How to tackle google penguin algorithmic penalty?
-
My Website ranking went down mid of april, I sent a Reconsideration request and the reply was :
“ We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. 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.”
My site was classic asp and i change that to a new word press theme
I change the site structure and created new fresh content on the entire site focusing on user experience.
But still no positive result in the ranking.
I further did a test and created 3 new landing pages that target long tail keywords with low competition.
Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages.
Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route I would like to if anyone could help me should i buy a new domain and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back
My link profile according to open site explorer is 190 links from 74 domains and domain authority is 31.
Can anyone help please
-
Regarding the 301s, I originally thought you were talking about redirecting your penalized domain to a new domain. I'm not 100% sure on what you are doing here, but as mentioned by Ian, don't redirect 404s to your home page...create a custom 404 for that use.
If you've got pages you want to get deindexed, you can tell Google in your webmaster tools to removed certain pages from the index.
I didn't have time to do a complete check of your backlinks but you can be pretty certain that if you've been hit by Penguin you've got an issue with backlinks. If you look at your site in OSE, and order the links by anchor text you can see that you've got a high percentage of anchor texted links as opposed to url links. That's where I'd start - get some of those anchor texted links changed to url links for a start.
-
Thanks for your answer,
I think will take few months after i have remove those links.
Will it have any impact if i do some infographics and artciles, the things is how can you make radiator cabinets interesting?
-
Hi Ausaf,
I wouldn't have the home page be the 404 page. Create a separate page. The odds of something getting mixed up are far too high.
Remove any links that are even remotely spammy. That includes all the links you have with 'classic radiator cabinets' as the link text - you're far too optimized to that term and Google's bound to pick up on it, if they haven't already.
-
apart from my brand keyword , I do not have any ranking at all.
used to ranking on first page for keyword
radiator covers
radiator cabinets
but now no where to be found
-
Thanks Marie,
i have removed all 301 redirect from htaccess, Now any 404 page goes to home page with notfound 404.
http://www.classicradiatorcabinets.co.uk/
do you know how long will it take to get these .asp pages to de-index from google,
I cant see any spaming link apart for 2 directories zezoo.com which they have already removed. I am not sure which links to remove?
Thanks again for you help.
-
Well that certainly sounds like Penguin!
We're still really in the infancy of knowing how to recover from Penguin. Most SEOs would tell you (and they're likely right) to get rid of as many spammy links as possible (or change to nofollow, or possibly change anchor text to your url as opposed to a keyword.) And then, it will also help to get good natural links to your site. One thing that is important to know though is that we don't have many good documented stories of recovery so no one really knows exactly how to recover.
If the vast majority of your links are unnatural (i.e. lots of anchor texted keyword links) and you think it would be impossible to get rid of them or change them or dilute them out with good links, then yes, starting over may be the best thing to do.
btw if you think you can recover, then do a cleanup and wait...you can't recover until there is a refresh of the Penguin algorithm.
Whatever you do, remove the 301 from the old domain to the new!!!!! A 301 will carry 90-99% of the link equity from the old domain so you are essentially just pointing those spammy links at your new domain and you'll go under again with the next Penguin refresh.
And one other thing...if you are starting new and if your content is the same as the old domain, make sure you remove the old domain from the index otherwise you'll have duplicate content issues.
-
I had a site tank in January 2012. Non-branded search traffic was down almost 50% that month (the previous 6 months had all been very steady at the higher traffic level) and that has remained ever since.
I did some analysis in Analytics and found the unique keywords driving traffic went down from around 3,800 to 950. Our big keywords and rankings remained and actually got stronger but the long-tail traffic almost completely disappeared.
This type of scenario seems in line with Panda rather than Penguin as other commenters have noted. What would be the best way to address a situation like that?
-
Hi Marie,
Thank you so much for your reply , I wanted to say " good answer" but it wont let me cause i already done 3.
I just checked on google analytics, the traffic drop occurs exactly on 24 april., Organic traffic went from 70 to just 9 visit. One mistake ive done is i already set 301 redirect , should i remove them or should i change the urls, and wait for them to get index again. Just want to try it before starting all over.
Thanks very much for your reply.
-
I'm probably just repeating some of the great answers given so far, but here's my thought.
Are you absolutely sure this is Penguin? Your traffic drop would have to be on or immediately after April 24 if that was the case. If it was prior to April 24 then this is not Penguin so I wouldn't be so quick to go deleting links!
There was a Panda update April 19th and April 27, so if your drop coincides with one of these dates then I'd be doing more research into Panda which is primarily about on site quality, lack of duplication, etc.
How new is your domain? If you were only up and running for a couple of months and then had a traffic drop it's possible you had a honeymoon boost and your site is now back down and that would have nothing to do with a penalty.
>>Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages.
That can be a normal traffic pattern.
Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route I would like to if anyone could help me should i buy a new domain and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back
You really need to figure out what the problem is first. If you have a Penguin penalty and you've got too spammy a backlink profile to clean up or dilute with good links then, yes, starting over is a good idea. Don't 301 the old to the new cause you'll end up in the same place. If you've got a Panda issue then you should be able to recover without starting a new domain. Whatever you do, don't just slap the same website up on a new domain.
It's also important to know how big of a traffic drop this is. I've seen people freak out at what would be normal day to day changes or seasonal changes or something like a 5% drop in traffic.
There are other possibilities too such as malware issues with the site. Or a robots.txt or accidental noindexing, etc. etc.
So, to sum up, can you determine the exact day that your drop happened, and how severe was it?
-
Do you know the exact date you traffic went down. You could have been hit by Panda. There were two Panda updates before and after Penguin in April.
