Affected by the Penguin 2.0...Lost Rankings!! Which one from the following causes did that?
-
Hi Moz Community,
we lost our rankings for almost all of our keywords due to penguin 2.0
I'm trying to rectify the situation by getting our rankings back and better. Here are the potential causes for our rankings drop.
1. My Company has the exact same site (in English) on different country-specific domains. companyname.com, companyname.ch, companyname.ca, companyname.nl etc..
We are using link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://companyname.com"
**Would this solve the duplicate content issue? **
2. All the international domains have footer links in the homepages, pointing to our main .com site. Google webmaster tools shows that every page on these international domains as a backlink source.
Would that be a problem? Should I ask our web designers to remove those footer links from the international domains?
3. In the past, our company had a partnership with forum...Like the forum promotes our company's services. I don't know how did that forum promoted our site, But Google webmaster tools shows that we have some 25K backlinks from that forum!!! But when I try to visit those backlinks, none of those pages have any links to our site....Could they be hidden? Or Some thing wrong with GWT?
I'd appreciate your valuable suggestions to help us understand the situation better...
Thank you.
-
Hey Chris,
Even I had the same reaction when I first started with this company, Why would you need all these sites...With the exact same content. They have different plans and ideas or probably misguided by some SEO guy!
Regarding the vast number of links from the forum, None of the backlink tools like OSE, Ahrefs is showing those links apart from GWT.
I'm thinking to Disavow that forum's domain. Hopefully, that should work!!
Thank for the response.
-
You must understand what Penguin is AntiWebSpam filter. You must control backlink profile of your site. Your profile must looking naturally. Not only your targeted keywords as anchor texts, not only backlinks on your homepage. For understanding structure of your backlink profile you can use Majestic SEO or Ahrefs (OSE on my opinion not perfect). And often after checking backlink profile I clearly understand what is wrong.
-
What's the purpose of having all those duplicate sites? Why not just 301 them and eliminate that as a possible cause of the problem--especially if some of them are showing up in the results? That would take care of #2, as well. As far as #3, have you tried any other tools to see if you can look at those links--OSE, MajesticSEO, or Ahrefs? Have you communicated with the webmaster there about them, documented it, and disavowed them?
-
Hi Tom,
First of all, thanks lot for your reply.
Funny thing is, Despite having the rel="alternate" included in our international domains. Some of them are ranking and in fact outranking our .com domain pages for some keywords.
How is that possible?
And your suggestion about putting a nofollow for the footer links is something I'm thinking to do.
-
Hi Eduard
First of all, if your site was effected by the Penguin 2.0 update, then your duplicate page content wouldn't have been the trigger. That has to do with the Panda algorithm (which is now part of the main algorithm), so if the drop came during the Penguin update, you could have a whole number of different problems with your site as well.
My advice would be to run your site through the Panguin tool: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
This will line up your organic traffic with announced Google updates - see if your drop matches up with the Penguin update. If it does, then you have a whole number of things to check about the inbound links to your website.
To answer the questions you posted:
-
That should do the trick - the only problem is that by setting a canonical version you are instructing Google not to rank or consider any of the alternate versions. A more ideal solution in my opinion would be to rewrite the content for the other sites, ensuring no chance of a duplicate content penalty and giving the other sites a chance to rank.
-
I've seen this be a problem with Penguin before and every time I've seen it fixed the links have either been removed or have been made nofollow. You may want to limit the amount of pages the footer links appear (just core landing pages) and also make them nofollow.
Hope this helps
-
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
-
HTML and XML sitemaps for one website.
