Which is one worst panda or penguin?
-
Which penalty is easier to fix, and how to go about it fixing the issues.
-
Thanks for your responses Matt and Andy, very useful information and I will go into them deeper to workout what is going on with my site.
It's interesting what Andy says about older sites getting hit the mosts as we are seeing new sites with high rankings, when in the "old days" it would take ages for these sites to rank for very competitive keywords.
We have not received a Google webmaster penalty, but have been hit by one of the black and white animals. We have disavowed many links and have seen some recovery, but need to see more progress.
I'll check out the links above and see if it will help in understand what to do.
Thanks again,
ps, if anyone has any more info, do let me know.
Tai
-
Both come with their own unique problems, and each target different areas. Neither is particularly easy to fix, but because Panda covers so much more than just backlinks, that it can take a long time to track down what has caused a hit.
I have worked with companies that have been in Panda and then back out within a few weeks - others, many months.
There are some great articles that can help you track down Panda and Penguin issues, so have listed them below.
Panda
- https://econsultancy.com/blog/8583-how-to-identify-and-fix-google-panda
- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
- http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2069358/Google-Ask-Yourself-These-23-Questions-if-Panda-Impacted-Your-Website
Penguin
- http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-on-googles-penguin-update
- http://www.searchenginejournal.com/an-seos-ultimate-post-penguin-checklist-infographic/48228/
- http://moz.com/ugc/a-theory-for-preventing-recovering-from-a-google-penguin-penalty
All of these are excellent guides that will give you information on how you can best approach these subjects. It is too large an issue to generally tackle here. I have written audits that run into dozens of pages!
Hopefully these will give you a wide range of points to look at
-Andy
-
"Google Penguin is the latest update to Google's algorithm. This update is aimed at websites that are using tactics that are considered a way to game Google's searches."
"Google Panda is the change to the algorithm we see that effects a lot of people who have old sites. To understand Google Panda, it helps to understand Google's core mission. Google wants to deliver the best results for what you are searching. They do NOT want to deliver websites they consider to be low quality and this means when people go to a site from Google's search, if you go back from that search, Google notices it and pushes you down in the search rankings. Some of the factors we have seen effect sites, are poor site design, sites that don't reference their articles through links, sites that are slow to load, sites that use duplicate content over and over again. The bottom line is you need to have a well designed site and creates original content."
Above content sourced from: https://digitalfireflymarketing.com/what-difference-between-panda-and-penguin
Personally, I'd recommend hitting 2 birds with one stone and:
- Removing any trace of suspicious techniques: cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc
- Check your backlink profile on www.opensiteexplorer.org and for each listed link, ask yourself, "would I willingly show this to the Google webspam team".
- Improve your site design and information architecture so that you fulfil users' desires elegantly. I've personally found that a decreasing 'bounce rate' is one of the best indications that your site experience is improving.
Hope this helps and good luck!
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
-
Same URL names in one domain
Hi All, I have 9 different subdirectories for languages in the same domain example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages. I know it is better to translate URLs, but we won't for now, because all the NON-ASCII characters. But we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at least for the main domain URLs? www.example.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz0 -
Case study re-directing one site into another?
Hi there, We have access to a third party site that has high domain authority and we want to know if anyone has a case study demonstrating what happens when you 301-redirect a high DA site to another high DA site. In particular, we are wondering what kind of lift the site saw from the additional link equity?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Crawl errors which ones should i sort out
Hi, just had my website updated to joomla 3.0 and i have around 4000 urls not found. now i have been told i need to redirect these but i would just like to check on here to make sure i am doing the right thing and the advice i have been given is not correct. I have been told these errors are the reason for the drop in rankings. I need to know if i should redirect all of these 4,000 urls or only the ones that are being linked to from outside of the site. I think about 3,000 of these have no links from outside of the site, but if i do not redirect them all then i am going to keep getting the error messages. around 2,000 of these url not found are from the last time we updated the site which was a couple of years ago and i thought they would have died off now. any advice on what i should do would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
Merging two sites into a new one: best way?
Hi, I have one small blog on a specific niche and let's call it firstsite.com (.com extension) and it's hosted on my server. I am going to takeover a second blog on same niche but with lots more links, posts, authority and traffic. But it his on a .info domain and let's call it secondsite.info and for now it's on a different server. I have a third domain .com where I would like join both blogs. Domain is better and reflects niche better and let's call it thirdsite.com How should I proceed to have the best result? I was thinking of creating a new account at my server with domain thirdsite.com After that upload all content from secondsite.info and go to google webmaster to let they know that site now sits on a new domain. Also do a full 301 redirect. Should it be page by page or just one 301 redirect? And finally insert posts (they are not many) from firstsite.com on thirdsite.com and do specific redirects. Is this a good option? Or should I first move secondsite.info to my server and keep updating it and only a few weeks later make transition to thirdsite.com? I am worried that it could be too much changes at once.
Technical SEO | | delta440 -
Trying to Optimize my site for one keyword any advice please
Hi, we are trying to optimize our site www.in2town.co.uk for the keyword of lifestyle magazine. We are having trouble with this. We were last year number one in google for the keyword and then the end of last year we went to position four and now we are on the bottom of the second page and we are not sure what is happening. here is the text view of the site http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5U281SBmDlUJ:www.in2town.co.uk/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=uk&strip=1 I am just wondering if we need to do a better description of the lifestyle magazine at the top as i know it says you should have your keyword within the first 100 words Any help on trying to solve this problem and get the page back where it belongs will be great. I know we have a lot of text on the page so google maybe finding it hard to find out what keywords are what but the only keyword we are interested in this page is lifestyle magazine, in the near future we would be looking at including lifestyle news many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
301 redirect of one site version to new domain
Hello all. I today have domain.com that has 10 language versions and the structure is by folders: domain.com/ru/
Technical SEO | | Gregos
domain.com/pl/ etc. Soon I plan redesign,new CMS and I plan to register 9 new ccTLDs. My question is: Can I 301 redirect domain.com/ru/ to domain.ru without having some bad effect on domain.com? I mean,the main domain,com is not going to be affected by permanent redirect of one url to completly new domain right?0 -
Penguin update pecks at specific terms
Bonjour from 25 degrees C, mediterranean climate change has hit wetherby UK 🙂 Ive got two questions please: 1. I suspect ive been punished for acquiring links with specific commercial terms (but not all) and the site has disappeared off the SERPS 😞 What can i do about this if anything? 2. Where is the best place to find out asap about Google Algorithm tweeks Thanks in advance, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0