Slowly recovering from algorithm penalty
-
Hi ,
over the years a website we took over was hit by an algorithm penalty (a combination of penguin and panda).
We managed to bring rankings back (after 6 months) from page 5/6 to page 2 after we used the google disavow tool.
now for the past 9 months we have been stuck on page 2..
is there anything you think can be done to bring it back to page 1?
- we are building quality links now and moved away from low quality links other link builders were making. We are managing the process much closer and ensuring we maintain good standards of links.
- also making the pages flatter and merging short page content to larger content pages
- now we are looking at site structure and creating structured internal link flow
is there anything we should be aware of and any recommendations to get back on page 1..
this is a tailor-made travel related website with a small selection of destinations
-
hi thanks for the reply
I also believe panda may have hit the site.. do you think just removing this kind of content is good enough to rank the site better.. we have gone to the extent of removing pages we found high duplicate ratios.. hoping that will help.. also we are merging page content to make them larger, more in-depth rather than multiple pages for small subtopics..
cheers
Ram
-
These are tough to comment on without actually seeing some of the links. These might all be ok, but I could see any of these having the potential to be unnatural links. I wish I could offer more but I do think it's possible that current link building activities are bringing you down.
Another thing that I see commonly is that sites can still be slightly suppressed by Penguin if they have not done a thorough enough disavow. Again though, that's tough to comment on without digging in quite a bit deeper.
It's also possible the site has other things holding it down such as Panda.
And then another possibility could be that this is just where Google wants to rank the site. Travel is a very competitive niche. It used to be that anyone could be top 10 for any subject if you could get enough links, but these days Google wants to show websites that users want to see and I would imagine that there are a lot of big brand travel websites that you are competing with.
-
hi
we are aiming at travel related websites which their own link profile is for travel sector.
Our online marketing is a combination of travel directories, some business directories, some link exchanges, guest blogs where appropriate, press releases and UK based PR in national publications.
All are checked for their neighbourhood, trust flow and relevance where they are not national household brands
thanks
-
OK, that's good. Sometimes ahrefs reports old links as new ones.
Can you give some examples of the types of new links you are building?
-
Yes these are bad links we have disavowed .. our disavow was very thorough.. In fact we suspect maybe too thorough for short terms gains but more a long term strategy that has currently redduced our domain authority but cleaned up our link profile immensely
-
This is a question that's tough to answer without spending a couple of hours digging in to the site. But, I had some thoughts.
we are building quality links now
That makes me uneasy. If you are building links then there is a good chance you're still doing things that are against the quality guidelines. There are a few self made links that can be acceptable such as valid industry directories. But, in most cases any link that you can build on your own is not a natural one.
Here are some new links that I see according to ahrefs:
http://www.expatfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/p=94262/ - a link from a forum profile. Not natural.
http://medranks.com/travel/packages/page-1.html?s=A - Ouch. Hopefully this is an old, disavowed link that ahrefs picked up.
http://www.huludirectory.com/computers_and_internet/discussion_forums/reference/acronyms_and_abbreviations/shopping/major_retailers/ - same as above.
Now it's possible that those are old links that you have disavowed, but my first concern would be how you are going about getting links to the site now. Again, if you're building them yourself rather than doing things to attract them then you're probably doing more harm than good.
-
hi, if anyone would be amazing enough to want the url to help us i can repost it for you.
thanks
-
It'd be super helpful if you could share your site URL, then our community can get even more specific with answers.
-
Hi,
I can't answer you anything very confidently that If you do follow set up strategy then your site will come up from page 2
page 1 . There is a very recent post on this published by Neil Patel on search engine Journal, he suggested some good
strategy that can help you in this situation.
A Tactical Guide to Making Old Pages Rank in Google Again @ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/tactical-guide-making-old-pages-rank-google/124575/
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
-
Do people recover from an unnatural outbound links penalty?
Dear Friends I received an unnatural outbound links penalty on 4th of June 2016. I immediately acted on it, and analysed a lot of outbound links and removed most of them. I had to file reconsideration 2 times, but on 26th of June my penalty was revoked.However, traffic drop was even worse 27th June onwards and it is still dropping. Now, i dont know why the traffic is dropping. Any idea how much time it takes to come back from an unnatural outbound link penalty? PHd8BzX.png
Technical SEO | | marketing910 -
Another client copies everything to blogspot. Is that what keeps her site from ranking? Or what? Appears to be a penalty somewhere but can't find it.
