Has Panda help this site achieve great heights? How? and Why?
-
Today I went about my business in trying to understand what is happening in our market, eyewear, after the last Panda update. I was interested to know if any of our competitors were effected as much as we were for a very competitive key phrase To my surprise a new kid appeared on the block, well, on page one, position two. Imagine my second surprise, when the new kid turn out to be a 3 month old domain, yes 3 months, with zero page rank and zero back links. I was in for one more surprise before I stood up, walked to the window and gazed into space to contenplate the meaning of Panda and SEO as we know it. This third surprise was the site in question is a counterfeiting site using black hat SEO with fast results. It has a Blog its a good looking site with the key phrase menstioned a hundred times.
-
Thank you for your reply.
I reported the site to google and now the have slipped to number 6th but I fear that the will be back with another site soon.
Regards
Chris
-
HI Chris
There is a way to track it, checkout the campaigns in Campaign section. You can add 3 of your competitors there and set up the keywords you want to watch. Unfortunately, the there is no great way to go back in time, but by tracking them now you can get a feel for what happens over upcoming weeks.
-
Hi
First became aware of it on Wednesday of last week. Is there a way of tracking it?
-
Hi Chris,
Out of curiosity how long has this site been ranking high?
-
Hi Journeyman
Thanks for replying, What I don't understand is how this still can happen? my understanding of the Panda updates are:
1. sites with better content will rank higher, more social, reviews, video etc.
2. Panda understands what it is reading grammar, context and so on.
3. what about page rank, back links?
I'm really confused I tried creating content and forget about SEO and just create for users, after 18 months no PageRank and only a couple of links which are natural. I have see a 60% drop in traffic and about the same in sales for the mentioned key phrase.
But here is a site which is able to high jack page one in an industry that is worth 100 billion with a key phrase which has 360K searches a month.
BTW I reported the site to our friends at Google. No response as yet.
-
Hi Chris I've witnessed the same thing in a couple other markets. Likely, their results are due to an aggressive link strategy that will ultimately bite them in the A**. The two sites I noticed this from held their spots for 1 week and the other 2 1/2 weeks, after which they disappeared from the first 2 pages.
One of them is one we track here at SEOMoz.org I included is an image of when we noticed this site rank very high, over-layed on their links over time graph.
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
-
Whitehat site suffering from drastic & negative Keyword/Phrase Shifts out of the blue!
I am the developer for a fairly active website in the education sector that offers around 30 courses and has quite an actively published blog a few times a week and social profiles. The blog doesn't have comments enabled and the type of visitor that visits is usually looking for lessons or a course. Over the past year we have had an active input in terms of development to keep the site up to date, fast and following modern best practises. IE SSL certificates, quality content, relevant and high powered backlinks ect... Around a month ago we got hit by quite a large drop in our ranked keywords / phrases which shocked us somewhat.. we attributed it to googles algorithm change dirtying the waters as it did settle up a couple of weeks later. However this week we have been smashed again by another large change dropping almost 100 keywords some very large positions. My question is quite simple(I wish)... What gives? I don't expect to see drops this large from not doing anything negative and I'm unsure it's an algorithm change as my other clients on Moz don't seem to have suffered either so it's either isolated to this target area or it's an issue with something occurring to or on the site? QfkSttI T42oGqA
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | snowflake740 -
Paid Link/Doorway Disavow - disavowing the links between 2 sites in the same company.
Hello, Three of our client's sites are having difficulty because of past doorway/paid link activity, which we're doing the final cleanup on with a disavow. There are links between the sites. Should we disavow all the links between the sites? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Clean-up Question after a wordpress site Hack added pages with external links from a massive link wheel?
