What´s the penalization extent applied by Google?
-
Hi!
I still don´t get this web site penalization applied by Google due to duplicate content.
My site has many of pages that were among the first positions for top keywords (A Photoshop web site).
Those pages were linked by sites like LifeHacker, BoingBoing, Microsiervos, SmashingMagazine, John Nack, and many other well known blogs.
After mid February 2012 everything went down the drain. I lost half of my traffic and my well ranked pages are now almost nowhere to be found.
I have plenty of ads in some pages of my site, and duplicate content (amazon product description only) in other pages of my site.
So, the good quality pages my site has, are no longer considered as good quality just because I have some duplicate content or ad filled pages?
I´m not complaining. I´m trying to understand this.
Google needs to serve good information to their visitors. But since they found some trash in my site, they decide to remove both the trash and the good information from the search engine?
That doesn´t sound logical to me. Why don´t they just remove the trash and leave the good content?
Of course, I understand that information is added everyday and some may come up with something better than mine, but dropping 40 or more places in the ranking sounds more like a penalty to me.
Again, I´m not complaining (although it sounds like I am!), just want to understand the reasons behind this.
Thanks,
Enrique
-
Yes, thanks Anthony. I will post back as soon (soon..?) as I find something.
Enrique
-
sometimes what you call natural google calls spammy or unnatural. Just sayin. Good luck. Post back with your findings. Im interested to see how things work out for you. Best regards.
-
Yes, thanks, I will check that. I was planning to add nofollow to the amazon pages, I will also check the anchors, but since they are all natural, any change I make will look artificial.
Enrique
-
Have you tried removing the amazon data feed from those pages? Just to see if that's is in fact what is impacting your rankings? What about the thousands of natural links pointing to your site? Are they all using varied anchor text or is it just five for your five main pages? If just five that could also be affecting your ranking.
-
Yes, I know that's the thing to do, but you must agree with me that it's something unnatural.
I have thousands of incoming links, and only exchanged or asked for less than 20 of those. The rest are natural. If I spend time analyzing links it would be something absolutely artificial.
The same goes with quality pages. Let's say that I have four or five pages that are the most referenced in my industry (just and example, of course). Visitors that read those pages get really good, top class information. But I have an Amazon datafeed in my site.
Suddenly, the information of those top quality pages are hidden from search results in Google because my site has an Amazon datafeed?
I know it's a simplistic example, but it can be translated as:
"A good article isn't good anymore just because of a site penalty"
It seems that Google is saying something like "Hey, you can't read this amazing article because it is from a site has lots of junk. So suck it up and read this article of a lesser quality but from from a pristine site!"
It is not about my site anymore, but about trying to understand the concept of it all. And of course it is an extreme example, but I think it is relevant.
-
No, google does care about good quality pages. Its just if you throw in a bunch of bad pages they dilute the goodness of your good pages. Once you clean yp duplicate content then i would suggest running a report on your inbound links. Check to see if your anchor text is spammy, or concentrating on only a few choice keywords. When it comes to link building you want to spread out the keywords to there isn't one or two money keywords banking on the anchor text.
Also, I would remove any inbound links from questionable directories. Once you do that I wold think you should see some significant gains in rankings.
-
Thanks! So it is clear that Google doesn´t care about single, good quality, pages with good quality links.
A good quality page needs a quality site to back it up.
Is that the criteria?
It sounds reasonable to me, but very difficult to repair.
Just for the records, my site isn´t trash or low quality, but it is an old site and has some quirks from old times: lots of directory entries with little content and datafeeds that used to work very well some years ago.
-
The trash part of your site affects the site as a whole, not specifically just the trash parts. If they did just that, then you would still benefit from using trash to promote your good pages.
Now from what I understand about penalties, there is a manual penalty and an algorythm or natural penalty.
The algo penalty can be easily fixed by addressing your penalty issue, which would be duplicate content. Clean up all duplicate content and you will be on your way to flying under the penalty radar so to speak. However, you will still need to add more quality content to make up for the removed or cleaned up duplicate content.
