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URL Error or Penguin Penalty?
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I am currently having a major panic as our website www.uksoccershop.com has been largely dropped from Google. We have not made any changes recently and I am not sure why this is happening, but having heard all sorts of horror stories of penguin update, I am fearing the worst.
If you google "uksoccershop" you will see that the homepage does not rank. We previously ranked in the top 3 for "football shirts" but now we don't, although on page 2, 3 and 4 you will see one of our category pages ranking (this didn't used to happen).
Some rankings are intact, but many have disappeared completely and in some cases been replaced by other pages on our site. I should point out our existing rankings have been consistently there for 5-6 years until today.
I logged into webmaster tools and thankfully there is no warning message from Google about spam, etc, but what we do have is 35,000 URL errors for pages which are accessible. An example of this is:
| URL: | http://www.uksoccershop.com/categories/5_295_327.html |
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Error details In Sitemaps Linked from Last crawled: 6/20/12First detected: 6/15/12Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. Is it possible this is the cause of the issue (we are not currently sure why the URL's are being blocked) and if so, how severe is it and how recoverable?If that is unlikely to cause the issue, what would you recommend our next move is?All help is REALLY REALLY appreciated
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Same with me. The index page disappeared but internal pages started ranking, but not as high.
It might not be penguin. Google sent out all those email's pre-penguin scaring the life out of webmasters.
If you think about it, 700,000 emails sent out by Google. If only half of them took pages down, we are talking 350,000 pages missing.
If the other 350,000 cancelled or deleted lots of incoming links to their sites/pages too and you had a links across a few to 1000 of these, you are going/have lost a load of link power.
Have a look on LinkDetective.com. I think its quite accurate. After Penguin I lost nearly 13% of links (dead links) and I never deleted or asked for any links to be cancelled or terminated.
Makes you wonder if there really was a Penguin update or if google just scared the webmaster community into deleting dodgy or paid links or getting rid of pages or sites with dodgy links.
I visited loads of forums, watched post-penguin videos etc and the general consensus is to carry on link building but try to get it more natural. Get your links pointing to you with your domain as the anchor.
However, you may be lucky, and when you get crawled again with no server error, things may return to normal.
It is possible to do a 'fetch' through your webmaster account on the pages that had the error, but I think you are limited to about 100 fetches. See if any navigational pages can be fetched. They could get crawled quicker and help get the errors sorted.
Good luck with everything.
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