Ranking for brand name but no other terms (no manual penalty) is this penguin?
-
Hi guys,
I would like your opinions on this site www.colourbanners.co.uk
Seems to be ranking for 'colour banners' but has dropped for keywords such as 'banners' and 'pvc banners' which were ranking well.
There has been no manual actions against the site so im assuming this is an algo penalty?
Any ideas/suggestions what could be causing this?
regards
Gerry
-
Not 100% sure if it's Penguin per se but it's definitely a link based problem. Look at all of the top anchor text to the site - it's entirely commercial keywords --> http://screencast.com/t/gt4zbWiWNxMc
What I've seen happen in this cases is that you will artificially rank well for some of those keywords for a little while and then a link algo catches up with you and you'll drop to where you should have been (or lower) all along.
Your on-site isn't as poorly over-optimized as other sites I've seen, but it could be toned down a little but removing keyword repetition / stuffing in the titles/URLs/descriptions etc.
You should definitely try to change the anchor text on any of the back links that might be good links, but just too optimized from an anchor standpoint. Use natural non-exact match anchors or branded / domain for the anchor text.
For any links that are just plain old bad/spammy/low quality - try to remove them or disavow them.
-
Hi Gerry,
You say that your site dropped in rankings. How much did the site drop and about when did the rankings drop? Also, did you make any changes to the site before the drop?
Thanks.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
A couple things come to my mind after a quick look of your backlink profile:
- Not too much authority.
- Some spammy backlinks, even though you didn't receive a manual penalty, you should consider using the disavow tool to avoid any penalization. As stated by Matt Cutts a wekk ago or so, Webmasters should use the disavow tool even if they didn't get a manual penalty just to prevent one.
- Consider adding more valuable content to your site. Even though you have content, try to come up with information that isn't available elsewhere, perhaps a blog? Brainstorm some ideas and choose the best approach depending on your business model.
Hope that helps!
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
-
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
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Suggestions Required to Improve Ranking
My website URL is: http://goo.gl/AiOgu1 Hello, Recently my websites revoked from manual link penalty, impressions in GWT increased from 3K to 9K within 2 months, but most of all keywords are ranking on the 3rd, 4th and 5th page. Please suggest me some onpage changes.
Technical SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk0 -
Are these redirects damaging my rankings
Hi, just been going through my google webmaster tools and i have found a number of soft 404 errors and was shocked to see these redirects going to my home page. | URL | Response Code | Detected |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
| --- | --- | --- |<colgroup><col style="width: 45px;"><col style="width: 80px;"><col><col style="width: 120px;"><col style="width: 90px;"></colgroup>
| | 1 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/475-gastric-band-hypnotherapy-expert-says-government-are-not-doing-enough-to-fight-obesity | | 7/25/13 |
| | 2 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1068-coronation-street-nick-proposes-to-leanne | | 7/28/13 |
| | 3 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1086-coronation-street-fiz-nearly-gets-tyrone-in-trouble-with-kirsty | | 7/28/13 |
| | 4 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1155-coronation-street-kylie-considers-telling-david-about-her-affair | | 7/28/13 |
| | 5 | staging1/jupgrade2/category-menu/item/1157-coronation-street-fiz-is-worried-when-kirsty-pays-her-a-visit | | 7/28/13 |
| | 6 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/750-actress-hilary-duff-is-sued-over-car-accident | | 7/25/13 |
| | 7 | staging1/jupgrade2/component/k2/item/843-what-your-dogs-bottom-scooting-behaviour%E2%80%99-really-meansI would have thought that the developer who upgraded my site would have either had these blocked or directed them to the correct page. i am now guessing that there are going to be hundreds of these appearing and would like some serious advice.normally with old pages i would have them going to the relevant articles or pages but it seems the developer has redirected hundreds of these to my home page, which i guess is going to confuse google. i would like to know if this will confuse google have all these pages going to my home page.i have tried to find out where the developer in my site has redirected the pages as they are not in my htaccess file, i use joomla.can anyone let me know what i should be doing with these to solve the problemmany thanks |0 -
What has happened to my page rank
hi my page rank for the site www.in2town.co.uk was page rank four and then last week it went down to page rank 2 and now my page rank is 0. i really do not understand what has happened. can anyone please give me advice on what is happening
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Slapped by the Penguin
We had a client's website hit hard by the Penguin update, particularly on the 24th. Sitewide each keyword lost 10-20 positions. It was in #1 or #2 for the past couple years. We optimize all of our websites onpage features well and within the whitehat realm. Since this was the only website affected out of 50+ other sites, I am guessing the penalty came directly from the backlink profile which was quite bad. The client had bought two other directory link package deals about 4 years ago which all of the incoming directory links have the exact same anchor text. I warned him this was completely unnatural and we only went after "natural-looking" links since then. Keep in mind these links were from 4+ years ago and did very little for rankings as we came into the picture. Out of 143 root domain links, around 45 use the same anchor text in link. We started with about 50 links total 2 years ago and have since built a very good quality profile, or so I thought. I was almost certain is was enough various anchor text to dilute it down. I'm wondering if any of your websites that have been hit have a high amount of exact match anchor text. I can't believe Google would penalize just for linkbuilding because it seems to be an easy way to attack competitors but all my data is looking that way. Let me know your thoughts if any of your sites have been hit. Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoninja201 -
Why am I ranking for this
In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to! Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues). The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain. The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home). Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite. I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously. The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term! The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for help hehe thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
How long before rankings return?
We recently had a redesign of our website and moved it from a static html site to WordPress. During the development the WordPress installation sat on a sub-domain. Our programmer and designer had the privacy setting inside WordPress checked so the search engines would not crawl the pages while being developed to avoid duplicate content. Fast forward two weeks when new site replaces old. Guess what privacy setting was not fixed. So about 3 days after the site is live organic traffic drops by 80%. Do a little research and all of our great rankings are gone. Notice that our page rank is also gone...Hmm... Upon further inspection the noindex tag is on every page of the site. It's now removed and has been 3-4 days. I've resubmitted inside webmaster tools and I'm just curious what y'all think the likelihood is that everything will come back to how it was before.
Technical SEO | | jmacek070