80% of traffic lost over night, Google Penalty?
-
Hi all.
I have a website called Hemjakt (http://www.hemjakt.se/) which is a search engine for real estate currently only available on the Swedish market. The application crawl real estate websites and collect all estates on a single searchable application. The site has been released for a few months and have seen a steady growth since release, increasing by 20% weekly up to ~900 visitors per day.3 days ago, over night, I lost 80% of my traffic. Instead of 900 visitors per day I'm at ~100 visitors per day and when I search for long, specific queries such as "Åsgatan 15, Villa 12 rum i Alsike, Knivsta" ( <adress><house type=""><rooms><area> <city>), I'm now only found on the fifth page.
I suspect that I have become a subject of a Google Penalty. How to get out of this mess?</city></rooms></house></adress>
Just like all search engines or applications, I do crawl other websites and scrape their content. My content is ~90% unique from the source material and I do add user value by giving them the possibility to compare houses, get ton of more data to compare pricing and history, giving them extra functionalities that source site do not offer and so on. My analytics data show good user engagement.
Here is one example of a Source page and a page at my site:
Source: http://www.hemnet.se/bostad/villa-12rum-alsike-knivsta-kommun-asgatan-15-6200964
My Site: http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/55860-asgatan-15/So:
-
How do I actually confirm that this is the reason I lost my traffic? When I search for my branded query, I still get result. Also I'm still indexed by Google.
-
If I am penalized. I'm not attempting to do anything Black Hat and I really believe that the app gives a lot of value to the users. What tweaks or suggestions do you have to changes of the application, to be able to continue running the service in a way that Google is fine with?
-
-
because you have no backlinks you have six total and your site apparently has an incredible amount of duplicate content after running it through screening frog and site liner you have a ton of broken links as well.
From only scanning 250 pages total I was able to come up with quite a few huge issues
with out the www.
400 Bad Request:
Top Issues
1,301 pages were not scanned.
772 broken links were found.
Your site is missing an XML Sitemap.
WWW vs. non-WWW: Server error.Your Pages
250 pages scanned of 1,551 found.
Normal Pages: 67
Skipped, Redirect: 10
Errors: 173
Not Scanned: 1,301Duplicate Content
Duplicate Content: 15%
Common Content: 59%
Unique Content: 25%** the complete PDF report is right here http://cl.ly/WF4O will**
http://www.siteliner.com/www.hemjakt.se/omrade/centralt/?siteliner=broken
OSE backlinks http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hemjakt.se%2F
After using the elite addition of Ahrefs ( the different editions offer different abilities) Summary of links found for www.hemjakt.se
You have roughly 2 domain backlinks total from utilizing both tools I would run it through MajesticSEO but I do not see the point.
you need to fix the problems with your site I have a guess as to how you are ranking, but I do not believe it was natural.
If you had built that many pages on a website and really gotten only about 5 or 6 backlinks out of that only 2 our from domains/ IP's to link to your site total I would find that impossible to believe.
You have clearly scraped them or somebody else has been doing a lot of scraping and you may not know about it.
Here is a lot of information I hope this helps,
Thomas
-
I would say that your site goes against the Google guidelines in regards to thin content: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604719?hl=en
Part of the description of thin content includes "automatically generated content" and "copied content".
Have you checked your Webmaster Tools console to see if you have been given a thin content penalty? Check Search Traffic --> Manual Actions. If there isn't one though, then Panda is probably still the culprit.
-
If your site is only a couple of months old, it's possible that you initially had a honeymoon boost and now you're seeing the traffic you would normally get. But, I think that there is a more serious issue.
According to Google there are over 72,000 pages of your site indexed. How many of these pages contain useful and UNIQUE content that users can't find anywhere else on the web? If you're crawling other people's sites and publishing their content as yours then you're just asking to be demoted by the Panda algorithm. The only thing that doesn't exactly fit with this is the date. As far as we know the last Panda update was May 20. Still, this is my best guess.
"My content is ~90% unique from the source material and I do add user value..."
I would not agree here. In the examples that you gave me, I see that the majority of the actual content (i.e. the text) is 100% copied from the original source. There are several issues with this:
1. Google will see that the vast majority of your site contains content that did not originate with you. This is a sign of low quality and Google will not want to display your site over the originator of that content.
