Penguin 2.0 has hit business
-
Howdy,
I represent a UK based workwear company called myworkwear.co.uk and our rankings have fallen following Penguin 2.0. We are a relatively small company compared to many competitors and have noticed the arrival of large companies in the serps. Many are not even in the workwear sector and pretty irrelevant which is annoying. We have not received any correspondence from Google, but our fall from grace particularly for the word workwear has been big.Do you think our link profile is an issue?
Click here: Link Profile
Is it worth emailing Google? We have attempted to remove bad links, is it worth using disavow? My feelings are we should:
1. Email Google via Disavow tool about the links we have already tried to remove with proof of attempt.Go through link profile with fine tooth comb and contact an even wider range of webmasters for link removal.Then email Google via disavow tool (best to try removal via email to websites first).2. Begin to build new content and links, even guest blogging is now coming under scrutiny from Google – There really is no bluffing Google anymore.3. Build site conversion.4. Develop a competition theme (10 years old anniversary) combined with say MyWorkHero, etc. Use this for social networking.5. Increase social networking, but is this experts are predicting this is the next kick up for seo.6. Having improved conversion, trial adwords.7. Continue to develop the site in a structured, non manipulative manner. – Look at it as a good site is a successful site in the eyes of Google and the rewards will follow.
Any help or advice would be much appreciated.
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the reply your time is much appreciated. I am aware of the edu.cn domains with drug products and emailed the relevant webmasters 6 months ago with no look as the site was hacked about 5 years ago. So I will now disavow them. Is it worth using disavow on other bad links before I attempt to get them removed? or does Google frown on this?
I agree about the term 'workwear' as over the years this built the rankings, but now the seo worm has turned. I have started to use prlog.org for press releases.Do you feel this is okay?
Once again, thanks for your help, it is important to provide independent opinions to clients.
-
Hi there
First of all, I'm really sorry to hear you've been affected by the update.
As Penguin was an algorithmic penalty, there will be no benefit in emailing Google directly or filing a reconsideration request, as the penalty was not manual. However, filing a disavow file would be worthwhile if you believe that your site's link profile is littered with spam.
Now, I don't mean to alarm you but I can see some very worrying links in your profile. You have a number of links from .edu.cn domains that look to be targeting pills and health items. In all honesty, at first glance it looks as though the site has been hacked - are you aware of this?
Having checked the site in the safe browsing tool, it doesn't look as though Google has detected this as hacked. Nevertheless, those links will be doing some pretty serious harm to your site and should be disavowed straight away. In addition, there does look to be a number of links with the keyword "workwear" that look quite artificial - as in, they only look to pass SEO value rather than user value. Those kind of links (which it looks like you've already identified) could be contributing to your penguin penalty.
It's worth noting that disavowing these links will likely have no effect until the algorithm refreshes, which may take a month or two. In the mean time, you should focus on replacing those links with quality links and looking to drive traffic to your site by other means. Also, in case you have been hacked, Google has released a great guide on what you should do next.
And I have to say, it looks as though you've got a great plan to do this. Steps 2 through 7 all look like great inbound marketing tactics (I particularly like 4) which in turn should help you earn high authority links.
I'd have a deep look at your link profile and also check your site security, but your recovery plan looks really solid and I hope it's not long until you get back on your feet.
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
-
Google My Business app search report
What is the deal with the search reports in the Google My Business app? I downloaded this app so prospective customers could message my business, and when I look at the search reports on the app, the results seem nonsensical. According to google analytics my business receives pretty steady traffic every day. Why does the report say that I receive zero visitors one day and 400 the next? (See the screenshot below) 4yLRCHG
Reporting & Analytics | | RandyHT1 -
Referrals - How is it possible I have 5 new users and 100 sessions over a 2 week period?
I have a referral from an email (2), android search(1) and another website(2) but my sessions is 100 over a two week period? I have NO returning visitors (still session data though?) Seems unlikely that just these 5 users have generated 100 sessions!! Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | darrenbooy0 -
I've hit a wall. What's next?
