Are we being Penalized? Can someone Assess Please!

[CyrilWilson]

We have two eCommerce sites. Both the sites can broadly be divided into 3 pages

• 1. Home Page.

2. Detail Page.

3 Category Pages (Altogether our site has approx 3 Million pages each)

These are the site URLs

http://bit.ly/9tRZIi - This is targeted for USA  Audience

http://bit.ly/P8MxPR - This is targeted for UK audience

The .com domain which was launched earlier in 2011 is doing okay with decent organic traffic

Precautions Taken: To avoid content being duplicate on both the sites we are using:

a. Geo-targeting through Google webmaster tools

b. rel=alternate tag on printsasia.co.uk

Problem

1. The .co.uk domain which was launched in May 2012 started gaining organic traffic slowly but then suddenly dropped to almost 0 after September 18.

2. When we use operator site:printsasia.co.uk and apply a filter on past week/month we don't see any result. While when same operator used for "any time" we see some results.

3. According to webmaster tool, Google has indexed 95% of our URLs in the sitemap

Our concern: Is our UK site penalized for some reasons? If yes, what could be the possible reason(s) for this penalty and possible steps to get out of it? Would request if experts here can review our site and help us.

[easyrider2]

Looking at open site explorer for your UK bookshop I would say with 99% confidence you are being penalised because of over optimisation. Sounds like you got hit on the penguin refresh around sept 18.

Your anchor text is nearly all pointing with Bookshops UK. In fact 236 times and the nearest alternative is printasia.co.uk 4 times. Plus they are all coming from the same domain (blog.bookshopasia). You need to vary your anchor text. However, i am guess that link is the page template, although I could only see a link for "online bookshop UK" it has to be in there somewhere as OSE picks it up.

Make sure that if it is on the template, make that link no-follow and get links from different domains for different keywords.

You also need to get on top of your blog commenting. People using names such as "how to build your own iphone app" are just spam and worthless comments. Even if you disallow websites to be linked, crap content is worthless to your site.

[MarkHodson]

I agree in part with easyrider2. There may be a problem caused by the sitewide header links from your own blog (blog.printsasia.com). These currently use the keyword-rich anchor text "Online Bookshop UK", although I suspect you previously had this as "Bookshop UK", as this is what OSE has picked up. Either way, they look like the kind of links that might be targeted by Penguin, as they don't use your brand name as anchor text.

If the blog was a subdomain of your UK site (blog.printsasia.co.uk), I don't think this would be a problem. But because it's a subdomain of a US site (albeit the same company), this could look like a spammy type of link.

Note: it may be that Google has not penalised you, but has simply decided to discount a set of links, perhaps these ones.

The good news is that as this is your company blog you can quickly change the link.

You could try one of the following:

1. Remove the sitewide link from blog.printsasia.com altogether

2. Change the anchor text to your brand name (eg Printsasia UK)

3. Remove the sitewide link and add a few more "natural" links into blog posts (as easyrider2 suggests)

Personally, I would try 1, assuming it doesn't drive significant traffic to your site. If that helps then you know you've identified a problem.

However, I don't think this is your only problem, and I'm not even convinced it is a problem. Looking at your link profile, you simply don't have sufficient volume or diversity of links, nor do you have enough links from high-authority sites within your space. So even if you "fix" this immediate problem, you still need to focus on some serious linkbuilding (by which I mean relationship building) within your industry.

I agree with easyrider2 about the spammy blog comments. These may not cause a problem with Google but they look very poor to users (and webmasters who might potentially link to your sites).

[CyrilWilson]

Thanks for your time. You mean blog.printsasia and not (blog.bookshopasia) right?

Juts a question- blog.printsasia.com is our own official blog, we have placed links for both the sites on subdomain blog.printsasia.com. If that is the reason for penalty then why our other site is not being penalized? or why only co.uk is penalized and .com is having no issues

[MarkHodson]

see my answer below!

[CyrilWilson]

Mark thanks for your time and valuable feedback. I think you almost answered my doubt why only one site being penalized and not the other.

Mark you are right when you say "Looking at your link profile, you simply don't have sufficient volume or diversity of links, nor do you have enough links from high-authority sites within your space"

As i mentioned co.uk is just 5 months old site and its taking us sometime to build links. But we are definitely working on it.

I believe having lesser links can only be the reason of poor page rank and low rank in SERP it should not be the reason of being penalized. I hope you will agree with this.

As immediate step

1. I will first remove the sitewide link and see if this was the reason. If thinks improves over the time, we will keep the link back with changed anchor text

2. We will definitely take care of the blog comments considering the importance of it in brand reputation

[MarkHodson]

Good plan. I would wait at least 4 weeks after removing the link before you decide whether or not it's worked

[AdamThompson]

According to this, there was a Panda update on Sept 18, so I suspect that's what hit your site. Panda mainly targets the content of your website - my guess would be that your site was penalized because it has a lot of "thin content" pages. In other words, all your book pages have very little (no?) unique textual content.

FYI, I would say your US site is also in danger of being penalized by Panda and/or Penguin. I see that over 1/3 of linking root domains link to you with the anchor text "<a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">buy books online". Over-use of keyword anchor text like that is strongly correlated with getting a Penguin penalty.</a>

[CyrilWilson]

Thank you Adam for your time and valuable feedback. We were also thinking of being hit by Panda but thought and as correction we used rel=alternate tag on printsasia.co.uk

It's been just a few days since we implemented this we are unable to say if this is working.

2ndly to increase the content we are introducing some review program and at the same time have also generated some auto generated content since it is impossible to develop content for 3 mn and increasing pages. If you can see the last "Book Information" Section on this page http://bit.ly/QqMAFR you will understand what i mean.

This section will be there on all book detail pages. Your comment post reviewing this will be appreciated

[AdamThompson]

Hi Cyril,

I doubt that the rel=alternate tag will help. Copyscape shows that at least some of the content is duplicated across other sites, not just your two sites.

I also doubt that auto generated content will help avoid Panda. That's one of the things Panda was specifically created to penalize - auto generated content.

If you're getting unique reviews from users and/or writing editor reviews, that very well may help.

I realize that it is impractical to write content for 3 million pages, but you may find that is what you need to do. You may need to start with your top pages and work from there, and in the meantime block indexing of all pages without unique content. I would not take that step hastily, but it may be what you end up having to do.

~Adam

[CyrilWilson]

Yes what you see through copyscape is correct as those content comes along with the book and will be true for all retailers and marketplace websites, be it amazon, bn or abebooks.

Since we could not think of any other way to come up with unique content we thought of auto generated content. I slightly differ here as these auto-generated content is unique for each page at least partially. Though I am not 100% confident if this is great way to go about it.

Yes review is something we are definitely coming up and this may help.

[AdamThompson]

It doesn't necessarily matter if the auto generated content is unique or not - Panda was intended to penalize low quality content (such as auto generated content), not just duplicate content.

Even if you were able to figure out a way to auto generate content  that didn't get penalized, there's a good chance you'll get penalized in a future update.