Should We Pull The Plug On This Site?
-
I am helping a retailer out with their site. They were hit hard with the Penguin update, and traffic has dropped by about 75%. Here are the stats:
-
It is fairly new, has been up for about 3 years.
-
Has partial match domain name
-
Is nearly fully indexed with over 4K pages
-
Has NOT received an unnatural link message from Google, so no manual penalty.
-
Has had most keywords BURIED in the search results.
-
Link profile: Has done about 50-100 blog comments, 500 directory submissions, 800 social bookmarks, 5-6 press releases, 300 article submissions (most removed), about 30-50 guest blog posts.
I am thinking it may have just been hit because of aggressive use of anchor text as opposed to massive spamming. Then again, the site has never really added great content and the product pages have no unique content.
Any thoughts?
-
-
Thanks. I've watched the video before but it's worth reviewing. Still seems a bit strange that someone can violate terms of service which G never bothered to enforce for years and get slammed with "Double Secret Probatiion" while a malicious site can clean up and eventually get the penalty lifted. No doubt a malicious site manual penalty should result in a long time in the penalty box but at least it's obvious what to fix. There doesn't seem to be a reliable consensus or even many case studies on garden variety Penguin recoveries yet. Not knowing what Dean Wormer wants me to change is irritating.
-
InHouseSEO - It's not an e-commerce site. (It's a blog with a couple of hundred posts many of which need pruning but many of which are high informative and written by someone with substantial experience in the subject.)
Sounds like you're telling me the best gamble is put in the work on this blog to try to grow the legit links so that the bad ones dip below the "tipping point" which prompts the Penguin attack. Have you had success with this tactic?
The home page appears to be penalized b/c of keyword rich text from relevant blog comments on mostly relevant blogs/pages. (It's also quite possible it's just a rather severe devaluation 30 or so spots in the SERPs for the EMD keyword). Other pages are hit or miss but the stronger pages (high bounce but very high times on pages) are beginning to return to some of their former strength (probably 50% of peak traffic).
Site traffic declined just before the 25th (the date that is associated with Panda 3.5) and resulted in a 20% hit. After Panda 3.5, the G traffic dove steadily (which I assume is Penguin added to the mix). Traffic is now off by around 2/3 without excluding the Bing traffic. (Have probably seen 15 -20% improvement recently with no new posts and only added one authorative directory link (Nat'l Trade Assoc. picked up the blog).
I just reread all of the comments in the thread you linked to. (Never received a warning in WMT so I assume the penalty is algo.)
Reading your comments, it sounds like you recomment attempting to remove any blog comments that I created. (I don't expect much success based on what people are sharing.
If my pet Penquin is algorhythmic and isn't scheduled to lift anytime in the next several months, should I try to guest blog my way out of the penalty? (Assume I have access to decent releveant indy blogs that are low authority but extremely legit.)
Thanks for the reminder to re-read the thread with you and Egol.
-
Do you have an e-commerce site? Is the site as a whole hit, or is it certain keywords/pages?
I would be careful with removing links, unless they are really spammy. You might do more harm than good.
I wrote about this here:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/using-dripable-to-build-url-links-too-dilute-link-profile
Anyways, good luck.
-
InHouseSEO - this is a GREAT question. I wish there were more discussion of realistic case studies like this one rather than so much "focus" on negative SEO and a handful of high authority sites that were probably hit by mistake.
The consensus seems to be that you can file for lifting a penalty IF you can show you removed bad links AND document the efforts you made to remove the bad links that remain despite your efforts.
Matt Cutts appears to say you're more screwed if the penalty is algorhythmic. Huh? Buy BMR links, remove them and escape the penalty G imposed on your site for 50 -100 presumably manual and relevant blog comments? Gimmee a break!
The 50 - 100 blog comments are probably going to be the worst of the lot to attempt to remove. Have you had any sucess removing the trash directories? You might be able to out grow the penalty by developing new links so that the number of suspicious (or bad) links falls below the tipping point. On a recent WBF, Danny Sullivan opined that Penguin is just a devaluation of the bad links. (Not my opinion but it's an interesting opinion.) No one has shared results but some people have suggested combining removing links with developing new strong ones.
Penguin is bizarre. Some of my pages are (very) slowly returning to their former top positions even when some of the bad links point to them. New pages with extensive content (think 2,000 words of unique/expert content) were among the first 2 - 3 to cover the event but now rank around 120. (Ouch).
I share your suspicion that for many of our sites, it's aggressive use of anchor text. Developing non-aggressive links may dig us out. Would love to hear from anyone who had tried this and what results they acheived.
-
if it was an algorithmic hit check out this video
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
-
Whether to use new domain or old ecommerce site domain that has been incomplete for a long time.
