Dropped ranking - Penguin penalty or duplicate content issue?

[gametv]

Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action.

I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings.  If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index?

The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update.  The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text.  As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update.

One last question:  The page completely dropped from the search index.  If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position?

If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?

[Dr-Pete]

I've seen some reports of sites being hit by the Penguin data update ("Penguin 1.1") on Friday night, but I'm not clear on the severity. If it's just one page, though, and it was completely de-indexed, that's pretty unlikely.

It is definitely possible for a bad canonical tag to drop a page from the index. I'm a little confused on what you're saying about the two pages. Are they both canonical'ed to a third page, or to each other? Could you give an example (maybe show us two tags that are similar to what you have, but with the exact details changed)?

[gametv]

Thanks for the reply!

What happened was that I added a new page and accidentally used the canonical for the page that was ranking well for search terms on that new page.

So to state it a different way - I added a new Page B to the site, but instead of using the canonical for that page, I accidentally used the canonical for Page A.  Page A is the page that previously had ranked well for search terms.  On Saturday night or Sunday, Page A dropped out of all of the search terms that it ranks for.  However, I did a little more research and Page A is still in the index, it just doesnt rank for any of the search terms it used to.  Page B is also in the index, but since it is a new page, it does not really rank for any terms.  Obviously, I have fixed the canonical on Page B and Google already has the new page in its cache.

As far as over-optimization penalties, Page A has nearly all the inbound links with anchor text that is only a slight variation of the search term.  It is the page on the site that I would have expected to have got hit by Penguin.  There are some other pages that have lost a little bit of ranking, but nothing drastic.

I am just surprised that if it is a Penguin penalty, it would completely lose ranking on the terms in a single day, rather than moving down the rankings to maybe the third or fourth page.  Do you find that Penguin penalties usually result in a lower ranking, or completely losing rankings?

Either way, I'm going to go in and clean up the link profile, but it would be nice to know how aggressive I should be to try to recover that page.

[Dr-Pete]

It's unlikely the canonical is to blame here, if I'm understanding it correctly. If you tried to canonicalize Page B to Page A, and they were clearly different, one of two things should happen:

(1) Google will just ignore it.

(2) Google will follow it anyway, and drop Page B from the index.

Now, it's theoretically possible that, if Google thought you were using the canonical tag inappropriately to benefit Page A, they could punish Page A, but I've honestly never seen that happen (I've seen it with 301-redirects). Typically, Page B would also have to have a lot of links that you were trying to "clean" (think money laundering). Since Page B is new, this seems very unlikely.

If you're hitting exact-match (or close to it) anchor text hard on Page A, it's certainly possible Penguin came into play, especially if Page A is pushing keywords a bit too hard. It's been tough to confirm Penguin cases, but most of the verified ones I've seen are sudden drops. It's not a subtle, gradual impact.

You could wait for the next Penguin data update, but I suspect you may have to do some link clean up. If there's anything that's not only exact-match anchor text but is sitewide (especially footer links), I'd start there. They seem to be major targets of Penguin. Truthfully, though, we're still collecting data on it.

[gametv]

Yes I think it was a Penguin drop. There is one other thing about the page that dropped. It is using a 301 re-direct.   I had updated the page url a while ago, but nearly all of the links to the page are to the old page.  So this penalty might be a combination of signals that collectively have tagged that page.

I'm working on cleaning up the link profile right now.   I think that Penguin is a very imperfect animal.   But I cant change the beast, so I will just have to make some changes here.