This client has a brand new site: http://www.susannoyesandersonpoems.com Her previous site was really bad for SEO, yet at one time she actually ranked on the first page for "LDS poems." She came to me because she lost rank. I checked things out and found some shoddy SEO work by a very popular Wordpress webhoste that I will leave unnamed. If you do a backlink analysis you can see the articles and backlinks they created. But there are so few, so I'm not sure if that was it, or it just was because of the fact that her site was so poorly optimized and Google made a change, and down she fell. Here's the only page she had on the LDS poems topic in her old site: https://web.archive.org/web/20130820161529/http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Even the links in the nav were bad as they were all images. And that ranked in position 2 I think she said. Even with her new site, she continues to decline. In fact she is nowhere to be found for main keywords making me think there is a penalty. To try and build rank for categories, I'm allowing google to index the category landing pages and had her write category descriptions that included keywords. We are also listing the categories on the left and linking to those category pages. Maybe those pages are watered down by the poem excerpts?? Here's an example of a page we want to rank: http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Any help from the peanut gallery?
Technical SEO | | katandmouse0 -
How to Identify Which Penalty : Penguin, Panda or Other?
I'm in the process of putting together a plan to recover from Algorithmic penalty. I'm not sure if I have to focus my recovery effort based on Penguin, Panda or Other algorithm penalty. After looking at the attached screenshot : Google Analytics Data vs Google Algorithm update timeline, I'm not sure if the blog is affected due to Penguin or Panda. I have following questions Traffic drop is because of Pengin, Panda or Other penalty? (there is no manual penalty message) Where should I focus my time with recovery efforts? (link removal, contents, link building, etc). Any other comments or suggestions? Thanks for you help. cSFZqj7
Technical SEO | | rsmb0 -
Google Penalty Investigation
Hi All, I've recently had a google penalty, and have spent a long while working through tying up any loose ends with my site (I'm building a new one, so you'll still see some probs on my current one). My search referrals do slowly seem to be recovering, but only for variations of terms that are similar to 'bike repair'. Now, my site does primarily offer bike repair advice, so that's a good thing, but I'm not yet ranking for any of my specific keywords. One example is that I used to rank quite high for the term 'schrader valve'. Is this a signal of anything in particular? Or can I not read anything specific into this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | madegood0 -
How to recover from duplicate subdomain penalty?
Two and half a weeks ago, my site was slapped with a penalty -- 60% of organic traffic disappeared over 2-3 days. After investigating we discovered that our site was serving the same content for all subdomains, and Google somehow had two additional subdomains it was crawling and indexing. We solved the issue with 301 redirects to our main site (www) a couple of days after the drop -- about two weeks ago. Our rankings have not recovered, and the subdomains are still indexed per Webmaster Tools. Yesterday we submitted a Reconsideration Request. Will that help? Is there any other way to speed up the process of lifting the penalty? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Thank you!
Technical SEO | | tact0 -
Dealing with manual penalty...
I'm in the back-and-forth with Google's Quality Search team at the moment. We discovered a manual penalty on our website and have been trying to get it removed as of late. Problem is, tons of spammy incoming links. We did not ask for or purchase any of these links, it just so happens that spammy websites are linking to our site. Regardless, I've done my best to remove quite a few links in the past week or so, responding to the Quality Search team with a spreadsheet of the links in question and the action taken on each link. No luck so far. I've heard that if I send an email to a website asking for a link removal, I should share that with Google as well. I may try that. Some of the links are posted on websites with no contact info. A WhoIs search brings up a hidden registrant. Removing these links is far from easy. My question is, what are some techniques that are proven to be effective when working your way through the removal of a manual penalty? I know Google isn't going to tell me all of the offending links (they've offered a few examples, we've had those removed - still penalized) so what's the best way for me to find them myself? And, when I have a link removed, it may stay in Webmaster Tools as an active link for a while even though it no longer exists. Does the Quality Search team use Webmaster Tools to check or do they use something else? It's an open-ended question, really. Any help dealing with a manual penalty and what you have done to get that penalty removed is of great help to me. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ccorlando0 -
We have been hit with the "Doorway Page" Penalty - fixed the issue - Got MSG that will still do not meet guidelines.
I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES / NO
Technical SEO | | LVH
My site's URL (web address) is:www.recoveryconnection.org
Description (including timeline of any changes made): We were hit with the Doorway Pages penalty on 5/26/11. We have a team of copywriters, and a fast-working dev dept., so we were able to correct what we thought the problem was, "targeting one-keyword per page" and thin content. (according to Google) Plan of action: To consolidate "like" keywords/content onto pages that were getting the most traffic and 404d the pages with the thin content and that were targeting singular keywords per page. We submitted a board approved reconsideration request on 6/8/11 and received the 2nd message (below) on 6/16/11. ***NOTE:The site was originally designed by the OLD marketing team who was let go, and we are the NEW team trying to clean up their mess. We are now resorting to going through Google's general guidelines page. Help would be appreciated. Below is the message we received back. Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.recoveryconnection.org/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team Any help is welcome. Thanks0 -
How to use overlays without getting a Google penalty
One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period. Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal. Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay. What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe? We are considering the following approaches: First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards. No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty? Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking? I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0