This site got hit but why..?
-
I am currently looking at taking on a small project website which was recently hit but we are really at a loss as to why so I wanted to open this up to the floor and see if anyone else had some thoughts or theories to add.
The site is
and the site appeared to be hit by Penguin because sure enough it drops from several hundred visitors a day to less than 50.
Nothing was changed about the website, and looking at the Analytics it bumbled along at a less than 50 visitors a day. On June 25th when Panda 3.8 hit, the site saw traffic increase to between 80-100 visitors a day and steadily increases almost to pre-penguin levels.
On August 9th/10th, traffic drops off the face of the planet once again.
This site has some amazing links
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/04/algorithmsdata-vs-analystsreports-fight/
http://as.exeter.ac.uk/library/using/help/business/researchingfinance/stockmarket/That were earned entirely naturally/editorially. I know these aren't "get out of jail free cards" but the rest of the profile isn't that bad either. Normally you can look at a link profile and say "Yep, this link and that link are a bit questionable" but beyond some slightly off-topic guest blogging done a while back before I was looking to get involved in the project there really isn't anything all that fruity about the links in my opinion.
I know that the site design needs some work but the content is of a high standard and it covers its topic (commodities) in a very comprehensive and authoritative way. In my opinion, (I'm not biased yet because it isn't my site) this site genuinely deserves to rank.
As far as I know, this site has received no unnatural link warnings.
I am hoping this is just a case of us having looked at this for too long and it will be a couple of obvious/glaring fixes to someone with a fresh pair of eyes.
Does anyone have any insights into what the solution might be?
[UPDATE] after responses from a few folks I decided to update the thread with progress I made on investigating the situation. After plugging the domain into Open Site Explorer I can see quite a few links that didn't show up in Link Research Tools (which is odd as I thought LRT was powered by mozscape but anyway... shows the need for multiple tools). It does seem like someone in the past has been a little trigger happy with building links to some of the inner pages.
-
Thanks Billy - another individual touched on this above actually but I think it is a very valid point. It is something I am adding in to my list of recommendations as well.
-
Just a quick look at the home page a some quick navigation of the site showed me that on the home page alone there are at least five links that go to howtotradecommoditiesDOTcom/go/etoro which just redirects to the etoro website. It almost looks like there are ads that are disguised as internal links in order to keep from getting the 'above the fold' penalty. Who knows how Google sees this but I would think that they wouldn't see it in a very good light whether this was the intention or not. I would certainly look at reworking your internal linking structure as well.
Good luck
-
also the onsite pages have bad anchor text links
-
Hi David,
For some reason these weren't showing up in Link Research Tools - just run the site through OSE and now I can see a fair amount of junk to inner pages...
Thanks for your input here
James
-
The home page and inner pages has tons of internal anchor text links that look pretty spammy could be that is hurting you. Tons of exact anchor texts all with word commoditie in it very unnatural.
-
Hi James, I'll didn't see any punch in the face this is the issue..
But, the site IMO is clearly a site that is looking for ad clicks. Had I come across it in my day to day life, I would immediately leave. I say this because it is clearly trying to force you to click the toro ad which is displayed 2-3 times on every page.. Furthermore, actually reading the text of the site is off-putting as you can't help but be distracted by the flashing or moving images, and I feel like I'm reading a spam site due to the over-abundance of underlining. So in this case I would say my user experience is 2 on scale of 10.
On the SEO side I think you have a challenge. This site is clearly about commodities, but how search engines can ascertain the difference between each page seems difficult, commodities and the derivatives are on every single page I looked at.
Andy also touched on a good point and it was what I thought immediately when I saw the site, which was.. is this text from another site? When you look at the user experience, and the amount of text on the site, it is hard to believe somebody sat down and specifically typed and wrote every page for this site. If somebody did, I think the web designer needs to give them more credit and not treat their time like a plate of spaghetti thrown at a wall.
I am not trying to be harsh, rather constructive. I believe a sites that offer poor user experiences should be out of SERP's when there is better competition, I also believe "copy & paste" sites should be thrown to the back of the line. I can say IMO the user experience of this site was very low, and the information provided is suspect, so it would be hard for me to argue with Google or any search engine ranking a site like this low.
-
There is probably a days-worth of discussion here James. But just looking at your links very quickly, I do see quite a few questionable ones, some odd ones, but I do notice that most have the same anchor text and appear to go to the home page.
Could be nothing at all, but something to look at. However, unless you have a links warning from Google in WMT, then it is unlikely this is the cause.
You do also seem to have a little bit of duplicate content outside of your site so presumably this is your content and someone has plagiarised it? For example, here is a random search from one page.
I honestly think there is a lot more to look at here, but something of a starter for you.
Andy
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
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Dealing with 404s during site migration
Hi everyone - What is the best way to deal with 404s on an old site when you're migrating to a new website? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Why is this site not ranking?
http://www.petstoreunlimited.com They get good grades from the on-page tool. The links are not amazing, but are not super spammy. Yet it ranks for nothing they target Any reason why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
What this site is doing? Does it look like cloaking to you?
Hi here, I was studying our competitors SEO strategies, and I have noticed that one of our major competitors has setup something pretty weird from a SEO stand point for which I would like to know your thoughts about because I can't find a clear explanation for it. Here is the deal: the site is musicnotes.com, and their product pages are located inside the /sheetmusic/ directory, so if you want to see all their product pages indexed on Google, you can just type in Google: site:musicnotes.com inurl:/sheetmusic/ Then you will get about 290,000 indexed pages. No, here is the tricky part: try to click on one of those links, then you will get a 302 redirect to a page that includes a meta "noindex, nofollow" directive. Isn't that pretty weird? Why would they want to "nonidex, nofollow" a page from a 302 redirect? And how in the heck the redirecting page is still in the index?!! And how Google can allow that?! All this sounds weird to me and remind me spammy techniques of the 90s called "cloaking"... what do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Seo flash site
Hey. Would hear whether it is possible to SEO a website which is flash site cms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agger0 -
Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc. We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did: -We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt -Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index -Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.) -removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site. We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect. There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all. The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com. There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist. The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name. Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new? ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line: "When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document." This may be what is happening here. And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it. Confused yet? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
SEO Link on Clients Site
Hey SEOMozzers, Quick question. In light of the possible 'over-optimisation' penalties pending from Google should we be looking to remove the SEO links to our site from our Clients websites? I appreciate that including a link to our site from an anchor text that includes 'SEO' in it may be like waving a flag to Search Engines saying we are carrying out SEO on our Clients sites. Obviously we would sooner risk a drop in our SEO keyword rankings than risk a penalty of any kind for our Clients. What is the recommended practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0