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Hi Marcus,

Your help has been invaluable. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this for me.

Kind regards

Mark

Hi Marcus,

Many thanks for your response. I have found the tools you recommended (Barracuda Panguin Tool and Link detox) extremely useful.

I have attached the barracuda results for allthetopbananas.com. It looks like Panda is the culprit.

Their link profile returned a result of "Low Risk" in Link Detox as expected, so I don't think Penguin is an issue.

If you have any further suggestions or direction from here, I would be most grateful. I am thinking that sites like this one, that have relied on basic on-page keyword optimisation and backlinks to attain their Google rankings in the past are now suffering because since Panda Google is putting more value on a wider set of signals such as social, authority, freshness, authorRank, mentions etc.. Would you concur with that?

I look forward to your reply.

kind regards

Mark

[Panguin Tool - Barracuda Digital-year.png](http://www.websearchseo.co.uk/dloads/Panguin Tool - Barracuda Digital-year.png) [Panguin Tool - Barracuda Digital.png](http://www.websearchseo.co.uk/dloads/Panguin Tool - Barracuda Digital.png)

Hi Moz community,

One of my clients has a beast of a website built in ASP.NET (which causes me problems cos I don't have much experience in that)

It is a job-site that aggregates job opportunities from other job-sites and provides a job matching service by email etc.

They used to have great presence on Google naturally for thousands of job searches.

Since Penguin and Penguin 2.0 (I think) their traffic has fallen off a cliff.

I have been doing some "off-page" experimentation, seeing if we can fix a lot of issues by re-sculpting their backlink profile (seeing as it was after penguin). but what I have found is that some pages respond to this off page work but some just do not at all, despite how we approach it, such as disavowing previous links building fresh new top quality content links with natural anchor text etc....

Which has lead me to the conclusion that the wider issue is on-page and potentially site structure. Unfortunately as it is ASP.NET I am not so comfortable diagnosing the issues.

I think also some issues will be related to dupe content etc.... but I would LOVE to get some input from my learned Moz colleagues.

The website is http://www.allthetopbananas.com/ - any tips on how to recover from this dramatic loss of traffic would be massively appreciated.

Kind regards

Thanks Daniel,

That certainly helps to make me feel better, but still doesn't fully answer my question. Even if they have achieved their links via spamming, the niche is still way stronger than what they have achieved in terms of Domain and Page Authority, trust, on-page SEO etc.... etc.... I would understand them getting to page 2 for a couple of months then disappearing, but not position 1? Seems too easy!

Any further comment would be greatly appreciated.

M

Hi mozzers,

I have been using moz tools for a long while now for assessing SEO metrics with great success, but since recent Google algorithm updates I am seeing more and more SERPS that just simply don't make sense to me what so ever.

The most startling recently was an assessment of one of the keywords my own site competes for "Link Building Services"

The current No 1 position in Google.co.uk is held by http://www.napalit.org/

I invite all you seo experts out there to take a look at this site, look at it metrics in OSE compared with the "lower" competition and explain to me why it is No1.

I would really like to know what ranking factors this site has that makes it "higher quality" and offer "better value" than the competition.

I thought I understood what Google was trying to do with recent updates - get rid of non-value adding spammers and improve the quality of the search results.

But now I am becoming more sceptical. Are they just making it impossible for us to make a difference by following good SEO practices so we all resort to paying for Adwords?

I hope you guys out there can help me with this one and restore my faith.

Thanks

Sorry Marcus, my account has been hacked. I did not write this.

I would certainly not do such a thing.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Regards

Mark

deleted by Mark Johnson

Thanks Tommy,

You have been very helpful

Hi Tommy,

Many thanks for your reply. I think my big mistake was filing a reconsideration request. Perhaps if I hadn't my rankings would still be in tact. I just panicked (the actions of a guilty man).

All your recommendations are in line with what I have planned for my new website.

Do you think that 301 redirecting my penalised website to my new website will harm the new website? It's just that I have a lot of existing customers (direct traffic) that I don't want to lose.

Thanks in advance.

Mark

So, When we distribute press releases to news channels, google will see this as duplicate content and we only get link juice from one instance of that press release? Is that right?

M

Hi Sam,

Most browsers add the trailing / anyway, so no need for that, adding .html is not necessary either, usually just for static html websites.

So, there is no real benefit of adding unnecessary extentions to your permalinks.

regards

Mark

More Italian Backlinks will help ranking in Google.it for both Brand and other keywords. The difficulty is finding suitable link sources I would imagine. But if you can find high quality Italian backlink sources then that must be favourable.

Cheers

M