Hey All, Thought I would throw this out to ensure I am dotting my "i's" and crossing my "t's"..... Client WordPress site was hacked injected 3-4 pages that cross linked to hundreds (affiliate junk spam link wheel). Pages were removed, 3rd party cleared all malware/viruses. Heavy duty firewall and security monitoring are in place. Hacked pages are now showing as 404. No penalties, ranking issues....If anything there was a temporary BOOST in rankings due to the large link-wheel type net that the pages were receiving....That has since leveled out rankings. I guess my question is, in your opinion is it best to let those pages 404, I am noticing a large amount of links going to them from all over the world from this large link net that was built. I find the temptation to 301 re-direct deleted pages to the homepage difficult...lol..{the temptation is REAL}. Is there anything I am missing? Any other steps that YOU would take? I am assuming letting those pages 404 would be the best bet, as in time they will roll off index.... Thank you in advance, I appreciate any feedback or opinions....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Anthony_Howard0 -
Old Press Release sites - Which ones do you Disavow and leave alone
Hi Mozers! I need your help. I'm in the final stages of a huge link audit and press releases are a big concern. As you know, press release distribution sites up until 2012 had "follow" links, giving webmasters a delight of having their keyword anchor texts a big boost in rankings. These are the websites that are troubling me today so i would appreciate your input on my strategy below as most of these websites are asking for money to remove them: 1. Press Release sites that are on the same C-class - Disavow 2. Not so authoritative press release websites that just follow my www domain only (no anchor texts) - I leave it alone 3. Not so authoritative press release websites but have anchor texts that are followed - Disavow 4. Post 2012 press release websites that have "followed" anchor text keywords - Request to remove, then disavow 5. Post 2012 press release websites that just follow my www domain only (no anchor texts) - leave it alone #2 and #5 are my biggest concern. Now more than ever I would appreciate your follow ups. I will respond quickly and apply "good answers" to the one's that make the most sense as my appreciation to you. God bless you all.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn1240 -
New Domain Name or Keep going - Help not Recovering after Penguin
Hi Moz Friends I wonder if you can help me , a while ago we had a Penguin Penalty and lost our Rankings. After Months of work Disavow and Reconsiderations , Google sent me a message in Webmaster Tools to confirm the Penalty had been uplifted. Since then we havent recovered. I have been working with Bloggers to build relevant safe links, each having a DA of between 10-30. We have developed a Mobile Friendly Website and ios and Android Apps. We have improved Site Speed and moved to a Server within the same Country. We add lots of content and believe we have ticked all the boxes for onpage optimisation. However our DA and PA seems to have dropped slightly after Moz update today. We seem to be jumping in the serps, one day page 4 for "fancy dress" the next day nowhere to be found. I'm not sure what to do next. I'm not expecting to jump back to page 1 for the main keywords but some positive movement would be nice, especially as there are Lower DA Website, not mobile friendly or as fast above us in the serps. What I am looking for I guess is any ideas from you and also what you think about this idea A few people have mentioned that we might stand more of a chance using our domain name example.com instead of example.co.uk. example.com has never been used and is totaly clean (no penaltys ect..) Do we use example.com and move the website and content away from example.co.uk ? if so do we use redirects or would that just pass any hold thats on example.co.uk to the .com version Ideas Welcome Thanks Adam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AMG1000 -
Google Panda and Penguin "Recovery"
We're working with a client who had been hit by Google Panda (duplicate content, copyright infringement) and Google Penguin (poor backlinks). While this has taken a lot of time, effort and patience to eradicate these issues, it's still been more than 6 months without any improvement. Have you experienced longer recovery periods? I've seen sites perform every black hat technique under the sun and still nearly 2 years later..no recovery! In addition many companies I've spoken to advised their clients to begin right from the very beginning with a new domain, site etc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GaryVictory0 -
The purpose of these Algo updates: To more harshly push eCommerce sites toward PPC and enable normal blogs/forums toward reclaiming organic search positions?
