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!
-
If it is Panda then cleaning up the site to make it more useful is your best bet.
- Make sure the design is clean.
- Make sure the writing is answering the user's question, and that it's well written.
- Make sure that the function of the page matches the search query.
Fixing these things should result in an eventual improvement in rankings.
If you were cloaking, that could be a penalty all by itself. Make sure to fix anything shady, and consider whether non-standard implementations or architecture could have confused Googlebot or made it look like you were trying to manipulate rankings. Check Webmaster tools for any warnings or manual penalties for sure.
You can also cross-reference drops in traffic to what others have seen on similar dates to make sure it was Panda.
-
There may be other technical issues or algorithm updates in play here. If you haven't done so already, you should check your Analytics against the dates of any algorithm updates using one of the links below.
If you're confident that it's a Panda issue, one of the best guides I've seen is http://www.thesempost.com/understanding-google-panda-definitive-algo-guide-for-seos/.
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
-
Building a new website post penalty and redirects
A website I'm working on is clearly algorithmically penalised. I've spent a lot of time mass disavowing spammy links, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. We have been planning to build a new website anyway since we are rebranding. 1. Is it possible to tell which pages are most likely to have a penalty applied? 2. If the website as a whole has a penalty, will redirecting certain pages to the new website carry the penalty? 3. Our website is structured as sales pages and blog content. It is the sales pages that have the spammy links, yet most of the blog content does not rank either. Would it be a good strategy to only redirect all the blog posts (which have natural links pointing to them) to the new website and not the sales pages? 4. The homepage has a mix of spam and very good editorial links. If I have disavowed links and domains, can I safely redirect this page?
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Rankings after manual penalty removal
I've just started working on a ecommerce website that was hit by Penguin 2.0 in May (It was ranking 2nd for it's major keyword at the time) and it hasn't been indexing for that keyword since After a lot of link removal, the reconsideration request was accepted and the manual penalty had been removed. Rankings haven't really improved and that specific keyword has not been reindexed The site does have a lot of not found errors (It was 5.5k but recently taken down to 4k) but it was still ranking before the penalty. Is there anything you believe I'm missing? Is it the onsite errors that are flagging the site as unreliable? I thought it would still appear for the keyword if that was the case
Technical SEO | | Sandeep_Matharu0 -
Hit by a penalty? But which one?
Hi guys, First off, thanks for reading my post! My site, www.doctorloanusa.com suffered a massive drop in Google rankings and traffic on September 27. For the past 4 years, I've ranked in spots 1-3. My main keywords are physician loans and doctor loans. I had a competitor copy almost ALL my text. In early October, I filed a DMCA takedown and had the infringing site removed from the SERPS. I also made text changes to my site. I thought this duplicate content was the problem, but I have yet to see any improvements 2 months later. My site isn't particularly deep content-wise, but it's competitive with others in my niche. I have relatively few links but others in the SERPS have very similar link profiles. I tried to clean up a few questionable links and used the disavow tool. I have used the SEOmoz on-page tools to grade my site. Typically, I receive grade A reports. I still rank for my website URL, and still rank 1 in both Yahoo and Bing. My bounce rate is 43%. If anyone could provide insight, I would be very grateful. I need to get this site ranking again, as this property is my main source of income. Is the site over-optimized? Is it my anchor text profile? Thank you very much in advance!
Technical SEO | | Cary_Forest0 -
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 -
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 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
Google Penalty?
Hi, I have recently been asked to help www.mycanvas.ie I have a feeling they have a google penalty. All their Google Keywords have literally dropped out of the Google SERP but they are still shown on Yahoo SERP. I recently did a site:www.mycanvas.ie and the pages are still in google index. The only thing that comes to mind is that the site owner submitted to 380 web directories over a period of 2 months with http://www.directorymaximizer.com/ do you think this could be causing the problem with google? Advise and suggestions are welcomed, thank you.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Google Duplicate Content Penalty On My Own Site?
I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June. On Bing I am like 9th On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows Original: www.playpokeronline.ca Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/ this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy. for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month. Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site. Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty? Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else? This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time Thank You Jeb
Technical SEO | | PokerCanada0