I've been working on creating content and optimizing my website for the past 18 months, and have seen decent gains in organic traffic. Recently my keyword ranking increases have slowed dramatically, despite adding additional content. I'm hoping a fresh set of eyes can spot something that may be holding me back. I appreciate any feedback the MOZ community is able to provide. One area of concern/confusion is the number of pages indexed according to GSC. The number tends to go up and down, and I can't figure out why. Of the roughly 8,000 pages that are submitted through the sitemap, it says only around 1,100 are indexed (sitemap page). The index status page says I've got 7,500 pages indexed. Kind of confused on that one. Anyway, my website is MetroAtlantaHome dot com. Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | Kyle Eaves0 -
What penalty might have hit here (screenshot attached)
I've had a spiky organic traffic profile for some time and wondered if anyone could suggest what penalty might have hit me. Something did in July but then when it recovered (not sure how) I ended up with double the traffic. Then it dipped, recovered a but and has slowly declined since. I've had no manual penalties so it must be algorithmic which means I can fix it. The problem is I don't know what the issues is! Any help appreciated! Ae00Lzl.png
Reporting & Analytics | | SamCUK0 -
Switch to www from non www preference negatively hit # pages indexed
I have a client whose site did not use the www preference but rather the non www form of the url. We were having trouble seeing some high quality inlinks and I wondered if the redirect to the non www site from the links was making it hard for us to track. After some reading, it seemed we should be using the www version for better SEO anyway so I made a change on Monday but had a major hit to the number of pages being indexed by Thursday. Freaking me out mildly. What are people's thoughts? I think I should roll back the www change asap - or am I jumping the gun?
Reporting & Analytics | | BrigitteMN0 -
Hit by a penalty... but which one?!
Hi all, One of our sites has seen a huge drop in traffic beginning in January 2012 and continuing to this day. However, even after spending a great deal of time going through analytics I'm none of the wiser to what penalty has caused the drop in traffic (please see attached - grey line is minus one year). The problem is that our traffic is particularly seasonal, hence the difficulty in highlighting what algorithm update(s) has hit us. I'm tearing my hair out with this one, so any advice would be most appreciated! Cheers yxkTnTn
Reporting & Analytics | | dooberry0 -
Are Panda/Penguin Penalties not Global but only fired for specific Google CCTLDs?
An international portfolio of web sites has been suffering from Panda and Penguin over the last months. Essentially many of the international sites completely disappeared from the top 50 when before we had many Top 5 positions for competitive key words. Today we noticed that it appears that for all this time rankings for local keywords have not been affected for domains outside of the most relevant Google CCTLD for the page. To give an example: Domain.it / Keyword 1 (IT) = Italian Competitive Keyword Google.it: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 4
Reporting & Analytics | | sp80
Google.it: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position --- Google.com: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 1
Google.com: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position 1 Google.de: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 3
Google.de: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position 4 Have other people observed such behavior? Does this give any pointers towards how the recovery strategies should be drafted? We have experienced that the more search volume a keywords has received the harder the Panda/Penguin impact. So one hypothesis could be that because the international Google domains do not receive overly significant traffic for the localized keywords Panda/Penguin protection algorithms are not being applied with the same force. Any thoughts are welcome. /Thomas1 -
Confirmation page gets hit multiple times by some users. How I can I segment out unique visits?
Hi All, I'm web marketing manager at http://www.evenues.com which is like an AirBnB for meeting space. When calculating the number of bookings for our meeting spaces, I've set up a goal in analytics with the confirmation page as the goal URL. The problem is, it seems that some users are looking at the same confirmation page several times. We have unique URLs for each confirmation page, but some users seem to be visiting these unique pages more than 2 to 5 times. This skews our numbers a bit. This makes things a bit problematic when it comes to segmenting visitors. is there anything we can so that each unique URL visited only counts once? Thanks, Kenji
Reporting & Analytics | | eVenuesSEO0