Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
-
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up.
She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way.
I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty.
First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it?
(We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content.
Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit.
Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing?
We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month.
So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course.
So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.)
Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option?
Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course).
Brad & Martha Novacek
-
Hi Brad and Martha,
You've asked a lot of questions which likely why you haven't got a lot of responses. It could take a few hours to answer all of those questions and really to answer completely someone would need to have a very close look at your site and your analytics.
I have a few thoughts for you though. The graphic you showed was interesting. Your drop that starts in March does not coincide with any known algorithm update so it is not due to Penguin or Panda. You do have a drop that coincides with the Penguin rollout of April 24 but your backlink profile is not really typical of a Penguin hit site. Sure, you've got your keyword as your top anchor, but according to ahrefs there are only 12 domains linking to you with that phrase. I would be surprised if you were severely affected by Penguin. I'm not saying it's impossible, but if it were Penguin it should be something not too hard to recover from.
I think there is likely a site issue. I only had time to spend a few minutes but I found that these two pages on your site contain content duplicating each other:
http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/
http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/index3.html
http://www.learnhowtomakequilts.com/index1.html
The second contains odd characters and I'm guessing it is not meant to be in the Google index, but it is.
It's possible that if you clean up the duplication on your own site you may rank much better.
-
Hi Brad,
Penguin and Panda are completely different issues. In brief, Penguin suppresses rankings for sites which have built manipulative links. Panda suppresses rankings for sites with various content issues.
I have not examined your site but based on your description, it seems likely your issue is Penguin. You have talked about building numerous links to the site using perfect match anchor text, which is the primary mechanism Penguin uses for detecting manipulation.
On a general level, you have two options: clean up the backlinks or move to a new site. Cleaning up the backlinks is a lot of work. For a hobby site, your best bet is likely moving to the customcarequilts.com site and shutting down the other site.
There is no reason to use yet another domain related to quilting. Clearly the topics discussed all relate to quilting.
Best Regards
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
-
Community Discussion - What's the ROI of "pruning" content from your ecommerce site?
Happy Friday, everyone! 🙂 This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore. Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney2 -
Can a "site split" cause a drastic organic search decline?
Let's say you have a client. They have two big, main product offerings. Come early April of this year, one of the product offerings decide to move their product offering over to a new domain. Let's also say you had maybe 12 million links in your inbound link portfolio for the original domain. And when this product offering that split opened their new domain, they 301 redirected half of those 12 million links (maybe even 3/4s) over to their new domain. So you're left with "half" a website. And while you still have millions of links; you lost millions as well. Would a ~25-50% drop in organic traffic be a reasonable effect? My money is on YES. Because all links to a domain help "rise" the page authority sea level of all URLs of the domain. So cutting off 50-75% of those links would drop that sea level a somewhat corresponding amount. We did get some 301 redirects that we felt were "ours" in place in late July... but that really accounted for 25% of the total amount of pages with inbound links they took originally. And those got in place almost 4 months after the fact. Curious what other people may think. LnEazzi.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristianMKG0 -
Site Migration of 4 sites into 1?
Hi Guys, I have a massive project involving a migration of 4 sites into 1. 4 sites include: **www.MainSite.com ** www.E-commerce.com www.Membership.com www.ResearchStudy.com Goal of this project is to have 1-4 regrouped into Main Site I will be following the best practice from this post https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos which has an awesome checklist. I am actually about to start Phase 3: URL redirect mapping. Because all of these sites have hundreds of duplicates, I figured I should first resolve the Main Site dup issues before creating the URL redirect mapping but what about the other domains (2,3,4) though? Should I first resolve the Dup issues on those ones as well or it is not necessary since they will be pointing into the Main Site new domain? I want to make sure I don't overwork the programming team and myself. Thanks For sharing your expertise and any tips on how should I move forward with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Domain Migration of high traffic site:
We plan to perform a domain migration in 6 months time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I read the different articles on moz relating to domain migration, but some doubts remain: Moving some linkworthy content upfront to new domain was generally recommended. I have such content (free e-learning) that I could move already now to new domain.
Should I move it now or just 2 months before migration?
Should I be concerned whether this content and early links could indicate to google a different topical theme of the new domain ? E.g. in our case free elearning app vs a commercial booking of presential courses of my core site which is somehow but not extremely strongly related) and links for elearning app may be very specific from appstores and from sites about mobile apps. we still have some annoying .php3 file extensions in many of our highest traffic pages and I would like to drop the file-extension (no further URL change). It was generally recommended to minimize other changes at the same time of domain migration, but on the other hand implementing later another 301 again may also not be optimum and it would save time to do it all at the same time. Shall I do the removal of the file extension at the same time of the domain migration or rather schedule it for 3 months later? On the same topic, would the domain migration be a good occasion to move to https instead of http at the same time, or also should we rather do this at a different time? Any thoughts or suggestions?0 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Site revamp for neglected site - modifying site structure, URLs and content - is there an optimal approach?
A site I'm involved with, www.organicguide.com, was at one stage (long ago) performing reasonably well in the search engines. It was ranking highly for several keywords. The site has been neglected for some considerable period of time. A new group of people are interested in revamping the site, updating content, removing some of the existing content, and generally refreshing the site entirely. In order to go forward with the site, significant changes need to be made. This will likely involve moving the entire site across to wordpress. The directory software (edirectory.com) currently being used has not been designed with SEO in mind and as a result numerous similar pages of directory listings (all with similar titles and descriptions) are in google's results, albeit with very weak PA. After reading many of the articles/blog posts here I realize that a significant revamp and some serious SEO work is needed. So, I've joined this community to learn from those more experienced. Apart from doing 301 redirects for pages that we need to retain, is there any optimal way of removing/repairing the current URL structure as the site gets updated? Also, is it better to make changes all at once or is an iterative approach preferred? Many thanks in advance for any responses/advice offered. Cheers MacRobbo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | macrobbo0 -
Can Linking Between Your Own Sites Excessively Be a Penguin No-No?
I have a bunch of travel-related sites that for a long time dominated google.com.au without any intensive SEO whatsoever. Aside from solid on-page content and meta tag, I did no link building. However, all of my sites are heavily interlinked, and I think they are linked with do follow links and lots of anchor texts. Here are a few of them: www.beautifulpacific.com www.beautifulfiji.com www.beautifulcooklands.com My idea in inter-linking them was to create a kind of branded "Beautiful" nexus of sites. However, when Penguin hit -- which I believe was on April 27th -- search traffic crashed, and has crashed over and over again. I've read that Penguin penalized over-optimization vis a vis anchor text links. I don't have a lot of inbound links like these, but they are everywhere among my sites. Is it possible that all of my text links have hurt me with Penguin? Thanks to everyone in advance for your time and attention. I really appreciate it. -Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
What is the best practice when a client is setting up multiple sites/domains
I have a client that is creating separate websites to be used for different purposes. What is the best practice here with regards to not looking spammy. i.e. do the domains need to registered with different companies? hosted on different servers, etc? Thanks in advance for your response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-1718030