How could Penguin kill my top ten rank and promote this garbage page to a #5 spot
-
Hey,
Before penguin, I had a #9 rank for the term "yoga poses". So as many of us are doing, I started looking at my link profile... and yes, there were around 300 links from an old yoga news website (anchor: yoga poses)... that lead to the page on my site optimized for this term. The problem is they took the site down, but not properly... I.E. they generate a "not available" message for browsers, but underneath, I guess the bots can still index all the pages... so I guess they were interpreting these links as coming from a cloaked site.
So, I was able to get them to remove the links... webmaster tools reports half of them gone now.
What I don't get though... is how Google can give this garbage page a #5 spot for a competitive term like "yoga poses"...
Check out http://www.ebmyoga.com/beginyoga.html and compare it to
my page... http://www.yogaclassplan.com/yoga-poses/
This page leads to highly quality 100% unique yoga pose articles... in my mind we deliver so much more value than the site with a #5 rank.
I don't understand. Any insight?
Thanks,
-
That looks logical to me! Plus, from a usability standpoint, the reader can better understand how to navigate the content.
I do wonder if you should go a little larger on the images and have the category title, image and description all be the same width stacked one on top of the other. This is not for an SEO reason, but based on the preferences of the average yoga demographic. This arrangement would also (albeit slightly) increase readability of the description.
-
Thanks Cole,
I was thinking of editing the template like in the image attached below. Add text for each category and then thumbnails below that lead to the full article. What do you think?
-
I see that you do have fantastic content for each pose. That's great.
I would place an image for every pose on this page. Include a short description of that pose... and a link where visitor can get the full article.
When a visitor lands on this page they will be impressed with all of the poses and that you have additional information for each one.
I NEVER hesitate to show the visitor images of EVERYTHING that I have and then link to a more detailed page. I am not going to say the keywords that I have pages like this ranking for (with zero linkbuilding done by me) but you would probably be surprised at their difficulty. Huge image galleries linking to more detailed content are killler killer killer.
-
Hi Egol,
Thanks for your reply and it makes total sense... the problem for me is that if you look at the length of one of my pose articles, you will see there is no way I can post all this information on one page... so...
... I was thinking the following steps:
Please see wire frame attached:
1. Remove the right margin of this template to make it wider
2. Modify the header so that it speaks specifically to the pose articles... not the software
3. Insert say 150x150 images for each category of poses... I.E. arm balances etc... and then insert some text beside that image to further explain to the reader the type of poses they will find in this category.
4. Underneath this top level image and category text, I will insert thumb nail images and the pose name, which leads to the full article.
What do you think?
Thanks,
-
Connie,
For a living, I work with the health and wellness industries. Within that, about 75% of my clients are in the yoga world. I'm also a 200 hour Yoga Alliance certified yoga teacher. Not that those things help with SEO, but I have a unique understanding of the yoga world and lots of experience with, specifically, yoga-related websites.
I strongly recommend adding in images. Not stock photos, but images you take or produce yourself. They will need to be properly sized and tagged and all of that too, but from what I've seen with my clients, images really have a very positive impact. I know this is not true for all segments/industries, but in the yoga world—yes.
Not sure if you've seen yoga journal's pose finder index: http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/finder/browse_categories
YJ has invested a lot of money into the UX part of their site. Take note of what they are doing and see how you can improve.
Now, another benefit to the other site is that it's smaller, and simpler. Jamie Fernandez has the goods on 'why' for that as does ChangingHorizon.
Since you are using Wordpress (which is what we build all of our sites on) you need to get rid of any extra plugins you can possibly spare. Depending on what theme you are using, you may not need All in One SEO, however, I use this plugin on nearly all of our sites. Delete extra plugins.
Add pictures (even just 10 or 12) and see how that has an effect.
Also, you get points for your Sanskrit transliteration! Looks great. I've never seen your site before and am happy to have found it.
-
It may not look pretty, but your competitor has higher page authority, higher domain authority and an established domain. You also have a lot of scripts running on the page, including an 'All-in-One' SEO pack which means your page load speed is slow.
But I think EGOL really hits the nail on the head (as usual).
-
sometimes less is more and you might want to check your low domain authority links!
and remember Goggle does not care how the site looks it only cares for text and links.
You can learn from your competitors, do you want to!?
-
I whole-heartedly agree with EGOL. A few points to add:
- you may want to watch Rand's G+ Penguin Update video (11 minutes) https://plus.google.com/u/1/111294201325870406922/posts/MjLCYnwMdBB
The very first thing Rand shares is the Penguin update is NOT designed to immediately improve search results. It is designed to penalize sites which violated Google Guidelines.
- your site offers detailed pages on each individual yoga pose. Your competitor's site only offers a single yoga pose page as it is a much smaller site. Your competitor's site therefore provides more focus on this single page then your site offers.
I completely agree your site is higher quality overall. I would recommend adjusting your content to better match the main focus of the page.
-
Here are a few thoughts,
From a visitors point of view as it relates to someone looking for yoga poses..........
When landing on your competitions website, I see information about yoga poses, with descriptions and images. It shows me what I was looking for.
When visiting the url you provided for your site, right out of the gate, I see information about course outline development and no "yoga poses". I see a description saying "Designed Specifically for Yoga Teachers" So, I did not land on a page with the exact content I was looking for, so, I bounced.
I would consider developing some more yoga poses related content for the page.
-
Went to your page. Where are the poses??
I like the other guy's site because the pictures are right there. That's what I expected to find.
