Panda or Penquin -Website Fell - Shouldn't this Recover?
-
On March 23rd our site fell 47% in one day. www.TranslationSoftware4u.com but we still held quite a few #1 to #7 rankings on Google and thought it would just recover.
Our top keyword "translation software" was #4 , now we are #19
Over the next week I waited to see if it recovered. We have been online 10+ years and always stayed with white hat. I admit to learning as I go over the years but always felt content was king so I focused on information. I really do not see my site as using spam techniques but maybe I am missing something on the way I have it.
March 23rd, major drop -47%
On April 2nd I started with SEO MOZ and the Research tools showed we had duplicate content warning. This was from a blog we were trying to start that only had 7 posts but it had about 20 tags per post. I did not realize that tags actually created that post under that tag. I went in and deleted the tags again being stupid and not realizing it was then making that come up 404. The blog was so small we do not get hits on it anyway so hoping it just clears itself up. ( still get duplicate warning on our directory due to using "php Link Directory", but it's due to how it reuses the title tag and description, 2 instances per category page"). Still trying to fix the php directory issue. Seems many others are running it and did not have a drop.
April 24th, we dropped another -10%
It keeps falling -70% now.
I have gone through the site and tried to clean up any warnings like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions.
With regards to links I put up a small web directory with some reciprocal linking. Our product translates languages but software is not the same as a human so we often set clients up with human translators, the directory is a nice place to help our customers find a translator or see online tools that can help. The links were not excessive, there were maybe 100 links. After the fall I went in and found some translators had gone out of business so I deleted those, I am down to 65 links now, about 45 are exchanges.
I have submitted to some online directories manually, but looking back through the links there is not really anything that makes me concerned. The link back to my site was really the most neglected SEO thing I did. Again concentrating on content. I did find a few links that I was not happy about but I did not put those links so had no control.
I have been working on cleaning up my title tags, and making sure the content just reads better. I have been hoping that my site would just start recovering but it keeps sliding.
Has anyone seen recovery from the updates. Should I see anything yet? I cannot seem to get Google to return to the site and reindex. Am I doing somethign spammy on my site and I do not realize it?
Thanks for any advice in advance!
-
Hi Force7
Unfortunately, it looks like Google threw a little bit of everything at you, so untangling the mess may be a little tricky.
Thanks for including the exact dates of the traffic drops. From these we can clearly see you were hit with two different penalties.
March 23 - Panda
April 24 - Penguinhttp://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
Panda - This is a tricky one to pin down, but you may be going in the right direction by fixing the duplicate content. I don't quiet understand what you mean by the "php Link Directory" but if you can get it fixed, I highly encourage you to do so.
Recently however, we've seen instances of Panda targeting link profiles, and if you've been double hit by penguin as well, that's probably a good place to look.
Looking at your backlink profile, it's obvious there's a lot of low-quality directory and article type links in your profile.
This could easily explain both penalties, and when we look at your site's distribution of anchor text terms, there is large proportion of optimized terms
Which helps explain the Panda penalty. Have you received any messages in Google Webmaster Tools?
So what can you do? Unfortunately, cleaning up a large link profile is hard work, and so is rebuilding it with clean, high quality links. I highly recommend reading Dr. Pete's article on the subject.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
No easy answers. It's okay to have a few spammy backlinks in your profile, but you want to look at the entire balance of your links, and make sure you're earning the majority of your links in a natural looking manner from high quality sites.
Regardless, hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
As of today 42 views of this question and no comments. I would have to guess that some looked at the site a little and did not see anything. The reason I even posted this question is because I saw someone else post a similar question and there were a lot of quick comments stating that the person's website had obvious spam techniques on the home page.
Still hoping some experts at least throw in a comment.
Thanks!
