Did we get hit by Panda? What do we do?
-
Hello,
here's our site:
nlpca(dot)com
We had a big drop in rankings, going from about 19th to about 43rd for our main keyword and having significant drops in other keywords. This happened roughly 6 weeks ago
We thought it was being caused by either:
- Placing keywords in titles before we had them in the content.
or
- Trying to rank for Utah keywords - we're the NLP Institute of California and we are in both places now, but the site talks about mainly California.
We changed both these things, and we're still at the low rankings.
Will we move back up?
What do we do?
Will a backlink campaign be effective at this point?
-
We found out that we had 2 other domains that were duplicates of our site. Could that be a problem?
-
This is very helpful William, I'm still working on this.
-
Great Points webfeatseo,
I went to the website and at first blush I did not see what I expected to see such as scraped content or duplicate content. I did not get too deep but one suggestion would be to review all of your page content and use something like plagium checker as well SEOMOZ tools such as the On-Page Report Card tool also maybe run the SEO Web Crawler to find any possible issues.
I did run a quick scan with Copyscape and it did find your content on other sites but not too bad but it maybe work getting the pro version to check deeper
http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nlpca.com%2F
Also I ran a test with Xenu site scan and it found a lot of broken links with 403, 301, 302, 404 Errors.
It also looks like you have a lot of outbound links from this domain.
Other items found:
Broken page-local links (also named 'anchors', 'fragment identifiers'): http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#null anchor occurs multiple timeshttp://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/Interesting_NLP_Sites.html#US not found
Again this is just a quick review I hope this helps....
-
Don't think you were hit by panda. That is more so for scraping and content issues. Are you doing any of that? And keyword placement in titles will not have a big impact like that on its own.
Your main page title tag has 4 keywords in there which could be causing some confusion on what the page is about. Try to target only 1 or 2 per page and target other words on other pages. On just a quick look your site does not really seem well optimized with on page factors.
Try using the seomoz on page grader tool to increase your page relevancy.
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
-
If we have all products on-site for indexing, do we get dinged by Google for not transacting on-site?
I am trying to do research on the SEO impact of having an off-site transactional website. For example, Pepsi.com lists all product information on their site but guides visitors to transact on Amazon or Walmart. What impact, if any, does guiding the customer to a separate transactional site have on SEO? In short, if we have all products on-site for indexing, do we get dinged by Google for not transacting on-site?
Algorithm Updates | | KaylaV0 -
Hit by an unnamed Google update on November 30th - Still suffering
Hi, Moz Community. Just decided to sign up for a free trial because I'm absolutely at my wits end here. Here's my site: cheapgamesguru.com I run a small PC gaming blog monetized by affiliate marketing. I do all the writing, SEO, etc. myself. The content I write is, from what I can tell, fully complying with Google's guidelines, and in and of itself is pretty informative and high-quality. My site was started in December of 2015, and it was doing very well for a good 10 or 11 months - until late November of 2016. Then something happened. My traffic started plummeting - I went from getting nearly 300 organic users a day (Not sessions - actual unique users) to 80, then 40, and now I'm lucky to get over 15 a day. I do not do ANY black hat SEO whatsoever. I have not taken part in any shady link building schemes, nor do I try to trick Google in any way. I just write good content, do good keyword research (Targeting only low-hanging fruit and low-difficulty keywords using KWFinder), and do my best to provide a good user experience. I run no ads on my site. Glenn Gabe wrote about a potential Google update on November 29th, but the stuff he said in his article doesn't seem to affect me - my mobile site is perfectly fine, according to Google's own metrics and testing tools. Here's the article in question: http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/november-30-2016-google-algorithm-update/ At first, I thought it was possible that this was a result of my competitors simply doing far better than me - but that doesn't seem to be the case, as their rankings did not actually move - mine simply pummeted. And many of their sites are far worse than mine in terms of grammar, spelling, and site speed. I understand backlinks are important, by the way, but I really don't think that's why my site was hit. Many competitors of mine have little to no backlinks and are doing great, and it would also not make much sense for Google to hit an otherwise great site just because they have few backlinks. A friend of mine has reached out to Glenn Gabe himself to see if he can get his input on my site, but he's had a busy schedule and hasn't gotten a chance to take a look yet. I recently obtained a backlink from a highly relevant DA 65 site (About a month ago, same niche as my site), and it now shows up in Search Console and Ahrefs - but it hasn't affected rankings whatsoever. Important Note: I'm not only just ranking poorly for stuff, I'm ranking in position 100-150+ for many low-competition keywords. I have no idea why that is happening - is my site THAT bad, that my content deserves to be ranking on page 15 or lower? Sorry for the long question. I'm struggling here, and just wanted to give as much information as possible. I would really appreciate any input you guys can give me - if any SEO experts want to turn my site into a case study and work with me to improve things, I'd also be open to that 😉 I kid, of course - I know you guys are all busy. Thanks! P.S. I've attached a picture of my SEMRush graph, for reference, as well. mhgSw
Algorithm Updates | | polycountz0 -
Why am I getting different Google SERP result for same keywords?