Hi all, First, we have created a HTML sitemap for our wordpress website. Then we again generated XML sitemap and submitted same in search console. It's been more than a week and still new XML sitemap has not been indexed yet. I can still only see HTML sitemap for search results "company sitemap". Also search console do have only XML sitemap. Both sitemaps are accessible but only HTML has been indexed. Is there anything wrong having 2 sitemaps? Why XML sitemap not been indexed? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Are non-breaking spaces ( ) in keyword phrases bad for ranking
Hello all, I came across a tip for avoiding text orphans in responsive design by putting a non-breaking space between the last two words. While this works nicely, I was wondering if I did this inside of a keyword phrase, would it still rank equally as well? Or will it be viewed as separate phrases or terms? Thanks, Roman
Web Design | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
2 or more wordpress installs on 1 domain
Hi ....I need to know if anyone has any concerns of running 2 or more WordPress installs on one domain and if so what would the concerns be. The situation is that we have a static html site that has a WordPress blog....and it is installed in example.com/blog/ . We will upgrade the static site to WordPress and this WordPress install will be in example.com/monkeys/ and then we will point its address to the root and make all other needed changes when ready to go live...but the install will stay in its own directory. So bottom-line is we have one domain with two WordPress installs that are each installed in their own sub directory and run from their own independent databases. There are quite a number of reasons for us to want to do this but I wont get into that......I just want to know if anyone has any concerns with this setup? The research we have done says its OK as well as our hosting provider....but before we get cracking we thought maybe one more "educated" input would make us feel more comfortable. Thanks
Web Design | | nomad-2023230 -
Should Our Mobile Responsive Version of our Ecommerce Site include the on Page content to Help with Rankings
Hello All, We are soon to launch our new redesigned website along with a mobile responsive version but i have noticed we currently don't include the on page Content we have on the mobile version which we have on the desktop version to help with rankings etc. I am not sure how google does mobile research with regards to rankings. We have designed our responsive version to be as user friendly as possible at the expense of having to much clutter/content but I am wondering now , if we will rank on mobile if all our on page content isn't present. Just wondered if we should include it at the bottom of the pages with say a "Read more" extension to help avoid clutter? Any advice greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Web Design | | PeteC120 -
Site as one page - SEO implications
We may be inheriting a site and will be asked to do SEO for it. We will have control over the development of the site, so this structure is what it is. My question is - how significant of an impact do you think this is going to have and can you think of any workarounds that may help? Basically, the user experience of the site will feel similar to multiple pages. However, this site will, in essence be one page and pull various content through javascript from different locations. I have not seen the site yet (and believe it is still in development), but this is how it has been explained to me. Any thoughts? My first thought was to add a blog to add page depth to the site and expand the content. Any other thoughts are welcome and appreciated. Thanks. (I know this is limited information, I'm sorry. It's just about all I have to work with right now, and I was a little concerned and was hoping for a second opinion)
Web Design | | AdamWormann0 -
How do I optimize a site designed to be one scrolling page of content?
Our website uses section ID's as its navigation so all the content is on one page. When you click About Us, the page scrolls down to About Us. Products, the page scrolls to Products section, and etc. I am getting crawl errors for meta descriptions but will this go away once the main domain has this info? We just added the meta keywords and description to the header and since the navigation sections use the same page, I assume it will correct the errors. Any other advice on optimizing for site designs like ours would be great. www.theicecubekit.com is the site. Thanks,
Web Design | | bangbang
Chris0 -
Changing from Squarespace to Wordpress - Will I Lose My Rankings?
I have a friend who has a squarespace site that is giving him lots of trouble. For one, even though it is supposed to redirect to GreenSpaceConstruct.com...Bing and Yahoo don't seem to recognize this domain. Instead, they show greenlightconstruct.squarespace.com in the serp's. Oddly, Google shows the site as GreenSpaceConstruct.com. The site is ranking well for some terms. I'm afraid that converting to wordpress will hurt his rankings in the short term. If bing and yahoo are crawling this squarespace domain, and he moves it...is there a way not to just completely lose the rankings? Thanks for any thoughts. Much appreciated! Josh
Web Design | | JoshTurner0 -
Landing Page - is this one a good landing page?
Hello Everyone, I want to ask about this landing page: http://www.rpgdicas.com.br/builds/diablo-2/build-necromancer-summoner-diablo-2.html It's in portuguese-brazil. What should I improve? Any tipps will be apreciated keywords: Build Necromancer Summoner, build necromancer summoner diablo 2, so on... thanks, everyone.
Web Design | | augustos0