Any ideas why this site is being penalized?
-
http://www.my-french-house.com/ has been online since around 2004 and has nearly always been in the top 10 serps for terms like 'property for sale in france'. However, over the last 12 months we've been hit really hard by Google and have fallen dramatically in rank. Can anyone give any insight into what may have happened?
As an aside, we've had no message in the Google Webmaster Console and have not contacted Google about the apparent penalty / penalization.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Jim
-
Hi Jim-
There are plenty of good articles about Penguin recovery, but here is the main goal:
Remove unnatural backlinks: Look for non-relevent backlinks, backlinks with manipulative anchor text or unnaturally high anchor text ratio, sitewide links, etc.
This can vary with each site and please don't look at my blurb and just start getting rid of backlinks. There has been a ton of discussion on Moz about Penguin recovery, which you should read up on: http://www.google.com/#q=penguin+recovery+moz.com
Do a lot of research if you are going to tackle it yourself instead of hire it out.
Best of luck!
-
It is looking like we've been hit by Penguin 2.1 (5th Update). There was a significant drop in organic traffic on 6th October 2013. There was another drop around 17th March 2013, which looks to be related to Panda update 25. However, weirdly enough we recovered quite considerably from 7th July until Penguin 2.1. Is that something that others have experienced as well?
In view of this, does anyone have any specific advice?
-
I haven't visited your site or looked at the backlinks, but most likely, you were hit by either Penguin/Panda or both. Save yourself some time and use Panguin Tool to look at your traffic stats compared to Algorithm updates. This is the best tool for a quick insight into potential traffic loss. http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
See if your traffic drop-off aligns with a particular update(s) and then move forward with fixing it from there. If nothing lines up with the algorithm updates, perhaps your own site has made a mistake during a code update.
-
The link operator only shows a snapshot and is in no way representative of the actual links. Open Site Explorer on here will give a more accurate account of your link profile.
You also want to take a close look at your organic traffic stats and compare with the Google update dates here http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and see if there is a pattern emerging.
I have dealt with sites that have just generally declined organically over a year or two and usually it comes down to poor on-site SEO (including possibly panda) and the indirect effects of penguin.
-
I'd review this article for more ideas about why your traffic may have dropped [http://3qdigital.com/experience/diagnosing-traffic-drop/].
Also, when you do get into Majestic SEO, you want to look for links with high-volumes of the same, non-brand anchor text. If your anchor text is uniform across a majority of your links, that's not good. If it turns out to be the case, you'll want to contact as many of those websites as you can to see if they'll modify the anchor text.
-
Thanks for that Justin. We do have a webmaster console account and we've had zero messages relating to bad practices etc.
Re the number of links - there should be way more than that as far as I'm aware! How could there only be 7 now?!?
I'll take a look at majesticseo.com. Anything else we can do?
-
Do you have a Google Webmasters account set up? Are there any messages there?
My hunch is that Google killed most of your links. I'm not sure how many links you had previously, but now you only have 7. [See attachment]
You may have done nothing to get penalized. But the sites linking to you may have. I recommend getting a Majestic SEO account [www.majesticseo.com] and diving into your historical link profile.
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
-
Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?
About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )
Technical SEO | | DanWrightson0 -
Why my site is not ranking for any of the keywords?
We have a site for Property management software, we have done everything like set proper Title and descriptions, heading tags, robots tag is also ok, set schema and its ok with Google webmaster too also we are doing Social media promotion. can you please check our website and tell me what is the problem??
Technical SEO | | rootwaysinc0 -
Mobile site not ranking
Hello, Our main site ranks well for all the keyword terms, and yet, our mobile site is buried. It is a "m." configuration, and I am wondering if it is a question of not using the correct programming language to get it there? Or if the redirects to the main site should relate differently? I have tried to read up on the topic of mobile site SEO and cannot find (or understand) the answer? Could someone please help? Thanks so much in advance!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
I noticed all my SEOed sites are getting attacked constantly by viruses. I do wordpress sites. Does anyone have a good recommendation to protect my clients sites? thanks
We have tried all different kinds of security plugins but none seem to work long term.
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Migrating to New site keywords question
We are converting an old static html ecommerce site to a new platform. The old site has excellent ranking for some of the products. In order to maintain our ranking we will implement 301 redirects from old to new pages (as the urls will change to SEF). I am using Googles Keyword tool (in adwords) and entering each page url of the old site (there are hundreds, I'm doing the top 50 in traffic) and generating a set of keywords, then sorting each list by global searches. For each page, Google's Keyword Tool is giving me hundreds of keywords, but in meta tags there should be no more than 15, so I need a method to choose the keywords on the new page. Question: in the new meta tags should we emphasize the most common keywords (as defined by most global searches) or the least common keywords? I would hate to lose the good ranking for the least common (long tail) keywords.
Technical SEO | | ssaltman0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
Best practice for eCommerce site migration, should I 301 redirect or match URLs on new site
Hi Guys, I have been struggling with this one for quite some time. I am no SEO expert like many of you, rather just a small business owner trying to do the right thing, so forgive me if I say something that makes no sense 🙂 I am moving our eCommerce store from one platform to another, in the process the store is getting a massive face lift. The part I am struggling with is whether I should keep my existing URL structure in place or use 301 redirects to create a cleaner looking URLs. Currently the URLs are a little long and I would love to move to a /category/product_name type format. Of course the goal is not to lose ranking in the process, I rank pretty well for several competitive phrases and do not want to create a negative impact. How would you guys handle this? Thanks, Dinesh
Technical SEO | | MyFairyTaleBooks0 -
Is SEOMoz only good for "ideas"?
Perhaps I've learned too much about the technical aspects of SEO, but nowhere have I found scientific studies backing up any claims made here, or a useful answer to a discussion I recently started. Maybe it doesn't exist. I do enjoy Whiteboard Friday's. They're fantastic for new ideas. This site is great. But I take it there are no proper studies conducted that examine SEO, rather just the usual spin of "belief from authority". No?
Technical SEO | | stevenheron0