Diagnosing a Penguin Demotion
-
Whilst ive noyt hit the panic button just yet ive learnt that a specific target term I was optimising a site flor has dropped off the Google radar from forth to zero
The site is www.davidclick.com the target term was "York wedding photographer" and the demotion happened at the end of March this year, below illustrates the carnage..
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/target-term-demotioncopy.jpg
When i first learnt about this I began to wonder if I was a victim of the Penguin update. I suspected i might so I ran a test to see how many inbound links used the target term York wedding photographer and here is what i found... Only one site http://www.singingwaitersx2.com/links/ and at a push this site also http://york-wedding-photographer.blogspot.co.uk/
So my question is have i fallen foul to the penguin update? If yes then is the only remedy to block the aforementioned site links via this technique:
http://www.htaccess-guide.com/deny-visitors-by-referrer/
Thanks in advance,
David
-
Thanks riplash, respect the detail you've gone into here , ive got work to do
-
EDIT 2: You never know, the site might bounce back once that blogspot domain change (from .com to .co.uk) completes properly in the SERPs.
In the meantime, I would still fix the other problems I mentioned in my first post (the on page stuff, the 302s, etc), and perhaps change some of the backlinks you are getting from the blogspot blog to non-exact match anchor text. You could also consider getting rid of some of the links in those blog posts completely to make the blog less spammy overall, as the content therein doesn't actually seem that bad.
Meanwhile, try approaching wedding blogs/sites (local sites and general UK authority sites too), to see if you can write a guest post or two on for them. You could offer to write about anything, from the obvious (How to choose a Wedding Photographer), to the more interesting/unique (Top 5 things you should never say to a Wedding Photographer). It's sometimes good to break the ice by helping the webmaster or blog owner out, e.g. if you can find a broken link on their site, or a spelling error, email them about that first to get the conversation going. As well as finding wedding sites, you could post for some general local blogs/sites - perhaps an article about wedding venues in York could work on a general local interest website.
When it comes to the davidclick.com site, I'd add a blog to that, and start trying to create some great content that will really attract links from other sites within the wedding sphere. Whilst you want to be giving your guest blogs some good content, you definitely need to save the best for your own blog. There are loads of great articles, videos and webinars to spark ideas for content here at SEOmoz!
-
Not for me.
EDIT: Ah, I see.. the .com blogspot URL is indexed.. but the blog has moved to a .co.uk - Do you happen to know when this occurred?
-
Thanks Riplash But curious about the following "The blog that you mentioned, http://york-wedding-photographer.blogspot.co.uk/ is not indexed by Google"
Ermm... when i google "Dark side of wedding photography" or put the url directly in the serach box it does appear in the SERPS. Does this not mena it is indexed?
-
Based on the date your site dropped down the rankings, it was not a Penguin related change. Penguin did not roll out until 24th April 2012. I've had a very brief look at the SEO for this site, I can see a few issues - this is not by any means an exhaustive or definitve list, but is probably a good place to start
-
You have canonicalisation issues - i.e. I can visit the site by going to www.davidclick.com and davidclick.com. Make sure you fix this with a 301 redirect.
-
You have 302 (temporary) redirects from wedding-york-photographer.co.uk (a URL linked to from the blog mentioned below, incidentally), and also www.davidclick.com - you prob want to make those 301 (permenant) redirects
-
The blog that you mentioned, http://york-wedding-photographer.blogspot.co.uk/ is not indexed by Google, having most likely been deindexed due to Panda.This will be because it's clearly there to affect ranking and not much else - evidenced by the fact that every post links back to the same website. I'd bin it completely if I were you as it's not doing you any favours SERP wise, and could be evidence of over optimisation leading you to fall foul of Penguin further down the line.
-
As a result of the blog above being de-indexed, the site basically has very few backlinks, and none with the anchor text matching the keywords you are targetting. Therefore there is no real reason that it should be ranking for those keywords.
-
A quick glance at the on-page for the site shows multiple repetitions of the keyword (title tag, h1, h2, body text) which isn't necessarily the cause of the ranking drop (as I said, Penguin came later) - but potentially looks like over optimisation. I would clean up the site - target the text at human visitors, not SEO.
Hope this helps a bit. I'd certainly start with the basics, and get those right, then build some relationships and get some good quality links in.
-
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
-
Sitelink demotion
I have applied a sitelink demotion in webmaster tools, though this same sitelink is still appearing under my Google listing. How long does it usually take to take effect? Or is there anything I can do about this? Also, is there a way in which I can select or channel Google to show the sitelinks I want?
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
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 -
Can Silos and Exact Anchor Text In Links Hurt a Site Post Penguin?
Just got a client whose site dropped from a PR of 3 to zero. This happened shortly after the Penguin release, June, 2012. Examining the site, I couldn't find any significant duplicate content, and where I did find duplicate content (9%), a closer look revealed that the duplication was totally coincidental (common expressions). Looking deeper, I found no sign of purchased links or linking patterns that would hint at link schemes, no changes to site structure, no change of hosting environment or IP address. I also looked at other factors, too many to mention here, and found no evidence of black hat tactics or techniques. The site is structured in silos, "services", "about" and "blog". All page titles that fall under services are categorized (silo) under "services", all blog entries are categorized under "blogs", and all pages with company related information are categorized under "about". When exploring the site's links in Site Explorer (SE), I noticed that SE is identifying the "silo" section of links (i.e. services, about, blog, etc.) and labeling it as an anchor text. For example, domain.com/(services)/page-title, where the page title prefix (silo), "/services/", is labeled as an anchor text. The same is true for "blog" and "about". BTW, each silo has its own navigational menu appearing specifically for the content type it represents. Overall, though there's plenty of room for improvement, the site is structured logically. My question is, if Site Explorer is picking up the silo (services) and identifying it as an anchor text, is Google doing the same? That would mean that out of the 15 types of service offerings, all 15 links would show as having the same exact anchor text (services). Can this type of site structure (silo) hurt a website post Penguin?
Technical SEO | | UplinkSpyder0 -
How do I diagnose a site that has had a corrupted database restored?
Here's the situation: Downloaded a backup of a full database from CPanel, because we needed to perform some queries on it. Found out that after restoring it, CPanel had not been able to zip up the full database because the server memory was set so low (some posts weren't showing up after the restore). SO, how would I go about determining exactly what content is missing from the site? What search engine queries would you perform? Is there a plugin I could use to establish the inconsistencies between the database content and the search results? Your help is appreciated in advance!
Technical SEO | | featherseo0 -
Are gallery sites ok post Penguin?
We're getting ready to re-launch a redesigned site and I was hoping to use the opportunity to get some quality links. Are some of the higher-quality web design gallery sites still ok to submit to? Did Penguin have any effect on these? Just looking for opportunities for a little boost from our re-launch.
Technical SEO | | _JP_0 -
Penalized by Penguin 1.1 Release
I just realized that my blog, (www.onbetterterms.com) just recently got blacklisted. That blog actually redirects to www.springcoin.com/blog On May 25th, Google released the Penguin 1.1 update. After looking at my rankings, I found out that all my keywords positions were dropped. I have no idea why, and don't know how to fix this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | kevinyu10290 -
How can you manually diagnose the canonical problem
Good Monrning from snow dusted minus 3 degrees C Wetherby UK... Is there a quick way to diagnose wether or not a website has a canonical problem or not? So far Ive been doing this for example: Typing a full web address then one without the w's and seeing if a 301 redirect has been set up. But I'm not confident this is the best way to diagnose if there is a canonical problem with a site. I would like to ad that I want to see if a canonical problem exists with any site and webmanster tools is not available. Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing1