Website has been penalized?
-
Hey guys,
We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010.
Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that.
Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly.
Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central.
We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly.
Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz.
The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links.
Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
-
The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much?
I agree with you. That's a very small number and unlikely to be the problem.
The duplicate content issue is fixed.
Excellent!
I have removed the link exchange script.
Good....
Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords?
Yes, you'll want to keep a number of links out there with your keyword anchor text, as that still has a high effect on ranking for a particular term. But you'll want to present a link profile that has a more natural "mix" of keywords and your domain to avoid getting flagged as spammy.
-
The links on our link exchange script accounted to about 2% of websites total links, most of our link building has been through natural articles and websites posting about us. So even if Google discounted our links via link exchange - this wouldn't of made us drop this much?
The duplicate content issue is fixed.
I have removed the link exchange script.
Even if I link as www.freemoviedb.com as anchor text, will it still help me rank for my keywords?
-
Sure looks like either a penalty or a massive discounting of links to me. You're not banned, but you're way back in the results given your link profile. I took a quick look at your robots.txt and it looks fine.
If Google is still seeing 13,000 pages as duplicate content, this could be the issue as well, as Google's internal "quality score" on your site is not going to be pretty. But giving the number of inbound links you have, I'm much more inclined to think that Google has identified your link exchange script and discounted all links related to that.
There's some discussion out there also on whether you can get dinged for over-optimizing your anchor text. See this article. While that case study is a pretty small number of sites, if Tim's findings are accurate, you're definitely at risk. Both your internal and external links to your home page are virtually 99% "watch movies online" and "watch free movies online".
So here's what I would do:
#1 solve the duplicate content issue
#2 see what you can do to change the link exchange process to make it less recognizable to Google
#3 go vary your anchor text, adding new links and changing a few old ones like this profile link to use www.freemoviedb.com as the anchor text.
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
-
I have a GoDaddy website and have multiple homepages
I have GoDaddy website builder and a new website http://ecuadorvisapros.com and I notices through your crawl test that there are 3 home pages http://ecuadorvisapros with a 302 temporary redirect, http://www.ecuadorvisapros.com/ with no redirect and http://www.ecuadorvisapros/home.html. GoDaddy says there is only one home page. Is this going to kill my chances of having a successful website and can this be fixed? Or can it. I actually went with the SEO version thinking it would be better, but it wants to auto change my settings that I worked so hard at with your sites help. Please keep it simple, I am a novice although I have had websites in the past I know more about the what's than the how's of websites. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | ScottR.0 -
Hosting Multiple Websites
I want host multiple websites in geo-specific locations, and also have them be unique from each other. Does anyone have suggestions of a software or another method to use for this? Any experience with http://multiplecloud.com?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate homepage content across multiple websites
Hi, I work for a company that runs 30+ membership based websites on separate domains and across multiple markets. The homepage for each site contains a section of content that highlights the site benefits and features. While each website serves a different market/niche, this section of content is essentially the same as each website offers the same benefits and features. What is the best way to avoid duplicate content issues while still being able to show the same section of content across 30+ sites? This particular section of content isn't valuable from an SEO perspective, but the rest of the content on that page is. Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Development Website Duplicate Content Issue
Hi, We launched a client's website around 7th January 2013 (http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk), we originally constructed the website on a development domain (http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk) which was active for around 6-8 months (the dev site was unblocked from search engines for the first 3-4 months, but then blocked again) before we migrated dev --> live. In late Jan 2013 changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the website. A week later I accidentally logged into the DEV website and also changed the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index it. This obviously caused a duplicate content issue as both sites were identical. I realised what I had done a couple of days later and blocked the dev site from the search engines with the robots.txt file. Most of the pages from the dev site had been de-indexed from Google apart from 3, the home page (dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk, and two blog pages). The live site has 184 pages indexed in Google. So I thought the last 3 dev pages would disappear after a few weeks. I checked back late February and the 3 dev site pages were still indexed in Google. I decided to 301 redirect the dev site to the live site to tell Google to rank the live site and to ignore the dev site content. I also checked the robots.txt file on the dev site and this was blocking search engines too. But still the dev site is being found in Google wherever the live site should be found. When I do find the dev site in Google it displays this; Roller Banners Cheap » admin <cite>dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/</cite><a id="srsl_0" class="pplsrsla" tabindex="0" data-ved="0CEQQ5hkwAA" data-url="http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/" data-title="Roller Banners Cheap » admin" data-sli="srsl_0" data-ci="srslc_0" data-vli="srslcl_0" data-slg="webres"></a>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.This is really affecting our clients SEO plan and we can't seem to remove the dev site or rank the live site in Google.Please can anyone help?
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
For SEO Purposes, What is a Good Website Builder?
Hi, I was just curious what website builder, example: intuit, sitepro, yahoo site builder, website builder - created by Godaddy, etc... would be considered good for SEO? Any comments or thoughts would be appreciated. Happy New Year! -Jimmy
Technical SEO | | jimmy02250 -
When will seomoz rank my website?
Hi all, I am really excited to be here. I joined seo moz three weeks ago. Seo moz crawled my website twice and still under competitive domain analysis my domain authority is 1 and everything else underneath is zero. I fixed some errors and warning after first crawl but still nothing in root domain metrics. Can anyone please explain whats happening? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | proaspirant0 -
Two websites with similar products
I have two websites with similar products with different tld.I have a keywords that is comman in both.One site is at top in google with that keyword and one is not.Can we implement 301 redirect from one domain to another domain for that keyword or google will consider it spammy?Please help me out.
Technical SEO | | Alick3000 -
New website
Hello, How bad is going to be if I change my Joomla website to Wordpress? I can check the 100 best pages and redirect them to the new url with 301 but my website has 424 pages. If is this needs time, how long does it take to be in the same position? Is Google review my new website quickly? What about if I make my services more specific and the main topic is going to be smaller in pages? (Mpre social services pages vs. less pages about the main webdesign topic) I should change my website to WP but I am afraid because now I am in the 2. 🙂 Thanks! Regards,
Technical SEO | | Netkreativ
Misi0