Phantom Update?
-
Hi All,
I know this is a long while back but I think we started to lose our organic traffic after the Phantom update back in May 2013.
We have two websites, one offering serviced apartments in London only and one website offering serviced apartments across the world.
The apartments we feature in London are the same on both sites - although they have different product descriptions, meta data etc.
I read that the Phantom update hit websites which were owned by the same company.
Do you think we are still being penalised for this?
Any thoughts at all would be greatly appreciated !
Thanks,
Laura
-
Hi Matt,
Thank you for your response.
I'm not sure what duplicate content you are referring to?
We are in the process of cleaning up our link profile.
-
-
Duplicate content on most every page of your site. Basically nothing unique = why would Google rank you?
-
56% anchor on your main keyword in Ahrefs. This seems quite high.
-
Majestic shows 50,000 backlinks from 3200 referring domains from only 1600 subnets (usually a sign of buying links & spam).
Backlinks from:
And other spam/porn sites. You also have a ton of EDU & GOV links - more than seems normal. Definitely needs a disavow.
I don't think you have an owner problem. That's way too meta for this. Your content isn't unique and you have tons of link spam.
-
-
That's really difficult to say without looking at more precise details, although my hunch is that other marketing efforts should have been able to overcome an algorithmic change like ownership tags. More than ownership though Google has been moving towards offering a diversity of results so if the two websites are on the same domain that could be at play. Also increasing during that period of time are localization and personalization with the results so global competition could be gaining on your sites while yours remains unchanged.
To really break it down you'll want a professional looking at:
- Analytics - What referral trends have been at play, what wins have not been replicated recently
- Webmaster Tools - Any warnings that have gone addressed? Are we responsive? Mobile?
- Diversity of results - Are some of our big past traffic generating results no longer showing up? Maps? Images? Video? etc.
And many more. I think really having success with just a couple of those aspects would get you plenty of organic results.
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
-
Updated Title Tag preference
Hi, This was a topic a couple years ago https://moz.com/community/q/title-tag-use-comma-pipe-or-colon I was wondering if there was any update on this as the consensus on this thread seemed to say using a pipe as a separator is best, but in Moz's title tag recommendations it has hyphen and pipe Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name Does anyone know if using a pipe | between the primary keyword and secondary has adverse effects? Also, does removing the brand name for the sake of length hurt you in any way? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
What was the Google 'update' on 31st March?
Hi all. I looked back and saw that there was an update shown in 'Search Analytics' in Webmaster Tools a few weeks before the Mobile algorithm update. Not been able to find any mention of it and what it did so thought I'd check in here. ps. Also, this is a 90 day stretch and shows that our rankings have taken a hit since the mobile algorithm update. Interesting stuff (see image below) 4rJMU9e.jpg?1
Technical SEO | | RobFD0 -
I think I got hit by the latest Panda update
Hi everyone, I think one of my sites got hit with Panda. On Sept 18th the site dipped to "not in top 50" for almost all keywords. I checked GWT for the manual action email but my inbox is empty!!!!!!!!!! The lesser of 2 evils I guess. They had major server issues that week as well so it is hard to identify what caused the site to dip. My client has original content on the website but almost all content on the blog is copied. Do you recommend me deleting the non original content? Can the problem be elsewhere? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Drupal Updates = errors
We have worked diligently to correct our SEO Moz crawl diagnostic errors to below 20. However, at least twice now, our coder updates the drupal security warnings and BINGO- every time - our errors go sky high again. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Stevej240 -
Google Places - need to update
I've got a client who verified their Google Places listing years ago, and noone knows who so I can't access it. The business is now moving and I need to update the address. What should I do? thanks
Technical SEO | | garymeld0 -
Google Fresh Update
Here's a question, if you put the date in your url (often a wordpress format) would that be seen by Google now as 'fresh' content? - part of their new update.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Updated title tags not displayed in SERPs?
A couple weeks ago I updated the title tags and URLs of some of my site's top landing pages, but the new versions aren't indexed in Google. Webmaster tools says that my site has been crawled since updated. I'm using a pretty old version of Joomla for a CMS, and had to fight with the plugins a little bit to make it all work (sh404SEF for the URLs and sh404SEF Custom Tag Module for the title tags). For example, www.radiussecurityinc.com's indexed title is still: Radius Security Solutions | Home But should be: CCTV System Design - IP Industrial Surveillance | Radius Security Other pages besides the home page have the old title tags as well as old URLs. Any ideas how I can fix this? Thanks a lot in advance! Jeff
Technical SEO | | jaysan0 -
Google May Update
As per google the May update takes care of all content scrapping sites Then why is this site - http://www.viduba.com is still having good ranking ? All of its videos are hotlinkled from youtube
Technical SEO | | krishru0