Hi Mozzers, I have noticed recently that Google (.com.au) has been serving up different SERP results for the same keywords. For example, one of our main keywords is "Car Loan". One result will show our site as ranking #5 organically from 242,000,000 results. A refresh of this search will then result in our site not ranking at all from 133,000,000 results. We have been noticing this happen only in the last few days & more frustrating is that Google is throwing up the SERP from 133,000,000 results more frequently. Would anyone know why this is occurring? And what can we do, if anything, to ensure we are shown regardless of how many results Google calls from? Is it from recent algo update & will it settle down over time? Any help would be greatly appreciated. (Just to add - I'm not gogged in to Google when completing this test & regularly clear cookies etc so I don't believe its a personalised search issue)
Algorithm Updates | | 360Finance0 -
Panda / Penguin Behavior ? Recovery?
Our site took a major fall on March 23rd, ie Panda 3.4 and then another smaller one on April 24th, ie Penguin. I have posted a few times in here trying get help on what items to focus on. Been doing this for 13 years, white hat, never chased algos but of course learned as I went. As soon as the fall hit one expert said it was links, which I kinda doubted because we never went after them but we have some but only a handful in comparison to really good authorative links. I concentrated on cleaning up duplicate content due to tags in a blog that only had 7 posts (an add on section to the site) then focuses efforts on just going through and making content better. Had other overlapping content that I would guess would pass inspection but I cleaned it up. After 6 weeks no movement back up, another expert here said yes, he saw some bad links so I should check it out. So back to focusing on links, I actually run a report and discover questionable links, and successfully get about 25 removed. Low numbers but we have only about 50 that were questionable. No contact info on the other directories so I guess we are stuck. Here is where I just go in circles... When our site fell on March 23rd we had 13 of our main pages still ranking at number 1 and 2 on each keyword phrase. Penguin hit and they fell about 10 spots. EXCEPT, one... This one keyword phrase and page stayed on top and ranked at #1 throught he storm. (finally fell to #4 but still remains up there). The whole site is down 90%, we only have 3 fair keyword phrases really ranking out of 250. The mystery is that the keyword phrase that was ranking was the one that supposedly had way over the % of anchor text, 7% of our links go to that page. The other pages that fell on Penguin had no pages linking back. I have been adding blog posts to our site, I post one an in a few days it gets indexed, have one of those ranking at #2 for the keyword, moved up from #4 a week after posting it in the blog. (google searches shows 80K) Just seems like the site should bounce back if new content is able to rank, why not the old? Did other people hit by Panda and Penguin see a sitewide fall or are they still ranking for some terms? I would love to see some discusson on success stories of bouncing back after Panda and Penguin. I see the WP success story but that was pretty sudden after it was brought to Google's attention. Looking for that small business that fixed something and saw improvement. Give me hope here please.
Algorithm Updates | | Force70 -
Why have organic hits to my site suddenly started to fluctuate widely?
Hits to my website have been gradually growing over the last 2 years to a point where there was 1300 organics a day. Recently the hits crashed to 300 a day and stayed there for a couple of days. They then bounced back to 1300 a day for a few more days before crashing down to 300 again. This has happened a few times now. Oscillating between two points. Its like the site is crossing a threshold of something, back and forth. I have looked at different parts of my site and every part is down by approximately the same percentage. Anyone out there have any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | easymatt0 -
If we are getting clicks from a local one box as a citation in the serps's would we see this as the referrer in GA?
If we are getting clicks from a local one box as a citation in the serps's
Algorithm Updates | | Mediative
would we see this as the referrer in GA?0 -
Was Panda applied at sub-domain or root-domain level?
Does anyone have any case studies or examples of sites where a specific sub-domain was hit by Panda while other sub-domains were fine? What's the general consensus on whether this was applied at the sub-domain or root-domain level? My thinking is that Google already knows broadly whether a "site" is a root-domain (e.g. SEOmoz) or a sub-domain (e.g. tumblr) and that they use this logic when rolling out Panda. I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions though?
Algorithm Updates | | TomCritchlow1 -
Classifieds and Google Panda
It seems Google's Panda update is targetting low quality sites with little unique content (I know there's more to it than that). It makes sense that they may want to do this but what about classified sites. They may use some scraped content as well as unique ads, and the ads may lack content as they rely on the users writing the ads. However, they are helpful to the people that use classifieds. Because of these factors, these sites are suffering with the release of the latest Panda update. Any advice for classified sites and how they can combat the rankings drops???
Algorithm Updates | | Sayers0