My organic search results are down 16% since the Penguin update 4/24

[wianno168]

Penguin has affected my search results down 16%

When I look at my SEOmoz scan the only problem I see is "too many on page links"

The problem is that my blog for each month is considered one page-eg august 2007 I wrote many blogs-the total on page links was 106-but that included all the blogs that were written in a month.

The other problem area is duplicate content.

I thought Penguin was after "link farming" which I do not do.

Any advice how I can correct this?

Brooke

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

First an aside, duplicate content is often a rather large problem, so i would try using some url re-writes or meta-robots to see if you can improve on that.

Other then that, the penguin update and other updates around it were largly aimed at inbound links. It's likly a lot of your links are of less value, or your link profile is now seeming 'less natural'

I would work out where you have lost the traffic (keyword rankings and what they were bringing in) and then see if you've gotten any per page penelties e.t.c.

If you got penalised for a major keyword for example, you may be able to restore your previous traffic levels.

If it's accross the bored ranking drops I would work on improving your link profile in general.

If it's a traffic drop with no ranking drops, your probably seeing a seasonal variation, or something has effected your clickthrough rates (is there a new effective competitor with a better adword or Organic meta description?)

I think thats most of the bases covered. Anything more precise then that would require some data analysis.

Oh, on too meny links, I wouldn't worry about it at all unless that page has vanished from the SERPS. 106 links isn't a huge amount on a blog.

[wianno168]

Thank you. It seems rather specific.

April 23 I got over 700 hits-April 24 -95 hits then setadily declining since then to about 16 % drop in organic search hits.

After Panda last year my visits increased 20%??

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

Is 95 hits a typo? Because if not your traffics dropped closer to 84%, and I would say it's penguin with a dead cert and advise reading some of the posts on recovery floating around.

Either way I would identify which keywords you have lost the most traffic on and review your link profile. Right now large % of exact match anchors seem to be a strong signal Penguin is in play.

[wianno168]

Thank you for your answer.

After the April 24 drop to 95 the site has recovered to 550-700 hits a day down from 800

[JustDucky]

Wianno168 - Did you change anything that you believe may have lead to the partial recovery (from 95 hits to 550-700)?   If so, please describe what you did.

[wianno168]

no it just happened-I made no changes

There were one or two other days in the last 3 weeks where it dropped to say 132 and then back to over 700 on its own

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Wianno,

As mentioned, Penguin seemed to hit over-optimized and spammy link profiles, so this would be a great place to look.

Dr. Pete wrote a great post about it last week which is well worth looking into:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

That said, if you have a duplicate content problem, it's well worth addressing even if you haven't seen a ranking drop because of it. No guarantees, but simply fixing duplicate content problems often has the effect of causing a traffic rise.

In the end, it may be easier to deal with dupe content that over-optimized anchor text, but take a look at both if you can.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[wianno168]

Thank you