Redirecting over-optimised pages
-
Hi
One of my clients websites was affected by Penguin and due to no 'bad link' messages, and nothing really obvious from the backlink profile, I put it down to over-optimisation on the site.
I noticed a lot of spammy pages and duplicate content, and submitted recommendations to have these fixed. They dragged their heels for a while and eventually put in plans for a new site (which was happening anyway), but its taken quite a while and is only just going live in a couple of weeks.
My question is, should I redirect the URLs of the previously over-optimised pages? Obviously the new pages are nice and clean and from what I can tell there are no bad links pointing to the URLs, so is this an acceptable practice? Will Google notice this and remove the penalty?
Thanks
-
Hey there...got your pm. I can understand you not wanting to share your url in public.
Take a look at your site in open site explorer and click on "anchor text". You'll see that your most common anchor text is your keyword, and it's definitely not a brand. You've got 191 links using that keyword as anchor text. Your next most common is your url and for that you've got 16 links.
That's definitely Penguin material unfortunately.
It may seem unfair, but the Google guidelines tell us not to make links for the purpose of increasing our position on the SERPS. It is very unlikely that 191 links with anchor text appeared naturally.
Unfortunately you're going to need to get the majority of those links removed in order to recover and that's likely a tough process.
If you had had an unnatural links warning in your WMT you could try to remove as many as possible and then show Google your attempts to remove the others. But, because Penguin is algorithmic, the only way to recover is to do some drastic work at getting the keyword anchors removed or possibly changed to your url.
I have found that about 10-15% of webmasters actually respond to my requests to remove links. That's just not going to work for a site hit by Penguin. If you can't get the majority of these links removed then you may need to start over with a new domain.
-
What you're describing definitely sounds like Penguin - Happened immediately after April 24th plus affects only certain pages and keywords.
No, you would not receive a link warning if this was Penguin because Penguin is algorithmic.
Care to share the url?
Penguin is almost always (as far as we know) about your backlink profile. What I have found is that most webmasters are not tough enough on themselves when looking at their backlinks. Your definition of spammy and mine could be different. If you've got a lot of keyword anchor links from directories, followed blog comments or articles then this could be the issue.
I have also seen problems where Google couldn't recognize your brand from your keyword. So, if you were trying to rank for "green widgets" and your website name was greenwidgets.com and you built a lot of links using the anchor text "green widgets" Google may look at that at a manipulation factor and not a brand thing. That's why WPMU got hit by Penguin because they had a bunch of footer links from websites that said "wordpress mu". It really was their brand but Google saw it as anchor text manipulation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
As far as redirecting goes, if you think this is Penguin I wouldn't redirect any penalized pages to new pages because you're essentially redirecting the whole backlink profile that got you penalized and the new pages will tank as well.
-
@Greg - It was enough to pretty much wipe out all keyphrase traffic. They were still ranking for their brand terms however, which obviously suggests it was not a full site penalty. The new site will be hosted on the same domain, but with some new URLs, hence my question about whether I should redirect them.
-
@Marie - The rankings drop happened on April 25th, definitely Penguin. And yes it only affected a handful of pages and keyphrases. I really can't see anything in the backlink profile that suggests the anchor texts for these pages would be regarded as spammy. About 50% of the keyphrases are brand-based. However maybe there's something I'm missing and perhaps I should cut my losses and just manually edit all the links I've created myself, which I know aren't spammy? (hope that makes sense...)
There are a couple of pages where I'd like to change the URL structure, so I can either start from scratch with these new pages or redirect the old URL there.
Ps Would I have received a bad link warning from Google if it was Penguin?
-
Are you sure it is Penguin? Penguin is usually about a spammy backlink profile and has very little to do with onsite quality. If it truly is Penguin and you redirect to a new page then you'll just be redirecting the bad links to the new page and passing on the penalty.
Do you know what day your traffic dropped on? There were Panda updates on either side of the Penguin update. What you are describing could be a Panda issue.
If it's Panda you'd notice that there was probably a sitewide drop in traffic that started April 29th or 27th. (Assuming it was near the time of Penguin that was April 25).
Penguin tends to affect one or more keywords as opposed to the whole site. And those keywords are usually the ones that you have overoptimized (i.e. built up too many anchor texted links with the keywords and anchor.)
If this is Panda, then I don't see the point of making new URLs and redirecting to them. Why not just change the current URLs?
And finally, in either case, if it's Penguin or Panda you won't recover until there is a Penguin or Panda refresh.
-
Hi,
How bad was the effect on rankings?
Is your objective to get both websites ranking?
If not, why not redirect the old site to the new one?
Redirecting the spammy/Dupe content to the clean pages wont be an issue in my opinion. (Bad link neighborhood would be a different story) but I'm not sure if this will help lift the penalty.
Perhaps someone else can comment on that?
Greg
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
-
Avoid landing page redirects
Avoid landing page redirects for the following chain of redirected URLs. http://domainname.com/ https://domainname.com/ https://www.domainname.com/ Anyone know how to solve this issue the correct way?
Technical SEO | | Sammyh0 -
Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?
If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert781 -
Duplicate Page Errors
Hey guys, I'm wondering if anyone can help... Here is my issue... Our website:
Technical SEO | | TCPReliable
http://www.cryopak.com
It's built on Concrete 5 CMS I'm noticing a ton of duplicate page errors (9530 to be exact). I'm looking at the issues and it looks like it is being caused by the CMS. For instance the home page seems to be duplicating.. http://www.cryopak.com/en/
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=67
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=25
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=4
http://www.cryopak.com/en/?DepartmentId=66 Do you think this is an issue? Is their anyway to fix this issue? It seems to be happening on every page. Thanks Jim0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Website redirects
We consolidated websites. All the international sites have been brought under the roof of our mothership site based in the US: www.crisisprevention.com ... We mapped out all of the URLs and where they should be redirected. However, if someone types in, say, www.crisisprevention.co.uk it redirects to the mothership site, BUT the old URL hangs around no matter what page you navigate to. I feel like it has duplicate content ramifications or worse. I would like opinions on this, so I can take my findings to IT and figure out a solution. Here’s another example: http://www.positive-options.co.uk and another http://www.positive-options.com
Technical SEO | | spackle0 -
302 Redirect of Home Page - Lost Link Juice?
I've got a new client whose site is set up to redirect the home page to another URL, like www.example.com, redirecting to www.example.com/home/, using a 302 redirect. Am I correct in assuming that links pointing directly to www.example.com are not passing their full value because it is being redirected with a 302 rather than 301? (In a nutshell, I want to make sure this resource is still accurate: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection)
Technical SEO | | kpclaypool0 -
Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!
My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords. All of a sudden, we completely fell off. I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50. I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is? This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Is this a safe 301 redirect?
We are moving our site from one platform to another. Currently on our site we have two homepages. "www.homepage.com" and "www.homepage.com/Index" Both pages have some high quality links pointing in on them. The problem: We are going to be doing a 301 redirect from "www.homepage.com/Index" page to "www.homepage.com" as we are moving platforms at this time we weren't going to create a "www.homepage.com/Index" page all. This leaves this page as an empty URL. With this webpage disappearing all together will we lose traction as we are redirecting an empty URL? Or is it better to recreate this "www.homepage.com/Index" on our new platform redirect it and wait for google to deIndex this page for us? As well is there a tutorial for how to implement 301 redirects or is this something worth looking for a developer and pay someone to do?
Technical SEO | | HCGDiet0