Recent Penguin Update
-
Hi SEOMoz,
Today www.carrentalbuddy.com.au was hit pretty big by the Penguin 2.0 update (I believe).
We had some pretty strong rankings for multiple search terms and we believe we have done everything by the book for Google.
We can't seem to figure out why our rankings have dropped so dramatically recently and was hoping that some SEOMoz's could take a quick look to help us fix this problem.
Kindest Regards,
Chris
-
I have seen any changes in rankings related with penguin 2.0
-
I don't know if you've done everything "by the book" like you say but you have tons of exact match anchors.
-
Check this out:
http://searchengineland.com/penguin-4-with-penguin-2-0-generation-spam-fighting-is-now-live-160544
It is official. I suspect this may be your issue. Since you have done everything "by the book", your site might not have done anything wrong per say. Instead, the other sites may have been deemed bigger "authorities."
-
Any notices or warnings in GWMT?
edit: nevermind, I've been under a rock for a few hours.
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
-
Did I get hit with a panda update?
I have a site that is a marketplace. We don't own any items, the sellers fill everything out and then it goes up on the site. Many of our sellers also have their own sites and just send us a spreadsheet with all of their items and we bulk upload. In that case what we are putting up is very similar to what they already have up on their own site. I used the Fruition penalty checker and they seem to be suggesting that we got hit with some penalties for Panda and Quality Content. With the Google Algorithm it is hard to know for sure what we got hit with. Is it possible Google sees us as one of those crappy scraper sites? Is there anything we can do? We never see the items so I can't add to peoples description.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
New Google Update on 21st April
Hi We all know that the mobile update is coming on the 21st April and if your site isnt mobile friendly in Googles eye you will be removed from the mobile index. Will this affect tablets. Most of our pages are mobile friendly but there are a few which arent. However these are tablet friendly. I havent heard Google mention about tablet rankings. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Migrating EMD to brand name domain. Risk of Penguin Penalty?
We would like to migrate from an EMD to a brand name domain, since our service offer has become much broader than indicated by the current EMD. The current domain name is a money keyword. Do you believe there is a big risk of suffering a penguin penalty if we go ahead with the domain migration, due to large share of anchor texts containing keyword of old domain name? Quick facts about our site:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
-about 500.000 pages indexed by google PR6 10 years old 1200 linking root domains 30% of linking root domains contain our domain name with domain ending as anchor text 5% of linking root domains have just the domain keyword as anchor text Any thoughts?
Thanks0 -
Updated Wordpress version and installed SEO plugin, ranking went down
Last week, we updated our Wordpress version to the most recent version, and installed the SEO plugin. Our rankings immediately went down from #9 to #19. Is this normal? Will our rankings improve once the search engines crawl our site in the next couple weeks? Any feedback is helpful!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | safiaabbasi0 -
Dealing with Penguin: Changing URL instead of removing links
I have some links pointing to categories from article directories, web directories, and a few blogs. We are talking about 20-30 links in total. They are less than 5% of the links to my site (counting unique domains). I either haven't been able to make contact with webmasters, or they are asking money to remove the links. If I simply rename the URL (for example changing mysite.com/t-shirt.html to mysite.com/tshirts.html), will that resolve any penguin issues? The link will forward to the homepage since that page no longer exists. I really want to avoid using the disavow tool if possible. I appreciate the feedback. If you have actually done this, please share your experience.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Following Penguin 2.0 hit in May, my site experienced another big drop on August 13th
Hi everyone, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May. This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame. On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google. At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction. So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner. However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs : Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added. As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!! I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached. In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs. So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business. However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions) My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process. I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design. I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My website is ConcertHotels.com. Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Community question- Penguin 2.0 link types?
What type of links do you think Penguin 2.0 targeted most - anchor text abuse , directory links, paid links, low quality guest posts, article directories etc????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
Is "Car Discount" a problematic anchor text for CarDiscount.com (google penguin)?
I have a couple of partial match domains in the format KEYOWRDdiscount.com and also the website name resembles domain name. "Car Discount" is not my website but just an example to illustrate:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Is "Car Discount" a problematic anchor text for CarDiscount.com?
Should I try to modify existing external anchor texts to "CarDiscount" or "CarDiscount.com" instead of "Car Discount" Do you know of any cases where such anchor texts coinciding with partial match domain were likely reason for penguin penalization? Thanks.0