Penguin issues

[jwdl]

Hello everyone,

I run about 10 sites and pretty much every single one got hit by Penguin (the traffic plummeted on 24th April). I have never done reciprocal links (except 1 domain upto 2005 or so), I have never bought links, I have never spammed message boards or anything like that (except 1 different domain got hit by negative SEO by someone else) and I have never employed anyone to do any of the above. The way I have created sites for the last 10 years is to try to make them useful and let the links build naturally which more or less worked until April this year. I've been tearing my hair out ever since. The only thing you can say about all of them (apart from that I own them but I've been careful with whois etc) is that the link profile is 100% natural apart from the 2 provisos above.

Since April I've hired people but I'm down $20K but not any better in the rankings.

A few of the sites are:

short-hairstyles.com was number 1 for short hairstyles and short haircuts for years then Penguin came and its dropped off for both. It had 10000 or so spammy message board links posted by someone as negative seo I have got some removed but google webmaster tools still reports them as there. There are tentative signs of recovery (maybe) but no traffic increase.

1001-hairstyles.com has been there or there abouts for 10 years for the keyword hairstyles and hair styles until April. A site ourlipsaresealed.skyblogs.be has 30000 links to it (there are only 40000 total) with the anchor text haarstijls which is dutch for hairstyles, I don't think its malicious just they set a template and do a new page every day and they also link in the same way to a competitor who wasn't affected. An seo firm have been working on this one for a few months, the traffic increased 50% a couple of weeks ago but bombed the day after to worse than before.

Prom-hairstyles.org when the same way as above in April. The only back link oddity is a site polyvore.com links to it about 400 times (out of 1000 or so total) they are using our pictures to sell their prom dresses (with out permission) but mostly deep link.

Most of the other sites went in a similar way but have no obvious backlink anomalies. Do I use the link disavowel tool? I am a bit wary of it because if you watch matt cutts video he keeps reiterating that the tool is for people who have used dodgy link practises in the past and want to do a clean up but that isn't me so am I owning up to something I haven't done by using it?

Are the search results as strange in everybody's niche? In mine there is some real dross as well as loads of pinterest and other user generated stuff.

Sorry to go on for so long and thanks for getting this far.

Ian

[EGOL]

*** WARNING ***

If you click the "SERP" link below some of the sites listed have possible malware problems.  Visiting them is not recommended.

If you ,look at this SERP you will see that you have a possible duplicate content problem.  Also, a couple of the listings in this SERP have a potential malware problem.

Sites with malware problems are usually dropped from the SERPs and sites linking to them are often harmed.

[jwdl]

Hi EGOL

Thanks for that. Yes most of my sites seem to have this but they copied me! Do I have to change everything? Is it as simple as just changing the content for the pages affected or is the damage done? Is there a way of preventing this?

Google really penalises sites because people copy them?

"Sites with malware problems are usually dropped from the SERPs and sites linking to them are often harmed." sorry I don't understand this bit, I don't link to them.

Ian

[EGOL]

Since your sites dropped on April 24th and that was a penguin date it is possible that penguin problems are responsible.

However, duplicate content could have done it if all of your sites have a lot of duplication.  Google does not want to show several sites with the same content in a SERP so they demote the sites with less authority - even if the content on them was copied from other sites.

Duplicate content can be solved by deindexing problem pages, rewriting them or deleting them.

Your site could have multiple problems.  You might want to take the quiz at mytrafficdropped.com to see if that gives you a better understanding of the problem.

[jwdl]

OK, thank you EGOL.

I clearly have content duplication issues on many of my sites which I'll address by changing said content and hopefully that problem will go away or at least reduce. How long does that take?

The linkback issue. Is it an issue? I originally assumed going by the date my problems were solely due to Penguin and therefore linkback related. Should I, in the light of this other content problem, assume that the linkback issue isn't a problem or should I still consider using the disavowel tool?

Ian