Help ! I have a Panda Penalty

[valesence]

I don't think it is a duplicate content problem. And as a disclaimer, I am just a business owner that markets a couple service companies on the internet in a smaller market. If any of my ideas are inaccurate, point them out it won't hurt my feelings.

If companies are doing outside advertising then their brand awareness would be higher, recent tests hinted that higher clicks caused higher rankings.

One company above you is a national franchise, this would cause it to have higher brand awareness and most likely higher clr

Your site, although filled with content wasn't that visually appealing to me at least. You had lots of words but not many pictures. I found that people are somewhat lazy, they prefer for you to tell your story with pictures vs having to read content (im backwards though, I love to read) If people click back without spending time on your site it may send negative signals to google.

If this was my business and I wanted to improve my response

1. Add some pictures to the site to tell the story about who you are.

2. Get some more reviews, a drip campaign with 1 a month would help tremendously

3 Get some social signals. I personally would do a facebook in-feed advertising campaign to try and get some people talking about you. I believe that people that see an ad on facebook sometimes will google your company to find out more. Even a small number may signal google that your popular and trendy.

Just my thoughts. I'm on a forum filled with some of the best and brightest in this industry, sometimes im shy about posting. If anything I wrote is off target, feel free to say so.

 

[JimFranco]

not really sure what anything you said had to do with ranking at all ?

The issue is not conversions. My site converts very well. In the cleaning industry in my experience most people just want an easy way to contact you after they land on your page.

The site is segmented with all you needing to know at the top and then higher content further down to sell the service and for google . Its basically an old fashion sales letter.

Not really sure how much weight pictures carries for seo factors. But, I do know content is king.
I also dont want to slow my page with pictures , especially if people are coming from mobile.

I am not a fan of media rich , service landing pages. Other than for construction portfolios etc.


The content is also good enough to formally rank me at the number one spot in Atlanta and all the rest of the metro towns and now tanks well top 3 for the person who stole my content.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Jim I think @valesence made some great points that are worthwhile to consider. Content alone isn't everything. Even if you think you have good enough content to rank... who cares? A big thing i've learned over the years is that what I think really doesn't matter when it comes to how a website looks/reads; I'm not the one buying the product.

I am not a fan of media rich , service landing pages. Other than for construction portfolios etc.

What does that matter? The only thing that matters is whether your potential customers like those or not. The only way to tell that is by checking your analytics stats. Throw out subjectivity and use data to guide the decisions. If your target market isn't staying on the site and buying, then you wont rank (think pogo-sticking). If they're not buying then why not make changes to see what can get them to buy?

@valesence made some nice points, but it's up to you whether you'll A/B test some of those ideas. There's not much more I can add to it.

 

[Marie Haynes]

Regarding Panda and Penguin as penalties (or not), I actually wrote an article on that for Search Engine Watch. It got a lot of flack from SEOs as many of them have been calling these filters penalties for a long time:

https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2417484/panda-and-penguin-are-not-penalties

I think it's mostly semantics though. If suddenly I lost 80% of my traffic due to Panda or Penguin that's certainly going to feel like a penalty. But technically, it's an algorithmic filter, not a penalty.

With that said, I feel that my points in my last post were not heard by the OP, so I'll reiterate the important ones:

1. If this site that copied your content is outranking you, it's very unlikely to be because they copied your content. Rather, it means that your site has something (i.e. Panda) suppressing it.

2. You posted previously with an older version of your website that had a number of significant issues. I think it's highly possible that those issues caused Panda to hit the site. If this is the case, then it's certainly possible that the new version of the site is much better and has fixed those issues. However, you won't get the Panda filter lifted from your site until Panda reassesses the site. We don't know how long that will take.

You asked whether we could say if Panda or Penguin were hitting the site. For me, that type of analysis usually takes me a few hours to do. Unfortunately it's not usually enough to just look at the Panguin tool and say that the dates match up. I've seen sites that dropped on a Panda date but it was because they launched a new site (and forgot to 301 urls) the day before. I've seen enough cases like this to say that you can just assume that a drop on a Panda date is Panda.

Also, "Panda dates" appear to be a thing of the past. As Google is working at integrating Panda into the core algo it's getting harder and harder to pin a drop on a certain date.

With that said, I had a quick look at your backlink profile and there are definitely unnatural links there so I would be concerned about Penguin. Here is a screenshot of your links sorted by anchor text:



Having an exact match keyword anchor doesn't make a link unnatural, but when we see a site that has a lot of these it certainly looks like there are self made links. Here are just a few of the many links that Penguin will most definitely consider unnatural:

House Cleaning Is Always Necessary for Keeping Germ-Free Home - MyArticle.com

House Cleaning Is Always Necessary for Keeping Germ-Free Home | ArticleField.com

Cleaning In Addition To Repairing Your Floor

If you have not done so already, you need to remove as many of these links as you can and then disavow the remaining unnatural links on the domain level.

An unnatural link is any link that was created for SEO purposes only. Even if an article is well written and potentially helpful, if you created it so you could link to your site it's an unnatural link.

 

[valesence]

not really sure what anything you said had to do with ranking at all ?

The issue is not conversions. My site converts very well. In the cleaning industry in my experience most people just want an easy way to contact you after they land on your page.

The site is segmented with all you needing to know at the top and then higher content further down to sell the service and for google . Its basically an old fashion sales letter.

Not really sure how much weight pictures carries for seo factors. But, I do know content is king.
I also dont want to slow my page with pictures , especially if people are coming from mobile.

I am not a fan of media rich , service landing pages. Other than for construction portfolios etc.


The content is also good enough to formally rank me at the number one spot in Atlanta and all the rest of the metro towns and now tanks well top 3 for the person who stole my content.

The reason it matters with seo is because google doesn't just rank the content of a website. They also have factors that rank the popularity of the site. Factors such as how long a person stays on the site, how many people quickly click back, how many people search for the site.

Google has evolved, what you did in the past may not work in the present or the future. My suggestions were just that suggestions, but before you discount them, maybe do some research to see if they may be valid for you.

My best advice imo, is to be very careful on assuming it is a content issue and not looking into other ranking signals.

 

[JimFranco]

thank you for your feedback.

for those links I did disavow all of those a couple of years ago.

To me filter or penalty are they not at the end the same thing with equal results; A drop in rank ? Arguing over a name is like treating a symptom not the disease.

I guess I am going to have to find out in a month or two after I get their content removed if it helped any.

 

[rand]

Have they updated the content different than what is displaying in the cache version of the google search? If so you can actually remove it or have it lower under your listing. Using a Google provided tool.

 

[JimFranco]

what do you mean ?

 

[CodyBaird]

Listen to Marie. She is spot on. Others copying your content or vise versa will not generate a penalty in my experience.

The panda penalty comes from thin and duplicate content on your own site. Too many pages are similar. Page titles are similar. Content is thin on too many pages.

Take a look at the technical seo on the site. Speed, 400 and 500 errors etc.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[JimFranco]

speed seems to be fine
and errors too




and errors