Slapped by the Penguin
-
We had a client's website hit hard by the Penguin update, particularly on the 24th. Sitewide each keyword lost 10-20 positions. It was in #1 or #2 for the past couple years.
We optimize all of our websites onpage features well and within the whitehat realm. Since this was the only website affected out of 50+ other sites, I am guessing the penalty came directly from the backlink profile which was quite bad. The client had bought two other directory link package deals about 4 years ago which all of the incoming directory links have the exact same anchor text. I warned him this was completely unnatural and we only went after "natural-looking" links since then. Keep in mind these links were from 4+ years ago and did very little for rankings as we came into the picture.
Out of 143 root domain links, around 45 use the same anchor text in link.
We started with about 50 links total 2 years ago and have since built a very good quality profile, or so I thought. I was almost certain is was enough various anchor text to dilute it down.
I'm wondering if any of your websites that have been hit have a high amount of exact match anchor text. I can't believe Google would penalize just for linkbuilding because it seems to be an easy way to attack competitors but all my data is looking that way. Let me know your thoughts if any of your sites have been hit. Thanks
-
local niche, so yes the anchor text was probably very similar. What's really weird is that I just noticed on one of my sites that I had accidentally left some REALLY old pages up for a couple of cities. These are actually ranking now front page. The others are back on page 2 or 3 and this one is now top 5.
I think I'm just going to see what next week holds. Google seems to have lost a screw this week. I've had enough! Signing off for the week...
-
Not that high of a percentage, but yes they are niche sites so "close to exact match anchor text" is extremely hard to avoid.
For someone to link to our site about "tonneau covers" and not mention that term...it really makes little to no sense.
-
Did you guys have a high amount of exact anchor text? We were at roughly 33% for a single phrase when it hit us.
Ironically, the anchor text used for all the spam directory links wasn't even a good search term and we never optimized a page to utilize it.
-
We're in the same boat on 2 sites. Went from #1 to page 2 on many major searches.
-
Yes, I've had several hit hard. A few are from the same situation that you have. I'm hoping that the update has not completed yet and that things will raise back up over the next few weeks. I can't see how this could be the "final product" ... at least I'm hoping.
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
-
Is it a Panda/Penguin hit? Or it's just a natural ranking drop?
My traffic comes from google. This is the traffic profile. Does it look like a Panda or Penguin hit? I have a hard time determining it myself. Thanks. ne0r7kg.png
Technical SEO | | ChelseaP0 -
Website affected by Penguine / Panda
Dear All,
Technical SEO | | omverma
We have some websites. How we can check if site got affected by penguine / panda. We have observed few things since last few days like impressions are going down and keyword ranking is going down too. Any tools or any steps, to detect it will help us.
Thanks,
Om1 -
Any penguin or panda is updating today?
Hey Friends, Please help i have a question .. could you please tell me with the answer about google updates . is there any google algo is changed. because my website has loss the position. Please help me. i checked today removalinmelbourne.com.au it was on first page and suddenly today i lost this. Please guys help me and give me some good ideas to make me back .............. 😞
Technical SEO | | Tufail0 -
How to Identify Which Penalty : Penguin, Panda or Other?
I'm in the process of putting together a plan to recover from Algorithmic penalty. I'm not sure if I have to focus my recovery effort based on Penguin, Panda or Other algorithm penalty. After looking at the attached screenshot : Google Analytics Data vs Google Algorithm update timeline, I'm not sure if the blog is affected due to Penguin or Panda. I have following questions Traffic drop is because of Pengin, Panda or Other penalty? (there is no manual penalty message) Where should I focus my time with recovery efforts? (link removal, contents, link building, etc). Any other comments or suggestions? Thanks for you help. cSFZqj7
Technical SEO | | rsmb0 -
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 -
Local SEO and Penguin
All, One of my client's sites was hit by Penguin. The business has lost almost all of its organic rankings but is still holding on for a handful of local searches for some of its satellite offices. We've built a new site and are slowly building domain authority. My question is this: at what point do I swap out the new site's location URL for the old URL in Google places? I don't want to risk the existing local placement which is all they have left for the time being. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | JSOC0 -
Penguin update: Penalty caused from onsite issues or link profile?
Back in April before the Penguin update, our website home page ranked in the #1 position for several of our keywords and on page 1 for dozens of other keywords. But immediately after the Penguin update in April our rankings dropped immediately to below #100 for nearly all keywords. The sharp drop was obviously a penalty of some kind. We worked on removing some bad back links that were questionable. Over the past 7 months many of the bad links have dropped off and our link profile is improving. Our rankings, however, have not improved at all. In Yahoo and Bing we remain strong and rank on page 1 for many of our keywords. I joined SEOmoz because I’ve heard about their great tools and resources for SEO. The first thing I learned is that I had a lot of errors and warnings that need to be addressed and I’m optimistic that these items once addressed will get me out of that dreadful penalty box we’ve been in for 7 months now. So with that quick summary of our SEO problems I have a few questions that I hope to get some direction on. 1. Crawl Diagnostics for my site in SEOmoz reports 7 errors and 19 warnings including missing meta description tags, temporary redirects, duplicate page content, duplicate page title, 4xx client error, and title element too long. Could these errors and warnings be what has landed my website in some kind of penalty or filter? 2. A couple of the errors were duplicate page title and duplicate page content. So there appears to be a duplicate home page. Here are the two pages: howtomaketutus.com/ howtomaketutus.com/?p=home They are the same page but it looks like Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Do I need to do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file? I’m not sure how that would work since they are the same page. If that is possible how would I go about doing that? 3. Finally based on what I’ve described above is it more likely that the penalty we are experiencing is because of onsite issues or because of our link profile? We would really appreciate any help or direction anyone can offer on these issues. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 123craft0 -
Google Penguin - Target Landing Page
Hello, One of our sites have been hit by the first penguin update back in April and ever since then we have been removing links and submitting reconsideration requests... It only seems to have affected our home page as some of our internal landing pages are still ranking OK in the SERPS #1 / #2. I'm just wondering if we created a landing page for this keyword and drove high quality / relevant links to this landing page could we get it to rank higher than our homepage even though our Homepage is on the 5th page.Hope the above make sense. Has anybody had any joy with this?
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0