Was my site hit by Panda or Penguin? Looking for diagnosis help

[iderma]

My URL is: www.westlakedermatology.com

Hello Mozers,

I'm looking for some help or guidance as to why my site fell off the "rankings cliff" on 9/5. In the forums I hear a lot of others with a similar issue, and some speculation it is due to a Panda refresh. However, looking at our site we have unique content with each page having over 300-400 words (so it's not light or duplicate content). We get a lot of leads that verbally tell us our content helped answer some of their questions so I'm pretty confident its good for users. Can anyone see an issue with the content on our site?

In terms of Penguin, I think our backlink profile is clean, our physicians do take part in providing content to various high quality and relevant websites/blogs. But we do not buy links or do anything in violation of Google's guidelines.

In terms of brand, we are the biggest dermatology and plastic surgery group in the Austin area. So any brand implications to search should be on our side.

Just looking for some sort of guidance or help, any suggestions would be great!

Thanks,
Adam Paddock

[stever999]

Take a look at the Panguin Tool - http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

This tool uses the organic traffic from your GA account and overlays the dates of major Google updates. You can then see if a Google update resulted in a sudden drop in your organic search traffic. Once you know this you can look at what changed as part of that update and check this against your live site.

[Jonathan1979]

I think your brand name could be mistaken as it is quite long, but I don't think that would make much difference with your link profile.  It just isn't natural.

I guess branding is built from a number of signals, such as social media, domain names etc.  Those anchors differ from your domain and your facebook.

I suspect Google is more likely to see your brand as "Westlake Dermatology".

[iderma]

Hi Yiannis, thanks for the great feedback. Our actual brand name is Westlake Dermatology & Cosmetic Surgery (and some people commonly refer to us as Westlake Dermatology as we started off just in dermatology). So do you think it's a case of Google seeing it as over optimized anchor text when in fact it is our brand name?

[artdivision]

Hi Christopher,

I think the answer is pretty obvious,the rule applies to anchor texts of specific keyphrases that are non branded. Google allows a higher threshold of brand name anchor texts because that's how people would naturally link to you. High percentage domain/brand match anchor text is generally a very good SEO practice (way before Penguin release).

In the case of our friend here we have an EMD and 80-90% of his overal link profile with exact and contextual anchor text links. Also the exact key phrase he down-ranked is around 10% of the profile. I am pretty sure that there is not a rule set in stone with % for NON-branded keyphrases but **from my experience (thus not necessarily a  rule) **in the sector I work at when I had to deal with penalised sites this was one of the common features I dealt with.

Again, the answers are within his data!

Regards

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much

I've seen comments like this before but I've never been clear on what it means.  Does this rule apply to anchor text with brand names or the name of the website?  For example, isn't it natural for the anchor text "Nike" to be frequently used for the URL nike.com?

Best,
Christopher

[iderma]

Hi Jonathan, thank you for your response, I totally thought most of those site wide links you are referring to were no follow (at least they were no follow the last time I checked). But I just popped them in opensiteexplorer and it does seem to be follow now. I'll get that cleaned up and see if that helps

[artdivision]

I recently had to deal with an identical case but I would never be able to tell you for sure unless I have a look at your google webamsters and google analytics data. Go and have a look at your site impressions, visits per and avg.position drops. Make sure that you have comparison on so you can see how your pages and keywords respond to last months.

Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much (have seen web sites with more not being penalised so this is not a rule) and it would be good to keep it a bit lower around 5-6%. That goes for your contextual anchor text links which in your case seems to be 80-90% of your profile.

All these ofcourse are guesses and speculation based on my experience, only your data will tell what happens but what Jonathan suggests above wont harm you, quiet the contrary it will improve your link profile.

[Jonathan1979]

I have had a quick look at your site via opensiteexplorer.  It would seem you are a featured site for allaboutthepretty, which is generating huge numbers of unnatural links pointing at your site with identical anchor text.

My first port of call would be reviewing your link profile, and removing these spammy links.  I suspect the 1139 links with "westlake dermatology cosmetic surgery" as anchor text is contributing to a penguin penalty.

There are some other spammy links as well such as "face list austin tx" 2138 links.  You should try to avoid site-wide sidebar links from other sites that generate huge numbers of links.  For instance mommypr site has alot of image links, and 3boysandadog site too.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.westlakedermatology.com

Edit:  Just to add, you don't have to remove good links that provide traffic, but do make sure they add rel="nofollow" to the sitewide links such as mommypr.