2. Copyright issues. Do you have permission to scrape these sites?
I haven't had a thorough look but from what I've seen, I don't think that this business model will work.
-
Oh yes - I'm sorry about that. So the duplicate content issue still applies, and now I've tested your website - it is quite slow but not as bad as the example I gave. I'd still recommend improving the speed.
Do you link to the website you're scraping the content from? Do you have permission to publish it?
I'm assuming at this stage you don't have any messages from Google in WMT about penalties. Can you pinpoint any onsite changes you made before the traffic drop?
Considering the duplicate content on your site I'm surprised you ranked so well and saw the traffic increases you did - so with your absence of links perhaps the website is at it's natural position at the moment. I have no experience of real estate websites or the Swedish market and competition within it though.
You could consider adding some unique content to the homepage and other location pages - something useful for users. If I was moving to a new city I'd want to know about the different neighbourhoods and which area suited me - which areas are quiet, near to parks? Which have good (public) transport links, might be noisy, have amenities nearby? These could be expanded into really useful standalone location guides, with pictures, maps and more info added.
-
Not sure what you are talking about. There are no links in the footer, there's no footer. On category pages there is a infinity scroll and on normal pages there are no footer at all.
On a normal house page there is only about ~55 <a>tags. </a>
-
Hi Alex thanks for your response.
That is not my website you are linking to, that is the source website that I crawl the content from in the example above.
The domains are very similar so easy to mix up.
Hemjakt.se is my site.
Hemnet.se is the source that I crawled.So in this case if you want to do a Pingdom Speed Test on that page, you should do it on the following URL: http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/55860-asgatan-15/
But to answer the rest of your question:
- No there have been no significant speed changes to the website according to Google Analytics Speed Page. The last bump when speed times was increased temporarily was 2 weeks ago and only for 1 day.
- The site is hosted on Amazon with a CDN for all images. The site is not perfect but there have been a lot of time spend on making sure that the load times are decent and that the site get a OK score in Google Insights Speed Test.
Here is the Overview page from my Google Analytics to display my Bounce Rate and so on.
Regarding the Bounce Rate. It was ~66% when I had 0 goals set for the site. When I set up goals such as completing forms, viewing the gallery of each house etc the bounce rate dropped to ~38%. That is the reason for the bounce rate drop. -
Footer links are not usually an issue unless you're using them for keyword spamming e.g. you have a load for different locations: "buy house london", "buy house manchester", "buy house liverpool" etc. You won't get a penalty for having over 100 links on a page so that's unlikely to be the issue either.
I've had a quick look at your website and there are two major issues I picked up on:
- Duplicate content - you say you crawl websites and your content is "90% unique from the source material". The content would be better if 90% of it was unique to your website only. I searched Google for a block of text from one of the links you provided and 5 websites appeared. Google doesn't like duplicate content - maybe your website does provide value to users but how can Google's algorithm know this if all it sees is duplicate content? Perhaps your site had poor user metrics (e.g. people pressing back to return to the search results page after a short period of time on your website) so Google demoted it. Can you see any evidence of this in Google Analytics?
- I tested http://www.hemnet.se/bostad/villa-12rum-alsike-knivsta-kommun-asgatan-15-6200964 on Pingdom Speed Test and "Your website is slower than 92% of all tested websites" - has a recent change caused that slowdown? Is the site registered with Google Webmaster Tools? If so, can you see a change in page speed, crawl rate etc.? Google Analytics can also report on page speed. That's very slow and if it's a recurring problem the first thing I'd fix.
While I was browsing this happened to me twice "Just nu har vi tekniska problem".
-
Remove some footer links. More footer links cab be affected any kind of website.No more then 100 links per page.
-
What? Not sure what you're talking about.
Here is an example of a page on my site:
http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/59873-soldatgatan-13-b/ -
As per my knowledge can you delete footer links then i am sure you will rank again.
You putting more and more links in footer.
Thanks,
Akhilesh
-
What is your suggestion to solve it?
I truely think my application can add a lot of value to the users by giving them a chance to find a lot of data at the same spot, instead of having to navigate to a bunch of other sites. Since I also get access to "Big data" I can add a lot of value to the users by displaying price history from multiple sources.
