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Has Anyone Had a Site Partially Hit by Penguin?

by bcmwp
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have a large blog with about 200 posts that has been hit by penguin. What's weird is that only half the site seems to have been hit. Some pages rank exactly as they used to, while others rank below their own pictures.

I'm going through the site, and I can't find much of a pattern. The newer a post, the more likely it is to have been hit. I put out four press releases and 10 ezine articles, but that was the sum of my backlinking. I've deleted the three internal pages the press releases linked to, plus all the ezine articles, removed my internal linking and related posts plugin, but no change as yet.

Has anyone else noticed a site get partially hit rather than completely? Has anyone noticed a pattern?
#hit #partially #penguin #site
  • Profile picture of the author dp40oz
    Yea I have one site that was hit badly but one very competitive term still ranks #1. I think Penguin goes after the penalites on a keyword by keyword and page by page basis. Unlike Panda which affects the whole site, the Penguin penalty is a bit different it seems.
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  • Profile picture of the author derprinz
    me too
    i have a site that was hit but some keyword still on page 1
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  • Profile picture of the author retsek
    Bad move deleting backlinks when you don't even know what caused your drop. Now you'll drop even further.

    It sounds like your issue was solely on-page.

    And what do you mean "while others rank below their own pictures". Do images in articles on your site have their own page? Are you using "attachments" urls in wordpress or something like that. If yes, then those should be no-indexed.

    You only want pages indexed that you want returned to the user who is searching.

    You don't want your tags, or attachment pages in the index. Those might be good for pageviews, and for user-navigation but they should be "noindex,follow" in almost all cases.

    Back to the issue, if image pages are ranking above the article pages it means the articles are over-optimized. Take a look at them again: reduce the keyword density; reword the titles if they are repetitive; use internal links but don't abuse it; etc.
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    • Profile picture of the author bcmwp
      Thanks. I was wondering about that. How do I go about deindexing my image pages? Wordpress generates them automatically.
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      • Profile picture of the author retsek
        Originally Posted by bcmwp View Post

        Thanks. I was wondering about that. How do I go about deindexing my image pages? Wordpress generates them automatically.
        Use a SEO plugin.

        I recommend Yoast's Wordpress SEO. There's an option where you set attachment URLs to redirect to parent post URLs. You can also set tags and other supplementary page types to noindex,follow.
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  • Profile picture of the author momo3
    I too have had a site hit where some terms dropped from #1 or #2 to #7-15... but other terms didn't get hit at all.

    However, most long tail terms tanked bad because what google is doing is ranking a PAGE of my site instead of the index page (where it used to rank).

    retsek -- I like your input here, it gives me hope. Do you think partially hit sites are mainly due to onsite overoptimization?
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    • Profile picture of the author bcmwp
      Has anyone else found that a site has been partially hit? From what I've read elsewhere, spam link penalties are site wide. Does this mean that those of us with partially hit sites are ultimately having onpage issues?
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