Hello, We are starting a second store in our niche. Which of the following should I choose: A. We have a site from a year and a half ago that we put content on but never actually added products. The category and article content needs to be completely rewritten. We will completely rewrite the content to be much better and up to date. We're planning on adding products and rewriting the manufacturer descriptions. B. We could use a new domain that is closer to exact match for our main keyword. We'd just buy one for $15 I don't know whether A or B would be the fastest way to get the site going. I'm concerned that leaving a site half done for a year could cause an issue, but I really don't know. If you've got experience with this, please advise. Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Can I use content from an existing site that is not up anymore?
I want to take down a current website and create a new site or two (with new url, ip, server). Can I use the content from the deleted site on the new sites since I own it? How will Google see that?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Do some sites get preference over others by Google just because? Grandfathered theory
So I have a theory that Google "grandfathers" in a handful of old websites from every niche and that no matter what the site does, it will always get the authority to rank high for the relevant keywords in the niche. I have a website in the crafts/cards/printables niche. One of my competitors is http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/ This site ranks for everything... http://www.semrush.com/info/gotfreecards.com+(by+organic) Yet, when I go to visit their site, I notice duplicate content all over the place (extremely thin content, if anything at all for some pages that rank for highly searched keywords), I see paginated pages that should be getting noindexed, bad URL structure and I see an overall unfriendly user experience. Also, the backlink profile isn't very impressive, as most of the good links are coming from their other site, www.got-free-ecards.com. Can someone tell me why this site is ranking for what it is other than the fact that it's around 5 years old and potentially has some type of preference from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
People buying links to their profiles on my site
As we have a major Penguin update looming in the background, I am looking for expert advice on how to deal with professionals buying into link programs whether they are doing it deliberately or not. Our site provides detailed profile information on hundreds of 1000's of professionals and some professionals apparently believed that buying into link program will lift their profile in the SERPS. About 10 professionals have paid shady link building companies to buy links to their profiles on our site. The biggest offender bought over 1,500 links to his profile. Aside from adding the known toxic links to our disavow file, what else can we do to avoid any link penalties? I can think of three distinct options and would love to hear feedback especially based on actual experience. Option 1. 404 the existing profile - "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith" and create a new URL "http://www.anysite.com/jones_smith_1". Option 2. Keep the existing URL and fully rely on the disavow file. Contact the professionals and kindly ask them to stop buying links and to contact their link building companies to remove the links. Any other ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | irvingw0 -
Google penalty having bad sites maybe and working on 1 good site ?!!!
I have a list of websites that are not spam.. there are ok sites... just that I need to work on the conent again as the sites content might not be useful for users at 100%. There are not bad sites with spammy content... just that I want to rewrite some of the content to really make great websites... the goal would be to have great content to get natual links and a great user experience.. I have 40 sites... all travel sites related to different destinations around the world. I also have other sites that I haven't worked on for some time.. here are some sites: www.simplyparis.org
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sandyallain
www.simplymadrid.org
www.simplyrome.org etc... Again there are not spam sites but not as useful as they coul become... I want to work on few sites only to see how it goes.... will this penalise my sites that I am working on if I have other sites with average content or not as good ? I want to make great content good for link bait 🙂0 -
How Does This Site Get Away With It?
The following site is huge in the movie trailer industry: http://bit.ly/18B6tF It ranks #3 in Google for "Movie Trailers" and has high rankings for multiple other major keywords in the industry. Here's the thing; virtually all of their movie trailer pages contain copy/pasted content from other sites. The movie trailer descriptions are the ones given by the movie companies and therefor the same content is on thousands of websites/blogs. We all know Google hates duplicate content at the moment... so how does this site get a away with it? Does it's root-domain authority keep it up there?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | superlordme0 -
competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority
According to my recent SEOmoz links analysis, my competitor sites link to a considerable amount of irrelevant sites/nonsense sites that seem to score high with regard to domain authority... e.g. wedding site linking to a transportation attorney's website. Aother competitor site has an overall of 2 million links, most of which are seemingly questionable index sites or forums to which registration is unattainable. I recently created a 301 redirect, and my external links have yet to be updated to my new domain name in SEOmoz. Yet, by comparing my previous domain authority rank with those of the said competitor sites, the “delta” is relatively marginal. The SEOmoz rank is 21 whereas the SEOmoz ranks of two competitor sites 30 and 33 respectively. The problem is, however, is to secure a good SERP for the most relevant terms with Google… My Google pagerank was “3” prior to the 301 redirect. I worked quite intensively so as to receive a pagerank only to discover that it had no affect at all on the SERP. Therefore, I took a calculated risk in changing to a domain name that translates from non-latin characters, as the site age is marginal, and my educated guess is that the PR should rebound within 4 weeks, however, I would like to know as to whether there is a way to transfer the pagerank to the new domain… Does anyone have any insight as to how to go about and handling this issue?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eranariel0 -
Is pulling automated news feeds on my home page a bad thing?
I am in charge of a portal that relies on third-party content for its news feeds. the third-party in this case is a renowned news agency in the united kingdom. After the panda and penguin updates, will these feeds end up hurting my search engine rankings? FYI: these feeds occupy only 20 percent of content on my domain. The rest of the content is original.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | amit20760