If I owned your site that page would have big photos for every pose right there and visible... generous descriptions will accompany each one. I would not expect people to click to them. People who arrive on a page like this want to see something. Give it to them is what I would do.
If you do that I bet your traffic will climb from long tail keywords and better ranking for your main term.
I would also cut back on spending the top 500 pixels of the page on design elements that are repeated across the site.
That's just opinion... but where I would bet my money.
(I have a page on a subject where I have lots of images - about the size of yours - each with a few sentence description. That page has about 60 images and 3000 words. It pulls in more traffic than an five pages on my site combined and is slowly climbing the SERPs for difficult terms. I do no linkbuilding. Pages with lots of images, big images and substantive text pull in links with no work from me.)
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
-
About porn sites and ranking
Hello, I'm thinking to extend my website into porn. At the moment there is no pornography on it, although we do talk about sex related topics and products (from dating to tutorials, to toys etc.) Would it be dangerous to keep the porn section on the same domain as the rest? Would this negatively affect my non-porn content as Googlebot would "flag" my website as being pornographic (although only a few pages would be)? Or simply Googlebot would leave the current non-porn pages ranking as they are now, just fine, and plus it would rank the porn pages if they "deserve" to? I hope my question is clear. I don't want to create a subdomain.
Algorithm Updates | | fabx0 -
Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?
Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
Algorithm Updates | | Inevo
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂0 -
Long term rankings drop after swapping primary domain
Hey...this is my first post on Moz so please go easy on me! I've recently been baffled by the ranking behavior of a domain I do SEO for. In short, the primary domain was "musashispicymayo.com". After several months of SEO efforts and a really solid PR run the site managed to run up to #1 for several target keywords. For the purposes of this question I'd like to focus on the term "spicy mayo". "Musashispicymayo.com" was steadily climbing for as far back as page 5 until it ultimately reached #1 rank on Google for "spicy mayo". We also had another domain "musashifoods.com" which was originally 301 redirecting to "Musashispicymayo.com". About 3 months ago (shortly after acquiring the top ranking) the client wanted to reverse the domains so we started using "musashifoods.com" as the primary and redirecting "musashispicymayo.com" to that. In summary:
Algorithm Updates | | Andy-Twizen
ORIGINALLY: musashifoods.com 301 redirect -> musashispicymayo.com
NOW: musashispicymayo.com 301 redirect -> musashifoods.com At the time of the swap I did the following: Redirected the domain using a 301 via htaccess (made sure "www" requests are forwarded too) Created a new Google analytics account / webmaster account for "musashifoods.com" Went into my old webmaster tools account and used the change of address tool In the new webmaster tools account i submitted a sitemap and requested a crawl of the new domain Ensured the new primary domain was properly configured and all pages had the correct urls in the source code Verified that Google has updated their index and "musashifoods.com" now shows in the results. Now of course musashispicymayo has the keyword in the domain but I find it hard to believe that that is what caused such a dramatic and swift drop in rankings. In fact a good portion of the backlinks actually point to "musashifoods.com"...Did I miss something else here? Does Google penalize you for reversing 301 redirects like that instead of just using a new domain altogether? Let me know if I can provide any additional info that would help clarify...any advice is greatly appreciated!0 -
Why are Google Webmaster Tools' Google rankings different to actual Google rankings?
Dear Moz, We have noticed that according to Google Webmaster Tools one of our client sites is ranking very prominently for some of the major key phrases that we are trying to rank them for. However, when we perform a Google search for these queries, our client's content is nowhere to be seen, not even on the 5th page (we logged out of the Google account before performing the test). A long-term manual spam action on our client's site was recently lifted by Google - is it possible that Google Webmaster Tools is providing data about our client's estimated Google rankings, without taking into consideration the penalty of the manual spam action which was taken? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BoomDialogue690 -
How do I rank higher in Bing/Yahoo?
We are doing really well across the board on Google, but having issues in ranking with Bing and Yahoo. What is different between the three search engines? I have read a few articles that Bing is happier with Flash, and they are more interested in Top Level Domain links, but what else is different? In Google we are sitting on page one for most terms, but are page 2-3 in Bing/Yahoo for the exact same terms. Any help would be appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | FVdBeuken0 -
How does Google treat anchor tags on badges after penguin update?
We have a website builder that creates sites in sub-domains (i.e. yoursite.breezi.com) on every site we have included a badge that has anchor text and an image. My question is given the fact that we will include this on many if not most of the sites created inside our builder how will google treat backlinks with the same anchor tag/text from non relevant sites after the penguin update? I am concerned about the backlinks from non-theme related sites and it's SEO implications. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | breezi0 -
How Do Geo Rankings Work?
I know that's vague, so let me specify. I recently got a client on the second page for a relatively difficult 2 word keyword. That is when the location is set to Chicago, Il in Google and private browsing in Chrome (so I'm not logged in). This is great because Chicago is the more important location (the client is located there and that's what his location is when he searches in Google). But when he goes home to the suburbs and searches, the ranking completely disappears. Why would he rank in a much more desired location such as Chicago vs a suburb way out of the city? Is that something you can control or target in terms of optimization? It's difficult trying to explain why this is happening to clients.
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Google Cached Pages
I made some on-site changes to a site last week, in particular their page titles. This was all done on the same day at the same time. Now, one of those pages, got re-indexed on August 8th and has my updated changes, which also helped with my ranking. The other page I made changes to still shows a cached version from July 27th, which is before I made the changes. Why wouldn't google have an updated page from August 8th for both pages, not just one?
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelWeisbaum0