Penguin 2.0 drop due to poor anchor text?

[mjk26]

Hi,

my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update, and after years of designing my website with SEO in mind, generating unique content for users, and only focusing on relevant websites in my link building strategy, I'm a bit disheartened by the drop in traffic.

Having rolled out a new design of my website at the start of April, I suspect that I've accidentally messed up the structure of the website, making my site difficult to crawl, or making Google think that my site is spammy.  Looking at Google Webmaster Tools, the number 1 anchor text in the site is "remove all filters" - which is clearly not what I want!  The "remove all filters" link on my website appears when my hotels page loads with filters or sorting or availability dates in place - I included that link to make it easy for users to view the complete hotel listing again.  An example of this link is towards the top right hand side of this page:

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/agganis-arena-hotels/300382?star=2

With over 6000 venues on my website, this link has the potential to appear thousands of times, and while the anchor text is always "remove all filters", the destination URL will be different depending on the venue the user is looking at.  I'm guessing that to Google, this looks VERY spammy indeed!?

I tried to make the filtering/sorting/availability less visible to Google's crawl when I designed the site, through the use of forms, jquery and javascript etc., but it does look like the crawl is managing to access these pages and find the "remove all filters" link.  What is the best approach to take when a standard "clear all..." type link is required on a listing page, without making the link appear spammy to Google - it's a link which is only in place to benefit the user - not to cause trouble!

My final question to you guys is - do you think this one sloppy piece of work could be enough to cause my site to drop significantly following the Penguin 2.0 update, or is it likely to be a bigger problem than this?  And if it is probably due to this piece of work, is it likely that solving the problem could result in a prompt rise back up the rankings, or is there going to be a black mark against my website going forward and slow down recovery?

Any advice/suggestions will be greatly appreciated,

Thanks

Mike

[matbennett]

That link is not ideal, but I really do not believe that it would cause the sort of drop you are talking about.

If you think you have been hit by penguin 2 then I'd start looking at your backlinks with a critical eye.  I just stuck your domain into majestic seo and I hit a lot of questionable directories pretty quickly.  That might be unfair - I certainly haven't analysed in any depth. However I took 10 domains at random and 9 were sites that at best are not helping you much.

If you're looking for a cause of a drop I'd say you could do worse than going through your backlink profile.

[mjk26]

Hi Mat,

thanks for your reply.  I'll definitely change the link, but I agree that it would be harsh if it was the sole reason for the 30% drop in organic traffic.

There are definitely some directories linking to ConcertHotels.com - at one stage I used the SEOmoz list of directories and got my website listed on some of the recommendations from the list.  But my strategy for the last two years has been to approach venue's own websites and ask if they'd be interested in linking to our nearby hotels page, as a useful resource for their visitors.  This strategy has worked quite well for me, and to me it sounds like a very natural, sensible link building strategy.  I'll certainly work through my list of backlinks, but I would hope that the majority of them are from very relevant websites (due to the strategy I adopted).  I guess there could be a percentage that I have not had any control over however, and I guess I should disavow these?

As for the directories, should I now be disavowing directory links?  I didn't think that the percentage of directory links to my site would be that high -I used the directory link strategy in the past to simply enhance the number of links to my homepage - the strategy I described above is one which achieve links to specific pages throughout my website, not my homepage, so I felt the need to grow the number of homepage links.

Thanks again for your help and advice

Mike

[MarketingOfAmerica]

Go to majestic SEO, type your url in.  If your keywords you got penalized for are over 10% diversity you are being penalized generally, however there are a few exceptions, but not many.  I analyzed 440 sites and found that the highest was 2.47 for a site that didn't have keywords in the url.

Also, I suggest you read this http://dailyseotip.com/what-other-marketing-firms-want-you-to-believe-that-isnt-true/3356/  I see that you are really focused on Onpage SEO.  I think this will help you understand more.

The next thing you may want to do is start contacting admins and deleting low quality links if you have them.  Use OSE and figure out low quality links.  There are only a handful of directories I recommend out their.  I have a message from Google telling one of my clients to get rid of their directory links, it was and example link coming from a directory site to be exact.  Never use a keyword at a directory site, always use Brand name or your URL.

Make sure your Disavow is your last resort and I highly suggest you get someone to do it that has experience in it.  Many have messed this up and really hurt their website.

Have a great day.