Penguin 3.0 hit caused by Pinterest?
-
I've read the FAQs and searched the help center. My URL is: http://www.weplann.comHello there,Since 10/24 we've seen a critical impact in organic results in our site. At first, only taking a look at the date of when it all started made us think about a Penguin 3.0 hit and then we went to take a look at our linking data to find we had more than 14,000 links from Pinterest (significantly more than any other source). Then, another thing that made us think about that dramatic organic drop is the anchor text: an exact match (www.weplann.com) is at #1 in our anchor text ranking but we're not 100% sure if this could affect our organic results because of the Penguin update.So our questions are:- A lot of Pinterest links could affect dramatically our organic results (understanding that Google may find that huge difference between linking sources as a bad practice)?- The anchor text exact match could really affect our ranking? If none of this points could cause that drop, then what would be causing it? We're sure it has to do with the Penguin update.Thank you very much in advance for your help!!
-
To my knowledge, Pinterest is a very high quality linking source. Having several links back and forth should mean that you have an equal amount of images, products and/or pages. No matter how good the source is, when you over use something it doesn't look natural.
From what I understand, Penguin 3.0 really targeted linking "neighborhoods". This means that you could see an effect because of link associations that your linking sources have. That could be Pinterest, but my gut tells me that it is probably some other source. These social media sites are pretty safe and usually have ways to prevent bad associations.
Have you used Open Site Explorer to compare what you have in GWT? I would just take a look and see what the quality of your links are and if there is any low hanging fruit you should disavow. You want to find high quality linking sources, these are the safest. I would try to eliminate links from low ranking domains with not a lot of root links behind them.
You might be suffering the effects of someone else's bad links. Have you received any manual notices in GWT?
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
-
Search Causing Duplicate Content
I use Opencart and have found that a lot of my duplicate content (mainly from Products) which is caused by the Search function. Is there a simple way to tell Google to ignore the Search function pathway? Or is this particular action not recommended? Here are two examples: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search&tag=cloth http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=product/search
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Question spam malware causing many indexed pages
Hey Mozzers, I was speaking with a friend today about a site that he has been working on that was infected when he began working on it. Here (https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:themeliorist.ca) you can see that the site has 4400 indexed pages, but if you scroll down you will see some pages such as /pfizer-viagra-samples/ or /dapoxetine-kentucky/. All of these pages are returning 404 errors, and I ran it through SEO spider just to see if any of these pages would show up, and they don't. This is not an issue for a client, but I am just curious why these pages are still hanging around in the index. Maybe others have experience this issue too. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Possible Penguin 2.1 fix - Anybody tested this?
Possible Penguin 2.1 fix? This happened to client site - Stay with me - this takes some explaining… A clients home page is set as index.html Which in domain settings goes to the root address: http://www.domain.com/ But is a setting on a domain/hosting - you can set any page to the root- I always link directly to the root address (the second one) So if you set the new root page as http://www.domain.com/index.htm --- going to the root - essentially is a new page- any previous poor linking would be then broken and would have no effect So it would be a matter of changing the domain settings to use the index.htm page (which would function exactly the same- internal link structure of site goes to the root) thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OnlineAssetPartners0 -
Is it Penguin or is it just a shoddy website?!
Right, I'm struggling and could really do with a different perspective on a website I am working on http://www.data-contracts.co.uk/ This is an Analytics image for March through to July of organic unique visitors http://imgur.com/Y2zaekP The page for concrete repair is struggling in the rankings and is currently residing somewhere like page 15 on Goooooogle. Is there anyway back??? Y2zaekP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
I was hit bad by Penguin on 4-24-12.
I was hit bad by Penguin on 4-24-12. Never received a bad link warning from Google but I do have lots of bad links from a SEO company years ago. I canceled with them and they kept sending automated links with the same anchor text. I even asked Google to remove the bad links years before the penguin update I have removed many bad links by contacting webmasters and have used disavowal tool twice. 6 Months later still no improvement. Is it possible that Google needs more time to disavowal bad links ? What about 301 redirect to a new domain? Anyone ever have long term success with 301. What about 301 after using the disavowal tool any luck? What about changing my domain, will it take months for site to move up, anyone with experience trying this? Let me know any ideas. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DWatters0 -
Pinterest
This is a bit of a rant, to be fair, but I'd appreiciate peoples opinions all the same... If you search google in the US for long hairstyles at around position 4 and 5 there are a couple of pinterest pages that are just doorway pages for the sites they link (or mostly link) to. The first one http://pinterest.com/hairstylesweekl/long-hairstyles-for-women-2012-2013-long-hairstyle/ is said to have 6k pinterest followers, I can't fathom why a doorway page to such a low pagerank site would get that many but it doesn't look like they've bought them. And the second one http://pinterest.com/hairstylesvane/long-prom-hairstyles/ is so blatent. 20 or so pictures all from the same site. Google seems intent on penalising "wrong doers" while everyone else gets caught in the crossfire and yet someone throws a pinterest doorway page together in 1/2 an hour and it gets near the top for a relatively large search term. Panda/penguin etc were sold to us as a fix for low quality and spam but instead it seems to have given a free meal ticket to people like this and yet established sites get kicked in the teeth by arbitrary penalties and negative seo.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
SEO & Magento Multistore - I have been asked if "duplicatiing" a magento stor using its "Multistore" functionality will cause both to be picked up as duplicate content, can anybody help?
Hello all. I have been asked what the consequences of using Magento's "multistore" functionality are if we were to duplicate our entire magento store and place it on a secondary domain... The simple answer which comes to my mind is that it will be a flagged as duplicate content. However, is this still the case if the site were placed in a different country? The original being the UK the copy being Ireland (both English speaking) How would Google.co.uk & Google.ie treat these stores? Hope this is clear... our site is http://www.tower-health.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TowerHealth0 -
Will this internal linking feature cause canonicalization issues?
This is a canonicalization type question, so I believe it should be a pretty straightforward answer. I just haven't had much experience with using the canonical tag so I felt I should ask so I don't blow up my site 🙂 Ok, let's say I have a product page that is at: - www.exampledomain.com/products/nameofproduct Now on that page I have an option to see all of the specs of the product in a collapsible tab which I want to link to from other pages - So the URL to this tab ends from other pages ends up being: - www.exampledomain.com/products/nameofproduct?=productspecs This will link to the tab and default it to open when someone clicks that link on another page. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understand canonicalization correctly I believe creating this link is going to cause a duplicate page that has the opportunity to be indexed and detract from our SEO to the main product page. My question is... where do I put the "rel=canonical" tag to point the SEO value back to the main page since the page is dynamically generated and doesn't have its own file on the server? - or do even need to be concerned with this? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of the above. Like I said - this is something I am fairly familiar with how it works, but I haven't had much experience with using. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler0