Hiding Legitimate Content From Google Without Penalty?
-
Hi Around the time of the April/May 2012 penguin update we lost around 40% of traffic and ever since traffic has slowly been reduced to around 50% of what is was from last year from approx 1000 hits a day to under 500. I'm not convinced totally that penguin is to blame as link building has not been overdone especially when other companies who rank first page for "personalised gifts" have 100's of anchor links pointing back to there sites with this term as the link. I think our site may be hit due to accidental keyword stuffing! Basically when an order is placed the product page is updated with the last message to be engraved on the item, so for example if someone buys 10 wine glasses all personalised with "happy birthday mum, happy birthday dad, happy birthday son etc or if customers choose similar engraving then we have lots of combinations of the same words repeated. This information has increased the number of conversions as it gives customers ideas as what to engrave and I don't really want to remove it from the page. Could anyone advise me on what i need to do, is there a way of telling google to ignore this text, a way of hiding without being penalised? Any ideas greatly appreciated!
-
Hello Mr. Smith (I love saying that)
Taking a look at the URL you provided: http://www.keepitpersonal.co.uk/silver-personalised-noahs-ark-money-box-p-108.html....
...I wouldn't guess that keyword stuffing is a cause for concern. In fact, I like the recent engravings box as it adds a nice touch to the information on the site. I also didn't find it spammy at all.
The design is a little "busy" and perhaps outdated - sometimes with edge cases this is enough to trigger a Panda update - especially if you have poor user engagement metrics, but I couldn't find any duplicate content and overall the site seems structurally sound.
I know you're hesitant to blame the link profile, but 80% of the time it's the culprit in these cases. The difference between what you and your competitors are doing is not always fair, but more based on what Google defines as "unnatural" at the moment.
I ran your URL through Remove'em link analyzer - http://www.removeem.com/ which loosely identified 285 "suspicious" links. You can do the same sort of analysis with these 2 other tools as well:
Looking at the backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, we see a lot of comment signature links and directory listings, both types of links that were targeted by Penguin and/or over-optimization filters.
I'd check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages and/or errors. Even if you didn't get a link notice, you can file a reconsideration request to see if they will verify a penalty. Sometimes this will get you more information then you had before. In any case, it might be well worth it to do a complete link audit and cleanup, and even go through the disavow process if necessary.
Just my 2 cents. I know it's probably not the best news you want to hear, but I really like your site and want to see you succeed!
-
Anyone?
-
I've changed the title of the post and wondering how we go about adding tags or iframe to content.
-
Thanks for your reply Irving I really appreciate your help, we moved from a home business to a premises with staff and overheads in March last year, traffic growing month on month then bang just my luck!
This is the URL www.keepitpersonal.co.uk
This is an example of one of the product pages, scroll down and check out "recent personalisation requests" - these are generated as sales come in.
http://www.keepitpersonal.co.uk/silver-personalised-noahs-ark-money-box-p-108.html
I have fixed duplicate content issues, using canonical tags and errors in webmaster tools and fixed technical issues but it just gets worse.
-
you can hide the text in an iframe or something like that.
that is a long time to still be penalized, it could be keyword stuffing or some other unintentional technical issue. supply the URL if you want the site looked at
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
-
Duplicate Content
Hello Moz Quick question. Can I copy and paste a paragraph of text (100 words) from my main category page into my products without hurting SEO of the category page? The content on my category page is so good I don't want to take chances as this is what I will be ranking for. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crocman0 -
Is there a benefit to hiding words from Google on ecommerce sites?
I think we all know that ecommerce sites have a lot of repeating functional texts on them. Is there a benefit from hiding this text from Google's crawler? Take this page for example, http://storage3.static.itmages.com/i/16/0805/h_1470425505_1090542_224cc344d4.png Some of the most dense words on the page are "Add to cart", "Add to Wishlist", "New", and "Sale". Is there any benefit to hiding those words from Google? The method of hiding I am talking about is not cloaking, but this, https://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/gsa_doc_set/admin_crawl/preparing.html#1076243 using the google:off index tag. So the content will be there still, but it will not be indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | LesleyPaone0 -
Duplicate Content for Event Pages
Hi Folks, I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them? Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue? I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Kind Regards Gareth Daine
On-Page Optimization | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Duplicate Content on Event Pages
My client has a pretty popular service of event listings and, in hope of gathering more events, they opened up the platform to allow users to add events. This works really well for them and they are able to garner a lot more events this way. The major problem I'm finding is that many event coordinators and site owners will take the copy from their website and copy and paste it, duplicating a lot of the content. We have editor picks that contain a lot of unique content but the duplicate content scares me. It hasn't hurt our page ranking (we have a page ranking of 7) but I'm wondering if this is something that we should address. We don't have the manpower to eliminate all the duplication but if we cut down the duplication would we experience a significant advantage over people posting the same event?
On-Page Optimization | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
How should I handle author attribution for ghostwritten content?
I've been using Crowdcontent for article production, and always feel like I'm potentially missing out on some authority or social proof with visitors (and maybe Google?) by not attributing an author (Crowdcontent doesn't give you the name of the author, otherwise I would just use their name). Would I be doing myself any favors by attributing myself as the author and pointing it back to my Google+ profile? Thanks in advance for any guidance!
On-Page Optimization | | spking0 -
Duplicat contents on wordpress
I ran a crawl error and found that I have many pages with "tag" i.e. http://www.soobumimphotography.com/tag/70-200-2-8-is/ What's the best way to deal with this problems? Is it worth to visit all of them and fix? Delete? Could you give me some suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | BistosAmerica0 -
How much constitutes duplicate content in your opinion?
Mornin' In your experience, how much constitutes duplicate content? A sentence, a paragraph, half a page, etc? What about quotes - are they considered duplications, too, if there aren't quotation marks? Over the years, the client has been a bit bad in taking a paragraph from here, a sentence from there, and coupling it all together as daily news on their site. I'm now in the middle of a purge. Oh boy! All hail originality.
On-Page Optimization | | Martin_S0 -
Google Place Pages - Definitive Guide?
Hi good folk of SEOmoz, I've recently updated a number of place pages for my client who is an estate agent. I have to admit that they were a little keyword stuffed, but at the time my competitor; who ranks first, was filled with keywords. For example in their title it states "[company name] estate agent [location]" I thought that this was a big no-no and it should not be done? They also have keywords stuffed into categories and description. Im confused on how they are getting away with this? I have searched on the Google place page support forum and can not find a definitive guide on the exact rules. Could anybody be so kind to help me out? i.e Where to put keywords and locations in the title and categories Thankyou.
On-Page Optimization | | Lakeside0