A possible hit by panda
-
Hi there, on the panda update a few weeks ago i noticed i dropped 8 places for a very competitive keyword.
All my content in the site is unique and quality. Its also not published elsewhere.
I think the update did knock this one keyword down for me - no others got hti though. Perhaps the landing page got it? too many mentions of the keyword? however i didn't think i spammed it on the page, perhaps jsut mentioned once or twice - any ideas?
Any help aprpeciated
-
Hiya, well i saw it go from 12th to 20th - this is a very competitive keyword. The landing page is my homepage. I didn't see any other target keywords go though.
I saw this happen about 8pm Friday last week (gmt).
-
Hey Paul
Could you provide a link and specific dates of when the traffic dropped and when the rank of that given keyword dropped?
If you browse to organic traffic in Google analytics and compare the two weeks prior to and after the date of the suspected drop you can clearly see which keywords were affected. You can use this same approach to look at landing pages etc.
Happy to take a quick look if you can provide more details.
Marcus
-
I might also add, i bolded the keyword on the page once, but other keywords are bolded that feature that keyword - this happens about 4 times - is it seen spammy by panda thus taking me down rankings?
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
-
Payday Loan or Panda? Any thoughts?
So this is a very old problem, but I'm finally getting around to trying to figure it out. My site experienced a dramatic organic traffic drop from Google (-40%) on May 17th 2014. It then drops another 30% on May 19th 2014. See graphs. According to Moz these two dates correlate with Payday Loan 2.0 and Panda 4.0. Panda makes complete sense, as this site (www.ausedcar.com) has a large amount of content that is syndicated across other sites (used car inventory is essentially the same everywhere on the Internet). Payday Loan on the other hand, which seems to be the primary traffic drop doesn't make any sense at all. Is it possible I started getting hit by Panda on the 17th and then it completed on the 19th? I know the dates for algorithm changes are not perfect. Next, assuming it is Panda, what are some things you guys have done to help with this? As I mentioned this content is duplicated all over the Internet, so it seems like Google arbitrarily picks winners and losers (my site is twenty years old!). I know I need unique content, but not sure how exactly to do that besides rewriting words so it doesn't appear duplicate.
Technical SEO | | Catbelly0 -
Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.
Back in October 2014 last year, a site we are working with had a significant drop in organic traffic. This coincided with Google's algorithmic update. The side in question uses filters extensively and at the time did not have any canonical tags in place. The lions share of these filter pages had little or no written content just products. The website now has canonical tags throughout and content has started to be added to the top level categories and we will continue to add more, however there is still a large amount of pages with little or no content. Webmaster tools shows that there are large amounts of internal links (for instance 42,000+ to the homepage) which must be due to the filtered pages. I am looking for advice on what is the best way to proceed. Do I edit robots.txt, start adding no follow tags or something else entirely?
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
Is this a Penguin hit; how to recover?
Our site is: www.kibin.com Our organic search traffic has dropped significantly in the last few days (about 50%). Although we don't have a ton of traffic coming in via organic search, this is a huge blow. We we previously the top spot for keywords like 'edit my essay', 'fix my paper', and 'paper revision'. These kw phrases linked to smaller services pages on our site such as: kibin.com/s/edit-my-essay kibin.com/s/fix-my-paper kibin.com/s/paper-revision We no longer rank for these keywords... at all. My first question/concern is... is this a Penguin penalty? I'm not sure. Honestly, I know we have some directory links, but we've never been aggressive on the backlink front. In fact, in the last few months we've been investing quite a bit into content: kibin.com/blog If this is a Penguin penalty, how should I best go about cleaning this up? I'm not even sure what links Google would be considering spammy, and again... we really don't have that extensive of a backlink profile. Please help, this is a real blow to our business and it's got me a big freaked out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Kibin0 -
Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in terms of being able to escape its clutches ?
