or penguing effect ? Waiting for the suggestions.
Technical SEO | | HirenKhambhayta0 -
Google Not Indexed WWW name
Here is my domain - http://www.plugnbuy.com . When i see through "site" google not showing with WWW index but the same when i do without WWW.. it is showing in search. So yesturday i changed the setting from GWM to preferred domain as a WWW appear but today still not showing anything... Please help..
Technical SEO | | mamuti0 -
Google Analytics
I usually have Google analytics "real-time" running on one of my monitors, occasionally I glance at the screen to see that are TOP KEYWORDS people are using, lately there have been a lot of long-tail keywords. If I try to copy and paste the queries into google, i can never seem to find us organically for the long-tail searches? Is the real-time feature accurate? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Unexplained spikes in Google Analytics
My site has modest traffic (50 unique visitors per day). In the past week, I've seen two unexplained spikes in my Google Analytics. Yesterday, there were 140 unique visitors, and these unique visitors each visited one unique page. This appears to be a bot of some sort. If this is a bot, why does Google Analytics think these are unique visitors? Is there a was for small sites to deal with this? Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
How can I tell Google, that a page has not changed?
Hello, we have a website with many thousands of pages. Some of them change frequently, some never. Our problem is, that googlebot is generating way too much traffic. Half of our page views are generated by googlebot. We would like to tell googlebot, to stop crawling pages that never change. This one for instance: http://www.prinz.de/party/partybilder/bilder-party-pics,412598,9545978-1,VnPartypics.html As you can see, there is almost no content on the page and the picture will never change.So I am wondering, if it makes sense to tell google that there is no need to come back. The following header fields might be relevant. Currently our webserver answers with the following headers: Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0, public
Technical SEO | | bimp
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Does Google honor these fields? Should we remove no-cache, must-revalidate, pragma: no-cache and set expires e.g. to 30 days in the future? I also read, that a webpage that has not changed, should answer with 304 instead of 200. Does it make sense to implement that? Unfortunatly that would be quite hard for us. Maybe Google would also spend more time then on pages that actually changed, instead of wasting it on unchanged pages. Do you have any other suggestions, how we can reduce the traffic of google bot on unrelevant pages? Thanks for your help Cord0