Once that takes place you should notice your ranking drop stabilize, and over time begin the crawl back up. This would be a good time to implement other strategies like social media and quality link building.
Now if its a manual penalty, then you need to clean up all duplicate content and ask for a manual review, and pray. Manual penalties are heard to overcome and will require much more work. Sometimes its best to just start with a new domain from scratch.
Hope this helps some.
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
-
Solved Recommended title length for Google search results
I read the recommended title length is 50-60 characters depending on alphabets, etc,.
On-Page Optimization | | Mike555
Anyways, my question is, is there any harm of having longer title?
If all my important keywords are within the 50-60 characters that will show up on search results, I can still make the title longer, it's just that those keywords outside won't have any effect on search results?0 -
Fetch as Google
Are there any pros or cons with using Google fetch and submit? I realise Google will likely find it of its own accord in due course but I have found it may take a couple of weeks if at all. Fetch and submit seems to speed this process up, sometimes anyway.
On-Page Optimization | | seoman100 -
Web spam traffic coming from Fort Lee in Google Analytics
I keep getting a ton of web spam crawler traffic from Fort Lee. Anyone know who this is?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
Is there a way to prevent Google Alerts from picking up old press releases?
I have a client that wants a lot of old press releases (pdfs) added to their news page, but they don't want these to show up in Google Alerts. Is there a way for me to prevent this?
On-Page Optimization | | IdeaGarden0 -
Hit by Panda - Google Disavow Help
Hi I hope you can help me A Website I manage has been hit hard by the Panda Update. I am really struggling to understand what is seen as a Spammy link. The Website use to be on page 1 for "fancy dress" now it isnt visable for that term at all and most other terms the site has dropped for. I have looked into what might have gone wrong and have removed several links , used the disavow tool 2-3 times and submitted re-consideration requests, but each time google informs me that they are still detecting unnatural links. Could somebody please take a look at our link profile www.partydomain.co.uk for "fancy dress" as an example and show examples of links you would consider that google might not like. It would also be good if anybody had any contacts in the UK that could help thanks Adam
On-Page Optimization | | AMG1000 -
Google Places Problem
This may have been answered before but I have 2 questions. When I placed a business in Google Places, the "generic" ranking fell off the map. I now just have the 1 line Google places reference and that is all I can find. How can I get around that and get my 4 line description to show again? Do I have to delete my Places account? Before the Google Places account was built, the company was moving up the SERP ranks, now he is on pg 1 for Places but the other SERP positions have disappeared. This is true for all the keywords we are targeting. If there is not a Places reference he shows on Pg 3-5 (given the website is 4 weeks old, I think this is not bad). For the same client, he that services many of the surrounding communities. How do I get Google to recognize the various towns he services during a search? He places well for his "home" town but not at all for the other towns. if it helps any, the website is www.myairstat.com. Thanks for the help. Scott
On-Page Optimization | | scott5180 -
Google Ranking Dropped
Hi We launched a new website on the12th Feb 2012, it appeared on google page one for the search term "compare travel insurance" . Last week it changed ranking to page 49 of google ranking. my site is www.1234compare1234travel1234insurance1234ireland1234.com Take out the 1234 for my site address, some people have mentioned that it was honeymooned to page 1 due to being a new site with new content. Can anyone tell me if it looks as if I've done something wrong and been penalised by google? If not are there any SEO advice I could use to improve ranking? All comments and advice appreciated. Regards Paul
On-Page Optimization | | CocoMagenta1 -
Has anyone noticed a big delta between Google and Bing rankings? For example, we rank favorably in Google, but not so favorably in Bing. Are there different tactics I should use to rank better in Bing?
An example is in Google, we currently rank #1 & #2 for "yoga pants" for Athleta and Old Navy. In Bing, I'm on page 2. Any thoughts here?
On-Page Optimization | | kpr0