I'm not trying to do anything shady or black hat. I'm just trying to create a search engine for real estate. Obviously that will generate a lot of content and many pages in a short amount of time.
What am I doing that is against the Google Guidelines? I doubt that "Adding pages too fast" is a reason to give a penalty, but more suspicious activity that would indiciate that a closer look by Google would be needed to see if any spam is going on.
-
Means in your website no instances (Inbound links). I think you create more pages in very short of time that's the reason behind this.
-
I have done no linkbuilding for this site. I have only focused on building a strong crawler and with ~60'000 pages/houses indexed I have been able to rank well on long queries with low competition, and thereby getting good traffic without any linkbuilding.
Moz reports 0 links and from my Google Analytics report I have only been getting some referral traffic from Reddit, a post that has now been deleted. All other traffic is organic search traffic. So I highly doubt that there are any "bad links" that is causing this punishment.
Regarding the crawler. I crawl other websites for real estate objects. I cache the HTML and I then filter out specific information such as price, number of rooms, address and so on.
I then publish this data with my own structure. This makes the data 87-90% unique if compared to the Source site. You can see example in the first post of this topic.
The 10-13% that is not unique, is the description of the real estate object which is usually a 1-2 paragraph text saying something like "This is an amazing house with 12 rooms with a great view that would be a perfect fit for the large family". This text is copied straight off. Which might be what gives me the punishment? Even if its only 10% of the page content. What do you think?
-
HI Marcus Lind,
Can you share me what activity have you done for SEO for this website and how much anchor and which anchor text created by you.
After that we can say clearly what is the exact issue.
-
Please note that I have not done any link building at all to the site, it's only 2 months old. There are no unnatural links, no keyword stuffing and no other black hat seo tactics used. No links have been purchased at all, so Penguin should not be relevant to this site.
I've attached an image of my Google Analytics Overview for the past months, and you can see how it has been naturally steadily growing day by day and then just taking a huge drop the last few days.
-
That's fantastic that you been keeping track of your Bing queries and it sounds like you've been hit by a penalty and going for. I am guessing
i can pull link data for you however my girlfriends want to kill me if I don't stop answering questions right now so look for my answer in about six hours of use
Ahrefs majestic SEO & Moz
-
Try running your queries in Bing and see how it compares. If you see the terms you ranked for earlier ranking well in Bing, then you know you've been hit by a penalty in Google.
That's what made it clear for a site I'm involved with and have been trying to recover for many months now.
-
I'm very sorry to hear that this is happened to you. Here is some information I hopefully helpful
This URL may say on the video that you have to be a member to see the video however you do not have to remember to read the transcript. Therefore read the transcript use the tool that tries to gauge now this is not 100% but it might give you a lot more insight into what's actually occurred. You have to have Moz opensiteexplorer.com and another tool like MajesticSEO.com or Ahrefs.com
I like Ahrefs however either one will do.Your first step is to Google “fruition Google penalty tool”,
https://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/
because that will bring up a cool tool that will show you whether or not you’ve been hit by Google Penguin, because there are several updateshttp://www.quicksprout.com/university/how-to-identify-and-recover-from-a-google-penguin-penalty/
So your aware this link shows a video that you may not be able to see you and I sure remember however because it is fully transcribed you have a exact how-to manual right below it.
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
-
How good/bad the exit intent pop-ups? What is Google's perspective?
Hi all, We have launched the exit intent pop-ups on our website where a pop-up will appear when the visitor is about to leave the website. This will trigger when the mouse is moved to the top window section; as an attempt by the visitor to close the window. We see a slight ranking drop post this pop-up launch. As the pop-up is appearing just before someone leaves the website; does this making Google to see as if the user left because of the pop-up and penalizing us? What is your thoughts and suggestions on this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Its posible to use Google Authorship in an online shop?
Today I installed Google Authorship in my Wordpress Blog and I would like to know if its posible to implement it in my Opencart online shop. I am not interested in rich snippets because I have 9k of products and the 90% of them dont have sells nor reviews
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mozismoz0 -
Non Manual penalties, should I trash my site?
