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
-
Recovering from Sitemap Issues with Bing
Hi all, I recently took over SEO efforts for a large e-commerce site (I would prefer not to disclose). About a month ago, I began to notice a significant drop in traffic from Bing and uncovered in Bing Webmaster Tools that three different versions of the sitemap were submitted and Bing was crawling all three. I removed the two out of date sitemaps and re-submitted the up to date version. Since then, I have yet to see Bing traffic rebound and the amount of pages indexed by Bing is still dropping daily. During this time there has been no issue with traffic from Google. Currently I have 1.3 million pages indexed by Google while Bing has dropped to 715K (it was at 755K last week and was on par with Google several months ago). I know that no major changes have been made to the site in the past year so I can't point to anything other than the sitemap issue to explain this. If this is indeed the only issue, how long should I expect to wait for Bing to re-index the pages? In the interim I have been manually submitting important pages that aren't currently in the index. Any insights or suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Panda Penalty Recovery?
My site: www.stephita.com, is based in Toronto, Canada. It used to rank top 3 in local and national searches for "wedding invitations" and "wedding invitations toronto". I've now been placed on the dreaded page 2 ;| I didn't keep up with the times and news, and wasn't aware of Google Panda Penalty until earlier this year 😞 So, I've cleaned up most of my site with what I suspect what caused me to drop: a) Cloaking pages - I had PHP script generate about 1000 pages of "cloaked" pages. This has been removed, and I've used Google webmaster tools to "remove" the directory as well. b) Duplicate Content pages - (not cloaked, but I've done content writing on the majority of my product pages) The 2 items above is what I "assume" caused a Google Penalty... I started this cleanup endeavour late January, and with the content writing to remove what MOZ tools notices as duplicate pages. I've read online that Panda is now part of the search algorithm. So does that mean, ideally, I should start seeing "better" ranking results now? Or is there a process I should be following and submitting my site for "reconsideration"? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | TysonWong0 -
Can hosting blog posts with keyword anchor text on outbound links cause a penalty?
My site received a Google penalty for having inbound links from blog posts with over-optimized ("spammy") anchor text. I spent months getting these links removed. Yesterday - I received a link deletion request from a site that my site had linked out to (three links via keyword anchor text relevant to their company) in a blog post. The "unnatural link" penalty still hasn't been removed from my site. My question is: Does the penalty work both ways? For having inbound "unnatural" links ... AND for having outbound "unnatural" links?
Technical SEO | | RedNovaLabs910 -
301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
Hello all, As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile. The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to? I would appreciate your advise!
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Can I disallow my subdomain for penguin recover?
Hi, I have a site like BannerBuzz.com, before last penguin my site's all keywords were in good position in google, but after penguin hit on my website, my all keywords are going down and down day by day, i have done some changes in my website for improvement, but in 1 change i have some confusion. i have one sub domain (http://reviews.bannerbuzz.com/), which display my websites all keywords user reviews, in which every category's 15 reviews are display in my website http://www.bannerbuzz.com so are those user reviews consider as duplicate content between sub domain and main website. can i disallow sub domain from all search engine? currently sub domain is open for all search engine, is that helpful to block it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Delayed Penalty...
I received the 7/23/12 Unnatural inbound links warning but nothing changed, if anything my traffic and rankings improved well over the next 2 - 3 months. But last week a couple of the better (maybe slightly over) optimized pages suddenly dropped out of the rankings completely, is it possible that these two events are related but three months apart? A change I made close to the time of the rankings dropping was completely overhauling the homepage. I realized this would impact the internal "link juice" flow but never expected the kind of drop in rankings I received. I have restored the homepage to its former glory but it hasn't helped get my slightly over optimized pages ranking again. Any ideas? Suggestions? Exact date of drop in rankings is 18 - 19 October (site has lost roughly 50% of its organic search traffic)
Technical SEO | | Stan_C0 -
Could a large number of No Followed links in to my site have caused a penalty?
On 22nd Feb, I placed a text ad on a respected industry recruitment website. As the site has many pages, the webmaster made a point of NOFOLLOWING the links back to my site. 6 days later, my site lost 30% of its daily traffic overnight, and it's stayed there ever since. I looked on Webmaster Tools just now, and it says that there are 125,000 links coming in to my site from the site I'm advertising on (even though the links are NOFOLLOWED). Could this have triggered the fall in search traffic to my site? Thanks for any feedback.
Technical SEO | | tofftrader0 -
Duplication Penalty through Specs?
I am trying to figure our how to correct a recently incurred duplication penalty on a partner site. I didn't see any posts on this yet specific to my problem. The site used to be ranked on page 1 of Google for all important keywords but now we ran into the situation that many pages were bumped to pos 100 or lower due to duplication issues. This is an aviation site, discussing airplanes and each page discusses a different model but each page also has the specs of the plane and while the data parts are different for each plane the specification terms are the same ,see here: Primary Function:
Technical SEO | | WizardHQ
Crew:
Engine:
Thrust:
Weight Empty:
Max. Weight:
Length:
Wingspan:
Cruise Speed:
Max.Speed:
Climb:
Ceiling:
Range:
First Flight:
Year Deployed: Is there an easy way to get Google to stop including these terms (not the data in the 2nd column) from the page anaysis to prevent this causing the duplication issues we are are seeing due to this? Thanks in advance!0