Force7
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
-
No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag
I'm getting an error in Search Console that pages on my site show No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag. However, when I inspect the pages html, it does not show noindex. In fact, it shows index, follow. Majority of pages show the error and are not indexed by Google...Not sure why this is happening. Unfortunately I can't post images on here but I've linked some url's below. The page below in search console shows the error above... https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/ As does this one. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/independent-school-marketing-communications/ However, this page does not have the error and is indexed by Google. The meta robots tag looks identical. https://mixeddigitaleduconsulting.com/blog/leadership-team/jill-goodman/ Any and all help is appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sean_White_Consult0 -
Review rich snippet isn't appearing anymore
Hi, We have recently lost the review rich snippet for product that used to consistently show it for a long time. On top of that we have also lost the breadcrumb. The markup hasn't changed on these pages and gwt data tool tester doesn't show any anomalies. A few weeks back we have deployed a new property that list reviews from the first site without actually being under the same domain. Would that be an issue, review may have been considered as plagiarism somehow? Is there a way for us to confirm this theory? What are others factors that may have lead us to lose those rich snippet? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mattam0 -
Changes to 'links to your site' in WebMaster Tools?
We're writing more out of curiosity... Clicking on "Download latest links" within 'Links to your site' in Google's WebMaster Tools would usually bring back links discovered recently. However, the last few times (for numerous accounts) it has brought back a lot of legacy links - some from 2011 - and includes nothing recent. We would usually expect to see a dozen at least each month. ...Has anyone else noticed this? Or, do you have any advice? Thanks in advance, Ant!
Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
Need advice for new site's structure
Hi everyone, I need to update the structure of my site www.chedonna.it Basicly I've two main problems: 1. I've 61.000 index tag (more with no post)2. The category of my site are noindex I thought to fix my problem making the category index and the tag noindex, but I'm not sure if this is the best solution because I've a great number of tag idexed by Google for a long time. Mybe it is correct just to make the category index and linking it from the post and leave the tag index. Could you please let me know what's your opinion? Regards.
Technical SEO | | salvyy0 -
I don't understand how this site is ranking?
This website is ranking for a very high competitive keyword "bail bonds los angeles" http://www.bondgirlsbailbonds.com/ They maybe have one backlink and 10 citations. How are they ranking for 2nd spot? This doesn't seem possible. Almost 5 other domains on page have pr2 and higher and not able to beat this site. Can someone please explain what might be causing this? thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | webbutler130 -
Why doesn't SEOmoz see internal/external links on my site?
My SEOmoz analysis that my site contains neither external or internal lnks. I have used other tools and they have all seen the internal and external links on the pages. There aren't many but they are there. Why isn't SEOmoz seeing them?
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
SEOMoz is indicating I have 40 pages with duplicate content, yet it doesn't list the URL's of the pages???
When I look at the Errors and Warnings on my Campaign Overview, I have a lot of "duplicate content" errors. When I view the errors/warnings SEOMoz indicates the number of pages with duplicate content, yet when I go to view them the subsequent page says no pages were found... Any ideas are greatly welcomed! Thanks Marty K.
Technical SEO | | MartinKlausmeier0 -
I just found something weird I can't explain, so maybe you guys can help me out.
I just found something weird I can't explain, so maybe you guys can help me out. In Google http://www.google.nl/#hl=nl&q=internet. The number 3 result is a big telecom provider in the Netherland called Ziggo. The ranking URL is https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/. However if you click on it you'll be directed to https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/ HttpFox in FF however is not showing any redirects. Just a 200 status code. The URL https://www.ziggo.nl/#producten/internet/ contains a hash, so the canonical URL should be https://www.ziggo.nl/. I can understand that. But why is Google showing the title and description of https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/, when the canonical URL clearly is https://www.ziggo.nl/? Can anyone confirm my guess that Google is using the bulk SEO value (link juice/authority) of the homepage at https://www.ziggo.nl/ because of the hash, but it's using the relevant content of https://www.ziggo.nl/producten/internet/ resulting in a top position for the keyword "internet".
Technical SEO | | NEWCRAFT0