My URL is: www.adserve.com.au I get no traffic from google and I am convinced that I have penalties from the links that point to my page. I have written to google previously and they told me that there are no manual penalties on the site. I give up... I am shelving my ENTIRE brand and starting again with a new site, http://www.trusignage.com, I do not want to do this but... If I do a search for
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdAdam
"Using and implementing the AdServe digital menu board system couldn’t be easier! Just get any screen installed by a tradesman or electrician, plug the digital menu board device" two pages from within my site come up but my homepage does not, it comes up when you click on "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed" A search for
"The AdServe system comprises of only one tiny component that can plug directly into the HDMI port of a screen. Traditional digital signage systems require drilling into walls, running cables, a bunch of valuable space and the installation of several pieces of costly"
Brings up another 2 pages from my site, when clicking on "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed."
My homepage does not even come up... but the homepage of my new site http://www.trusignage.com comes up. My new site is at http://www.trusignage.com there is only 2 pages of duplicate content, the about us and the buy now page.
Is google going to penalise my new site? I WILL NOT DO ANY SEO, only on page......... I wont hire any SEO firm at all. My old site has a few great links to it
http://www.sixteen-nine.net/2013/06/24/android-digital-signage-closer-adserve/
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/adserve-digital-signage
I also have many of my REAL youtube videos that link to my site, maybe about 15
If I 301 redirect my penalised site to my new one am I just poisoning my new site as well? I could get the links changed instead. I will have to keep my old site www.adserve.com.au as I have customers who go to that site to lookup my contact details for support etc. will google see the same phone number and address etc and think I am trying to fill google up with duplicate websites? I would really prefer to keep www.adserve.com.au for Australian clients and usewww.trusignage.com for international clients, if the site layout is the same but all of the site passes copyscape then will I get hurt by duplicate content?
Google is ruining me.. I have no money to spend on adwords right now. I have a new highly inovative software product that has taken almost 2 years to develop and I think I deserve more than 4 visits per month. My actual business has been around for 7 years.
I invented SaaS digital signage in 2007 http://youtu.be/-YpyjLALoBU find me some web based digital signage system that was around prior to 2010?
This is me and my product http://youtu.be/ClXSiIA5DRY
Why should my site be treated as trash by google? I have in the past employed a SEO firm and if I search for "If you are looking for the top provider of digital signage in Australia, visit today" I find 70 absolute crap links to my site. I have disvowed them, there must be more links somewhere but I have no money or time to chase down site owners to remove them when I do not even know if I can get them all and have no guarantee that this will even help.. So bottom line, do I need to junk my www.adserve.com.au site? There is no getting away from what some SEO company has spammed in the past?
And again, using a tool to hunt down these spam links and try to get them removed will tie up my own time that needs to be spent on developing my software and I have no cash to pay people to do this for me. [edited by staff because line breaks weren't showing]0 -
Is there a way to check if your site has a Google penalty?
Is there a way to find out if your site has an over optimization penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
Confusing penalties
Dear Mozzers, I've been working on a friend's website that is fighting for pretty competitive keywords (+90,000 gms) and has been relying almost exclusively on $1800/mo of comment spam to rank on the first page. Now that I've taken over SEO my first priorities were to: eliminate duplicate content improve site structure optimize internal links build legitimate do-follows add some keyword density fix titles and H tags Essentially just the basics, right? But since cancelling the comment spam, rankings for their primary keyword have consistently dropped over the last 3 months. I'm using the same strategies that I've used successfully on at least 6 similar websites. At the moment their homepage is still almost entirely duplicate content -- which is obviously a huge problem, but it seems a little odd that they could have been held up exclusively by that comment spam for so long, doesn't it? Even stranger, their authority and trust scores are now higher than any of the competition. Needless to say, my friends are getting pretty antsy and I'm starting to second guess myself. Do you think I should continue to push them to improve content, eliminate penalties, and build legitimate links -- or should I give in and suggest buying links as a short term solution? Advice is really appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brevityworks0 -
How does Google rank a websites search queries
Hello, I can't seem to find an answer anywhere. I was wondering how a websites search query keyword string url can rank above other page results that have stronger backlinks. The domain is usually strong, but that url with the .php?search=keyword just seems like it doesn't fit in. How does Google index those search string pages? Is it based off of traffic alone to that url? Because those urls typically don't have backlinks, right? Has anyone tried to rank their websites search query urls ever? I'm just a little curious about it. Thanks everyone. Jesse
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | getrightmusic0