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?
-
Thanks- we have seen Unnatural links warnings come in as well (other domains) -ranking dropped we left it for a week- and it came back to the same place....
Undecided at this point what i will do- might start with Disavow of links....and go from there...
-
If I had to place my money of what would happen next from what I've seen int he past I would put it on one of two things assuming you are 301 redirecting to the new homepage:
1 - Nothing. Penalty passes instantly or is already assigned to the domain which was part of what the focus of Penguin 2.1 was about. Matt Cutts, discussing this update said:
"The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."
or ...
2 - Google gets tricked and passes the weight but not the penalty. In this event the rankings will likely last somewhere between 1 and 3 weeks before the penalty follows. I've seen this happen as well but mainly in cases where the penalty was an "unnatural links" warning.
Google luck and if you go for it, I'd love to hear how it turns out.
-
I see one of two things happening with that... Either your prior homepage 404s which will hurt you even more or your prior homepage will redirect to the new one and nothing will have changed.
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
-
2 Duplicate E-commerce sites Risk vs Reward
Hi guys I have a duplicate content question I was hoping someone might be able to give me some advice on? I work for a small company in the UK and in our niche we have a huge product range and an excellent website providing the customer with a very good experience. We’re also backed up by a bespoke warehouse/logistic management system further enhancing the quality of our product. We get most traffic through PPC and are not one of the biggest brands in the industry and have to fight for marketshare. Recently we were approached by another company in our industry that have built up a huge and engaged audience over decades but can’t logistically tap into their following to sell the products so they have suggested a partnership. They are huge fans of what we do and basically want a copy of our site to be rebranded and hosted on a subdomain of their website and we would then pay them a commission of all the sales the new site received. So 2 identical sites with different branding would exist. Based on tests they have carried out we could potentially double our sales in weeks and the potential is huge so we are excited about the possibility. But…..how would we handle the duplicate content, would we be penalised? Would just one of the sites be penalised? Or if sales increase as much as we think they might, would it be worth a penalty as our current rankings aren’t great? Any advice would be great. Cheers Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Best Way To Go About Fixing "HTML Improvements"
So I have a site and I was creating dynamic pages for a while, what happened was some of them accidentally had lots of similar meta tags and titles. I then changed up my site but left those duplicate tags for a while, not knowing what had happened. Recently I began my SEO campaign once again and noticed that these errors were there. So i did the following. Removed the pages. Removed directories that had these dynamic pages with the remove tool in google webmasters. Blocked google from scanning those pages with the robots.txt. I have verified that the robots.txt works, the pages are longer in google search...however it still shows up in in the html improvements section after a week. (It has updated a few times). So I decided to remove the robots.txt file and now add 301 redirects. Does anyone have any experience with this and am I going about this the right away? Any additional info is greatly appreciated thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz0 -
Google's Structured Data Testing Tool? No Data
I'm stumped as to why some of the pages on my website return no data from Google's Structured Data Testing Tool while other pages work fine and return the appropriate data. My home page http://www.parkseo.net returns no data while many inner pages do. http://www.parkseo.net Returns No Data http://www.parkseo.net/citation-submission.html Does Return Data. I have racked my brains out trying to figure out why some pages return data and others don't. Any help on this issue would be greatly appricated. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YMD
Gary Downey0 -
Problem appearing 1 st with a sub page when typing my company name and product
I just did a test typing my company name followed by what I sell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Let's say "company green widgets " I noticed that my webpage ( which is a subpage ) doesn't appear 1 st on google when i type that keyword.... Either some website that talks about my product appears or my homepage appears. Why is that ? Could it be a canonicalization issue ? Thank you,0 -
301 Re-direct Implementation & Its Possible Aftermaths
Hi all, I'm currently working on a domain that seems to be 'unofficially' blacklisted by Google. The reason behind my belief are, Ranking process of KW became stagnant. Current crawling and indexing rate has been decreased. Site performance deteriorate after every Search engine update or major data refreshes. And few major indications pointing out that search engines might started doubting its authority. The site is live n running for about 10+ yr and consists of 6000+ pages out of which 5000+ pages are indexed. The site also have some serious issues like, The site has been 2 times penalized by Google. The link ratio & inbound link quality of the site is quite unnatural (mostly directory links, links form spammy sites, bad-neighborhood links etc. ) The site is in flat file and not CMS, thus making it extremely difficult to maintain and update it. Due to the above reasons I was thinking of implementing 301 re-direction. I would like to redirect this poor performing existing domain to a new fresh one keeping the URL structure and files same and maintaining 1:1 redirection rules. I've read an awesome article by Danny Dover on 301 Re direction of a site here in SEOMOZ. It seems that if any one follow the steps mentioned there can actually get benefited by the overall re direction process. Now I'd like know your suggestion about following points: 1. Considering the factors that I've stated, do you think that it would be good to go with this re direction idea? 2. If 301 is implemented then what can be its immediate effects on current rankings and site performance? 3. Assuming that the ranks drowned or gets completely vanished from SERP, after what approx time period can be regain back? 4. Any other suggestion that might help me out to better understand the situation.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ITRIX0 -
Is a 301 Direct with a canonical tag Possible ?
Hi All, Quick question , Are we correct in thinking that for any given URL it's not possible to do a 301 redirect AND a canonical tag? thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Directories - Bad or Good for Link Building (Discussion on Penguin)
Hello, I would like to hear everybodies opinion on directories for link building now that penguin is out. Here's a good background post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger Do you think their out? How do you still use them? Which ones do you stick to?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Help, really struggling with fixing mistakes post-Penguin
We had previously implemented a strategy of paying for lots of links and focusing on 3 or 4 keywords as our anchors, which used to REALLY work (I know, I know, bad black hat strategy - I have since learned my lesson). These keywords and others have since plummeted up to 100 spots since Panda 3.3 and Penguin. So I'm trying to go in and fix all our mistakes cuz our domain is too valuable to us just to start over from scratch. Yesterday I literally printed a 75 page document of all of our links according to Open Site Explorer. I have been going in and manually changing anchor text wherever I can, and taking down the very egregious links if possible.This has involved calling and emailing webmasters, digging up old accounts and passwords, and otherwise just trying to diversify our anchor text and remove bad links. I've also gone into our site and edited some internal links (also too weighty on certain keywords) and removed other links entirely. My rankings have gone DOWN more today. A lot. WTF does Google want? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Should we be deleted links from all private networks entirely or just trying to vary the anchor text? Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0