Hi everyone, This is my first post here, and absolutely loving the site and the services. Just a quick background, I have dabbled in SEO in the past, and have been reading up over the last few months and am amazed at the speed at which things are changing. I currently have a few clients that I am doing some SEO work for 2 of them, and have had an ecommerce site enquire about SEO services. They are a medium sized oak furniture ecommerce site. From all the major changes..the devaluing of spam links, link networks, penalization of overuse of exact match anchor text and the overall encouraging of earned links (often via content marketing) over built links, adding to this the (not provided) section in Google Analytics, and the increasing screen real estate that PPC is getting over organic search...all points to me thinking on major thing..... That the search engine is trying to push eCommerce sites and sites that sell stuff harder toward using PPC and paid advertising and allowing the blogs/forums and informational sites to more easily reclaim the organic part of the search results again. The above is elaborated on a bit more below.. POINT 1 Firstly as built links (article submission, press releases, info graphic submission, web 2.0 link building ect) rapidly lose their effectiveness, and as Google starts to place more emphasis on sites earning links instead - by producing amazing interesting and unique content that people want to link to. The fact remains that surely Google is aware that it is much harder for eCommerce sites to produce a constant stream of interesting link worthy content around their niche (especially if its a niche that not an awful lot could be written about). Although earning links is not impossible for eCommerce sites, for a lot of them it is more difficult because creating link worthy content is not what eCommerce sites were originally intended for. Whereas standard blogs and forums were built for that exact purpose. Therefore the search engines must know that it is a lot easier for normal blogs/forums to "earn" links through content, therefore leading to them reclaiming more of the organic search ranking for transaction and non transaction terms, and therefore forcing the eCommerce sites to adopt PPC more heavily. POINT 2 If we add to the mix the fact that for the terms most relevant to eCommerce sites, the search engine results page has a larger allocation of PPC ads than organic results (above the fold), and that Google has limited the amount of data that sites can see in terms of which keywords people are using to arrive on their sites, which effects eCommerce sites more - as it makes it harder for them to see which keywords are resulting in sales. Then this provides further evidence that Google is trying to back eCommerce sites into a corner by making it more difficult for them to make sense of and track sales from organic results in comparison to with PPC, where data is still plentiful. Conclusion Are the above just over exaggerations? Can most eCommerce sites still keep achieving a good percentage of sales from organic search despite the above? if so, what do the more niche eCommerce sites do to "earn" links when content topics are thin and unique outreach destinations can be exhausted quickly. Do they accept the fact that the are in the business of selling things, so should be paying for their traffic as opposed to normal blogs/forums which are not. Or is there still a place for them to get even more creative with content and acquire earned links..? And finally, is the concentration on earned links more overplayed than it actually is? Id really appreciate your thoughts on this..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Panda Recovery: Is a reconsideration request necessary?
Hi everyone, I run a 12-year old travel site that primarily publishes hotel reviews and blog posts about ways to save when traveling in Europe. We have a domain authority of 65 and lots of high quality links from major news websites (NYT, USA Today, NPR, etc.). We always ranked well for competitive searches like "cheap hotels in Paris," etc., for many, many years (like 10 years). Things started falling two years ago (April 2011)--I thought it was just normal algorithmic changes, and that our pages were being devalued (and perhaps, it was). So, we continued to bulk up our reviews and other key pages, only to see things continue to slide. About a month ago I lined up all of our inbound search traffic from Google Analytics and compared it to SEO Moz's timeline of Google updates. Turns out every time there was a Panda roll-out (from the second one in April 2011) our traffic tumbled. Other updates (Penguin, etc.) didn't seem to make a difference. But why should our content that we invest so much in take a hit from Panda? It wasn't "thin." But thin content existed elsewhere on our site: We had a flights section with 40,000 pages of thin content, cranked out of our database with virtually no unique content. We had launched that section in 2008, and it had never been an issue (and had mostly been ignored), but now, I believed, it was working against us. My understanding is that any thin content can actually work against the entire site's rankings. In summary: We had 40,000 thin flights pages, 2,500 blog posts (rich content), and about 2,500 hotel-related pages (rich and well researched "expert" content). So, two weeks ago we dropped almost the entire flights section. We kept about 400 pages (of the 40,000) with researched, unique and well-written information, and we 410'd the rest. Following the advice of so many others on these boards, we put the "thin" flights pages in their own sitemap so we could watch their index number fall in Webmaster tools. And we watched (with some eagerness and trepidation) as the error count shot up. Google has found about half of them at this point. Last week I submitted a "reconsideration request" to Google's spam team. I wasn't sure if this was necessary (as the whole point of dropping the pages, 410'ing and so forth was to fix it on our end, which would hopefully filter down through the SERPs eventually). However, I thought it was worth sending them a note explaining the actions we had taken, just in case. Today I received a response from them. It includes: "We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. 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. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages..." And thus, I'm a bit confused. If they say that there wasn't any manual action taken, is that a bad thing for my site? Or is it just saying that my site wasn't experiencing a manual penalty, however Panda perhaps still penalized us (through a drop in rankings) -- and Panda isn't considered "manual." Could the 410'ing of 40,000 thin pages actually raise some red flags? And finally, how long do these issues usually take to clear up? Pardon the very long question and thanks for any insights. I really appreciate the advice offered in these forums.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomNYC0