Penguin Update and Long Tail Keywords
-
Since the Penguin update, organic traffic for our site; oxygenconcentratorstore.com
has dropped almost 25%. The thing I cannot figure out is that when I compare April 1<sup>st</sup> to May 15<sup>th</sup> (before the update) and June 1<sup>st</sup> to July 15<sup>th</sup> (after); 8 of our top keywords are up. Our 2 main keywords are up 15% and 11%.Where we lost most of our traffic is from our longtail keywords. We have almost 1000 longtail keyword phrases that we got visits from in the April/May period that we did not get in the June/July period.
Is there a reason why our top keywords would continue to improve while we most of the longtail keywords?? If Google penalized us, won’t all of our keywords be dropping and just not the longtail.
Any help/info would be awesome.
Thanks.
-
Yes, however keep in mind that as you remove links you may start to lose ranking. I would recommend removing some, the ones that you can, and start focusing on getting good branded links.
-
Our main keyword are "oxygen concentrator" and portable oxygen concentrator".
We had a SEO company working with us for awhile and I know they created a bunch of bad links from tons of low quality "web directories" and "blogs".
Should I try going and getting us removed from those???
-
Many factors are involved here I see that you have allot of links anchored "oxygen concentrators" and they are on pages that have a great amount of links. Not sure what your main keywords are, however your backling profile is raising red flags IMO. I would recommend building some quality links by creating unique articles on authoritative sites. Also the Penguin update is designed to find over optimization, your sites links look unnatural (they are). It is a good practice to have the site/brand name linking in more than the other anchors.
As far as your sites rankings go maybe the competitors sites were building worse links or Google has not detected the type of links you have.
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
-
Traffic, CTR AND AdSense eCPM Down ... Keyword Rankings Unchanged
Since the last week in March, one of our sites with ~ 1 million high quality page-views per month has had a 25% drop in traffic, CTR drop from 4% to 3%, and AdSense eCPM has dropped from $8 to $5 ... however, all of our keyword rankings have remained unchanged. Also, it is an extremely consistent niche with no drop in relevant searches ... The only thing that we KNOW for sure has changed is the removal of the separator and indentation from the Google search ads to our #1 ranking positions. Could such a simple alteration in the Google search results UI have such a significant impact on our numbers? Is anyone else experiencing a similar revenue drop without a rankings drop in the past two weeks? Besides punching up the titles to make our search results more appealing to users, is there really anything that can be done about Googles new paid results placement? Your thoughts and suggestions are invited. Thanks guys and gals 😉
Algorithm Updates | | Humanovation0 -
I thought META KEYWORDS tag was dead?
http://www.wpkube.com/wordpress-seo-plugin/ this article just came out as a one of the many guides to Yoast's Wordpress SEO. I am surprised it mentioned: Use meta keywords tag: Google reportedly doesn’t use the keywords that your enter for your posts but as Google isn’t the only show in town, you might want to check this box.Recommendation: check I stopped using meta keywords tag because Google doesn't use it any more, plus if you are in a competitive field by using keywords you are giving free keyword research to your competitors? Does any one still use meta keywords here? If so why? Google doesn't use keyword tags, has anyone experienced a dis-benefit to meta-keywords tag from Google ie. dropped rankings etc.?
Algorithm Updates | | vmialik2 -
Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed
Hi,
Algorithm Updates | | mlm12
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page. We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust. We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH! I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below... I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory). We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains), - this makes up 80% of our links. As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this. We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if possible, hence my questions. We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow? For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too? Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing? For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do? For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed). How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you? We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure). When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this). What would you do if this was you? Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)? Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect? Thanks for your input and advice. We appreciate it.0 -
15% Drop in Traffic. Anyone have theories about the most recent update?
Analyzing our traffic, looks like we were hit site wide, with some article pages that don't have great engagement seeing more damage than others. We've been talking to other sites, and sites that have never seen any penalties and do everything right have also seen about 15-20% drop in traffic. The sites we know that weren't affected are brands (sites you would recognize by name). The only conclusion I can draw from everything (looking at mozcast metrics 'big 10' is that branded websites saw a boost. Does anyone else have any theories about what this most recent update was about?
Algorithm Updates | | nicole.healthline0 -
Rankings Gone? Have I been effected by the Panda/Penguin Update(s)?
Our site www.alphameasure.com has been online since 2005 and currently has a page rank of 4. The site has always ranked on page one or two of Google for our primary keywords (Employee Satisfaction Survey, Employee Engagement Survey, Employee Surveys). I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but now our site is nowhere to be found. I'm thinking our ranking dropped somewhere in mid to late January? We did use an SEO company in the spring of 2012 that went on a link building campaign for us. They added about 450 inbound links over a three month period. Other than that - nothing has really change on the site. We're getting ready to release a new version of our software that was being re-written during all of 2012, so the timing of losing our rankings is just awful. Any help or ideas is greatly appreciated? Thanks in advance,
Algorithm Updates | | EngagedMetrics
Josh0 -
Lost and confused after Penguin!
I own an EMD which was hit by google penguin. I lost my #1 position to Google US SERP and went to #5 for the keyword which applies to the EMD. What I have tried so far is deleting the exact anchor text links from the footers of my c-block sites. That did not seem to help because i did not gain any position from that change. I also altered my meta title, description and keywords because they were spamming a bit. Things did not improved. My Links w/ Exact Anchor Text is at 5%, Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text at 3% The web pages that are above me are to 0% to both categories because they are not showing up with their main page. What is going on? The thing that confuses me the most is that i am also targeting for two other markets, Australia and Canada. In Canada I have maintained my #1 and to Australia I lost my first position falling to #2. I did not receive any message to my webmaster tools account and never made any black hat link building. Is the EMD fact the problem, but why not for other markets except US? Penguin has run to other markets(CA, AU) as well becuase i have seen a drop to other keywords and also to my traffic. Really what do you think?
Algorithm Updates | | Tz_Seo0 -
A rating on report card - Massive drop in rankings (Is it Penguin?)
Hi All, I would really like a second opinion on my current issue and I'd be very grateful for the communities knowledge please . I have a been running a successful campaign for one of my clients, increase in natural SERP's, etc. But since the 24th of April they were hit and hit hard and continued to decline now. They had many top 5 listings for terms and now most are not in top 50 serps. Openly I know they have a bad or not great backlink profile which was inherited from the past agency, but we're working on this using white hat techniques, contextual copy, brand etc. The copy is a great, contextual and no where near spammy at all... Very nicely written, factual, etc. What I don't understand is this SEOmoz's On-Page report card gives an A rating for the target term which is also a secondary term but was ranking high. Factor Overview <dl class="scoreboard clearfix"> <dt>Critical Factors</dt> <dd>4 / 4</dd> <dt>High Importance Factors</dt> <dd>6 / 7</dd> <dt>Moderate Importance Factors</dt> <dd>7 / 9</dd> <dt>Low Importance Factors</dt> <dd>8 / 11</dd> <dt>Optional Factors</dt> <dd>2 / 5</dd> <dd> On-Page Keyword Usage for </dd> </dl> Title 1 URL 0 Meta Desc 1 H1 1 H2-4 0 Body 1 B / Strong 1 IMG ALT 0 Total Keyword Usage for this Page = 5 Fall from grace is SERP 5 to 25 and still going down. So the questions are: 1. Has this happened to you? 2. Could it just be down to their bad backlink profile which now needs much more attention? 3. Is this Penguin for sure? 4. What would you recommend? If anyone requires any further info please let me know and thank you in advance. Cheers,
Algorithm Updates | | JosephGourvenec
Joseph Gourvenec
SEO and Search Specialist0 -
Google's reaction to site updates
Hi, Is it safe to assume as soon as Google indexes updates I've made to my site that any ranking changes the updates effected will happen at that same time, or is there ever a lag time before these changes ( if any ) take effect?
Algorithm Updates | | minutiae0