Website lost more than 70% search engine traffic overnight by Google Panda or Penguin update? if yes then you should read this article further. To make people aware on the factors and the reasons that lead websites to Google panda or Penguin penalty, i’ve shared my personal experiences and observations through this article.
Reasons why websites suffer Google penalty?
Website has bad links pointing to it: If your website has been penalized by Google then you should immediately open the free backlink checker tool majestic SEO, type in your websites URL in the text box you see and hit the search button. If you do this, you’ll be able to see your websites backlink report and 4 charts (2 graph + 2 pie charts). The first chart shows number of backlinks that Majestic SEO bot crawled on a particular day and the 2nd graph shows the referring domains. The first chart is very important. If you see an abnormal pattern of links (100′s of 1000′s of link on a single day) pointing to your site, then you have just discovered the reason why your website’s search engine traffic has dropped. Unless your website is very popular, you can’t have so many links pointing to it on a single day. These backlinks may be from low quality directories, websites with poor structure, websites penalized by Google. If you don’t find an abnormal backlink pattern in the first chart, have a look at the anchor text distribution chart located just below the graph chart.
What are low quality directories?
- Free directory listing or paid directories with 0 Page Rank.
- Directories that don’t appear on the 1st or 2nd page of Google search engine results on performing a search operation with its name.
- Directory with Google page rank and poor structure which results in 100′s of back-links through a single link.
What are Low Quality websites?
- Websites with 8 months age and 0 Page Rank. To find age of website, you can use this tool from moonsy. Each and every website’s (in Google’s search index) page rank is updated in every 6/7 months. If a website has an age over 6-7 months and has no Page rank then its a clear sign that Google hates that site or the sate has low domain or page authority.
- Websites that don’t appear on the 1st or 2nd page of Google search results on performing a search operation with the name of the site.
- Websites or blogs using top commentator plugin/ widget. If you comment on a website having this plugin installed, it will generate site-wide links. Site-wide links are not good for SEO. Site wide links violate Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Now as you know what are poor quality sites and directories, generate a report on all the back-links pointing to your website with majestic SEO tool. Once the report has been generated, find check for the links that I’ve mentioned above. When you find such links, note them down on a notepad and contact the webmasters of each those websites, request them to remove the links. If the webmasters don’t take any action, create a disavow.txt file for all the bad links that you had noted down in the notepad. This will take time but in the end, result will be fruitful. If you have no idea on how to create a disavow.txt file, follow this tutorial. If bad links was the reason why your website lost traffic overnight by Google panda or Penguin update, you’ll see the effect of your hard-work within few days.
If you don’t see any abnormalities in the number of backlinks to your site, follow the next step to identify the reason for Google Penguin or Panda penalty.
Thin or Low quality pages indexed by Google and over optimization: Google is constantly trying to update the quality of the search results it provides to the users. For improve the search results, Google engineers have added Penguin, Panda modules to the search engine to filter out bad quality useless pages and spammy content. Check out the index status menu in your Google webmaster tools account. The number of pages indexed by Google should be no more than the number of high quality content pages on your website. If you find useless pages like tag, category or search pages of your website in Google’s search index. Remove them immediately. Don’t forget to remove them or add a noindex meta robots tag to the page to prevent it from re-indexed in Google. Google Panda updates generally affect websites having low quality pages indexed in Google, so make sure that Google never indexes poor quality or thin content. If you’re using WordPress CMS, then you should go through this excellent guide from Amit Agarwal on WordPress optimization. This will help you fix common low quality pages on WordPress. If you follow this step, your search engine traffic will start recovering. If you don’t find low quality content or thin pages indexed by google then you should ceck the keyword density of each and every post on your website. Google hates keyword stuffing and every webmaster should avoid it. the ideal keyword desnity ranges from 1 to 5%. Anything above than this range makes the content not only difficult to read but also makes it over optimized. Over Optimized posts are considered as spam by Google and are affected by Google Panda updates. Yoast plugin has an inbuilt module to check the keyword density of posts on the fly when you’re in writing mode. If you’re using WordPress content management system the i recommend you to use the Yoast plugin. If you don’t wan’t to use WordPress SEO Yoast plugin then you can install the keyword density checker plugin on your site.
I’ll update this article further, stay tuned!