Hi, Is being hit by Panda as hard to get out of as being hit by Penguin ? Or if you clean up all your content should you get out of it relatively quickly ? I have a very old (11 years) and established site (but also very neglected site that i'm looking to relaunch) but its on an ancient shopping cart platform which never allowed for Google analytics & GWT integration etc so i cant see any messages in GWT or look at traffic figures to correlate a drop with any Panda updates. The reason i ask is i want to relaunch the site after bringing up to date with a modern e-commerce platform. I originally launched the site in early 2002 and was perceived well by Google achieving first field of view SERPS for all targeted keywords however competitive, including 'ipod accessories', 'data storage' etc etc. These top positions (& resulting sales) lasted until about 2007 when it was overtaken by bigger brand competitors with more advanced & Google friendlier ecommerce platforms (& big SEO budgets) I originally used the manufacturers descriptions editing slightly but probably not enough to avoid being considered duplicate content although still managed to obtain good rankings for these pages for a very long time even ranking ahead of Amazon in most cases. The site is still ranking well for some of the keywords relating to products for which there is still manufacturer copied descriptions so i actually don't think i have been hit by Panda. So my questions Is, is there any way of finding out for sure if the site has indeed even been hit by Panda at all without looking at analytics & gwt ? And once i find out if it has or not: Is it best if i relaunch on same domain to take advantage of the 11 year old domain history/authority etc ? So long as i make sure all product descriptions etc are unique, if i have been hit by Panda the site should escape its clutches quite quickly ? **OR ** Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in which case is it best to start again on a new domain ? Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Panda or Penquin -Website Fell - Shouldn't this Recover?
On March 23rd our site fell 47% in one day. www.TranslationSoftware4u.com but we still held quite a few #1 to #7 rankings on Google and thought it would just recover. Our top keyword "translation software" was #4 , now we are #19 Over the next week I waited to see if it recovered. We have been online 10+ years and always stayed with white hat. I admit to learning as I go over the years but always felt content was king so I focused on information. I really do not see my site as using spam techniques but maybe I am missing something on the way I have it. March 23rd, major drop -47% On April 2nd I started with SEO MOZ and the Research tools showed we had duplicate content warning. This was from a blog we were trying to start that only had 7 posts but it had about 20 tags per post. I did not realize that tags actually created that post under that tag. I went in and deleted the tags again being stupid and not realizing it was then making that come up 404. The blog was so small we do not get hits on it anyway so hoping it just clears itself up. ( still get duplicate warning on our directory due to using "php Link Directory", but it's due to how it reuses the title tag and description, 2 instances per category page"). Still trying to fix the php directory issue. Seems many others are running it and did not have a drop. April 24th, we dropped another -10% It keeps falling -70% now. I have gone through the site and tried to clean up any warnings like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions. With regards to links I put up a small web directory with some reciprocal linking. Our product translates languages but software is not the same as a human so we often set clients up with human translators, the directory is a nice place to help our customers find a translator or see online tools that can help. The links were not excessive, there were maybe 100 links. After the fall I went in and found some translators had gone out of business so I deleted those, I am down to 65 links now, about 45 are exchanges. I have submitted to some online directories manually, but looking back through the links there is not really anything that makes me concerned. The link back to my site was really the most neglected SEO thing I did. Again concentrating on content. I did find a few links that I was not happy about but I did not put those links so had no control. I have been working on cleaning up my title tags, and making sure the content just reads better. I have been hoping that my site would just start recovering but it keeps sliding. Has anyone seen recovery from the updates. Should I see anything yet? I cannot seem to get Google to return to the site and reindex. Am I doing somethign spammy on my site and I do not realize it? Thanks for any advice in advance!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
Creating new website with possible Url change (301 involved?)
Hi, I am currently getting a web designer to upgrade my website. I have built lost of links to my internal pages, should I get him to 301 redirect example.com/about.html (old) to example.com/about (new) OR Is there any need for this once the page doesn't change to example.com/about-us? Thank you in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Would this be possible for my research
Hi i am trying to find out if it is possible for me to put a search term down and found out what companies are using this. I know you can do this with google but i am finding that it is not bringing up the right results. What i am trying to do is, search for a search word that is being used on their content pages, so for example, if i put down the word holidays in spain, i want to find that word being used in their content and not the site being in google. Hope this makes sense, so i am trying to find how many companies out there use a certain search phrase in their content any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Considering redirecting my site from .com/us to just .com. What could the possible SERP consequences?
Today we use country-specific .tlds but have the US site on .com/us; .com is now a 'flag-site.' Ikea uses that structure too (.com/.com/us). Looking potential risk to redirecting current US site to .com.
Technical SEO | | KnutDSvendsen0