Try this analysis to get a better understanding if you were hit by Penguin or Panda:
-
I wish i could do that but i just wanted to know if there a way out of it. Is there any other solution.
-
Thanks for your reply, I did check but i cant see any obvious spam network links coming to my site nor 1000s of links from one domains, there were a few which i have requested them to remove although they have replied that they have removed but it is still showing on webmaster tools.
-
You know what, Ausaf, one of my sites was in a similar situation. In April it tanked, and there was no warnings from Google and no obvious reason for the fall. No deathly hallows links to my site that I could find. It may be that certain sites that were providing you juice were devalued by Google, and caused your drop. Quality link building might help.
I tried everything I could think of for 2 months, tried to get questionable sites to unlink, added new content, fixed a few minor html errors, and nothing budged it. The site just seem to fall further. In mid June I just started a new site with a well chosen domain name, rewrote the content, carefully built a broad variety of new links... and voila! I'm back on page 1 (result #3 currently). I was previously #1, but I tell you after 4 months of this I'm glad to be on page 1.
Sometimes its good just to start over if you're able to.
I know that 2 months is nothing in SEO time, but when you're running a business it's an eternity. I couldn't afford to wait around a year and hope. If the other site comes back, great. If not, we have plan B.
-
Are you sure this is a Penguin penalty? If so, the only fix is to find and remove all incoming links that appear even remotely spammy, and it doesn't sound like you've done this yet. Penguin is all about incoming links, not onsite structure.
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 is not indexing an updated website
We just relaunched a website that has 5 years old, we maintain all the old URLs and articles but for some reason google is not picking up the new website https://www.navisyachts.com. In Google Webmaster Tools we can see the sitemap with over 1000 pages submitted but shows nothing as indexed. The site is loosing traffic rapidly and positions, from the SEO side all looks fine for me. What can be wrong? I’ll appreciate any help. The new website is built over Joomla 3.4, we have it here at MOZ and other than some minor details it doesn't show that something can be wrong with the website. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FWC_SEO0 -
Hide Aggregation from Google?
Google isn't a fan of aggregation, but sometimes it is a good way to fill out content when you cannot cover every news story there is. What I'm wondering is if anyone has continued to do any form of aggregation based on a category and hide that url from Google. Example: example.com/industry-news/ -- is where you'd post aggregation stories but you block robots from crawling that. We wouldn't be doing this for search value just value to our readers. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | meistermedia0 -
Why has my site dropped off the face of Google???
Hi All, My site was ranking well for a long time and suddenly can't be seen at all any more. I have been trying to figure this out for some time and can't get to the bottom of it. Funny thing is also even when searching for my site with a keyword "snowboard gulmarg" my URL www.klinehinmalaya.com does not appear and somewhere way back in the listing my another page www.klinehimalaya.com/packages.php comes up. Any help would be good right now. Thanks in advance, Catherine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | caherinechan0 -
How about a discussion on Penguin 2.0?
Penguin 2.0 was officially released today. I'm sure we've all seen Matt's video. http://searchengineland.com/penguin-4-with-penguin-2-0-generation-spam-fighting-is-now-live-160544 Ideas for building sharable, linkable content? New strategies? What to avoid, what not to do, etc? Let's get a discussion going!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
Google Places Drop
Hi everyone! I have a client that was ranking very nicely for a number of keywords. In the 5 pack for most of the keywords we were targeting. His account went under review for some unknown reason about 2 months ago. It disappeared from the listing... Then a few weeks ago it became approved again. He is now no longer ranking for any of those keywords. He is ranking for some obscure ones but the money words are gone. Do you think this was due to the review? Some sort of GP update over the last 60 days? All of my other clients are still ranking strong in Google Places. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeattleJoe0 -
URL Error or Penguin Penalty?
I am currently having a major panic as our website www.uksoccershop.com has been largely dropped from Google. We have not made any changes recently and I am not sure why this is happening, but having heard all sorts of horror stories of penguin update, I am fearing the worst. If you google "uksoccershop" you will see that the homepage does not rank. We previously ranked in the top 3 for "football shirts" but now we don't, although on page 2, 3 and 4 you will see one of our category pages ranking (this didn't used to happen). Some rankings are intact, but many have disappeared completely and in some cases been replaced by other pages on our site. I should point out our existing rankings have been consistently there for 5-6 years until today. I logged into webmaster tools and thankfully there is no warning message from Google about spam, etc, but what we do have is 35,000 URL errors for pages which are accessible. An example of this is: | URL: | http://www.uksoccershop.com/categories/5_295_327.html | | Error details In Sitemaps Linked from Last crawled: 6/20/12First detected: 6/15/12Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. Is it possible this is the cause of the issue (we are not currently sure why the URL's are being blocked) and if so, how severe is it and how recoverable?If that is unlikely to cause the issue, what would you recommend our next move is?All help is REALLY REALLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Does Google prefer Wordpress Blogs?
In creating a regular brochure website such as one for a dentist or doctor, do you see any SEO benefit to having it based in a Wordpress blog? I do see the SEO benefit of having an actual blog on the site and continually updating that, but simply using the Wordpress platform as a CMS - does that give the site any benefit? If there is a benefit, is there a way to duplicate that advantage without going through the trouble of creating a Wordpress template for the site? Maybe just publishing a sitemap.xml, and feed, etc? Thanks! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBristol0 -
Google plus
"Google+ members, and to a lesser extent others who are signed into Google, will be able to search against both the broader web and their own Google+ social graph. That’s right; Google+ circles, photos, posts and more will be integrated into search in ways other social platforms can only dream about." What is meant by " and to a lesser extent others who are signed into Google" ? Does it mean that non-google plus members won't be able to view Google+photos, posts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050