Hub Under A Penalty from Google?

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94
Alison Grahamposted 10 years ago
I am looking for some advice. I am trying to improve the quality of my hubs old and new. As part of this, I have been going through them, taking a snippet from the beginning of the hub, pasting it in "..." to Google search.

This gives me one way of telling if my hub has been copied.

However, I understand that if you paste in an exact sentence from the beginning of your hub and Google returns no results found and gives lots of other results first, then your page is under some sort of penalty - in other words, it SHOULD appear first when you put in an exact snippet.

I was surprised to find that an Exclusive title hub of mine, which is featured, ticks ALL the boxes in the hub tool for word count, pictures, etc., has this problem and was nowhere to be found when I put that snippet from the beginning of the hub into Google search.

I copied and pasted the url and did a search site:myhuburl this returned my hub page so it IS indexed.

I think in this case, looking back over the hub, the problem could be keyword density as I was writing about a specific medical problem, I found it hard to use other synonyms, etc.

Is there anything else I could try and would keyword density be something that HubPages admin could build into the hub tool as a way of improving hub quality before publication?

If this problem is widespread, it could be contributing the site problems HubPages is/has been experiencing with regards to traffic.

Any suggestions would be gratefully received and I would be interested to hear from other Hubbers if they try the same exercise on 'quality', featured hubs and get similar results.

Thank you,
Alison
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1. 87
  Will Apseposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  I looked at five of your pages and, with four of them, snippets did not come up in Google search. I hate to say it, but I think you got a Panda hit somewhere along the line.
  
  Did you notice a sudden traffic downturn at any time?
  
  There is stuff in the learning centre on sudden traffic loss and Panda.
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Sounds like ^^^ this to me.
  
  My initial thought is that your account looks very top heavy with sales pages.
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  87
  Will Apseposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Did you have a lot more pages at one time, Susana? I mean did you cut out a lot of underperformers? You get more traffic than I do with a lot fewer pages.
  
  I wonder if I am being merciless enough.
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Not that many more - I think the most I had was 113 - which works out at about 1/4 of pages dumped (nearly all sales pages).
  
  There are still more that either need to go or get another good going over, but while traffic's good I tend not to bother. My laziness will come back to bite me I'm sure!
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  87
  Will Apseposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  It's partly laziness with me, partly a feeling that where an account is okay overall, why change anything and tempt fate. That might not be the best approach though, as you say.
  
  I reckon it's time for me to tackle the poor performers. It may sound simple minded, but I reckon I will use snippets to try and identify sections of a page that are harmful.
  
  It can't possibly work can it? I'll try it anyway, lol.
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  It's worth a go. Like you I'm not convinced it would work, though I always find researching search results is helpful in some way or another!
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  94
  Alison Grahamposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  I am currently working my way through my hubs so evidently have not tested the same ones as you Will Apse as I have not found any problems with any others - yet!
  Yes I did notice a drop in traffic but it has returned to good levels in the past few months and no recent drops or changes except slightly upwards.
  I do have quite a lot of sales hubs but I am here to earn some money - which thankfully, I am doing.
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33
Writer Foxposted 10 years ago
Try resubmitting the URL to Google. Go into your Webmaster Tools Account and choose 'Health' from the left menu. Then choose 'Fetch as Google.' Submit your URL. If there is a problem a box will show that says "Submit to Index" and then you can add it again.

Then, try to get a significant, relevant backlink to your Hub.
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94
Alison Grahamposted 10 years ago
Thanks writerfox, but I know that the page is indexed as typing in the url in a google search returns the page listing.
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1. 73
  queerlyobscureposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  It still might be worth trying to get it crawled again, which is (I think) what writerfox is suggesting. If you've *been* penalised at some point, it can't hurt you to lay out some robot treats to entice them back. No guarantees it'll help, but it won't do any harm.
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  33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  It does help sometimes. If Google had a crawl error at one point, it sometimes doesn't come back. I've experienced this before and adding the URL again has worked for me.
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94
Alison Grahamposted 10 years ago
thank you queerlyobscure and also writerfox. I have done as you suggested.
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87
Will Apseposted 10 years ago
I have had a couple of accounts hit with Panda. The best pages will still appear in the index and will still get traffic from Google. The rest will get none.

I would have thought you would have noticed a sudden traffic drop, though.

I sometimes get affiliate pages dropped from the index if I have inadvertently packed the keywords in or triggered a spam filter for whatever reason. But your account looks to be suffering a bit more than that.
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1. 33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Do you want to share the Hub URL here so we can give a more targeted response?
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  33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  (That was supposed to be a reply to Alison, sorry.)
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94
Alison Grahamposted 10 years ago
The article concerned was my hub on foot fungus. I have now checked it again and it appears right there as the only entry in Google for the snippet I pasted - this is a snippet that I edited this morning after I did the first search but before I submitted the page to index in webmaster tools.

It seems that the problem has been rectified very quickly and that the problem was, as I suspected that I had overused keywords.

I have not come across the same problem with any other pages I have checked but have found a number of my hubs copied so am working on DMCAs now!

Thanks for all the help
Alison
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1. 33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Thanks for the update. Sending Googlebot back to crawl the URL often works; glad it worked for you.
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2. 74
  creativegeniusposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  It's a shame that unscrupulous marketers continue to steal content right off of Hubpages. I, too, had to file DMCA complaints to Google to remove my content off of unauthorized sites.
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94
Alison Grahamposted 10 years ago
thanks again writerfox, that is a tip I will remember for the future.

Alison
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87
Will Apseposted 10 years ago
Deluded.
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1. 94
  Alison Grahamposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  explain please?
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87
Will Apseposted 10 years ago
I looked at a lot of your pages and couldn't get snippets to come up for most, and I was trying three or four from each page. I had a look at mine and the best pages are no problem snippet-wize. There is clutch of poor performers, though, where it is hard to surface snippets. I might rewrite them or cut them.

Panda is a lot more subtle than it used to be. It doesn't seem to kill accounts completely the way it used to, it just drags them down.
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1. 94
  Alison Grahamposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Thanks for explaining Will, I have been working backwards from newest which were all written during the Apprenticeship here. So I am thinking that my hubs that are not getting any traffic at all fall into the category you mention. I think I will be doing some pruning!
  
  I appreciate your time in looking at my hubs and the benefit of your experience.
  
  Alison
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2. 93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Same here. I searched for at at least 6 of Alison's pages by the full title and none came up in the results, though in some instances Pinterest links to the hubs did. To me that's a classic sign of a Panda whack.
  
  I've also seen both slow traffic declines and big drops as a result of Panda penalties - though fortunately when the offending pages are removed or fixed the whole account does a big bounce up.
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  94
  Alison Grahamposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Susana, when you say you searched for them by the full title, do you mean url or the title of the page (sorry if that sounds obvious to you). Some of my hubs turn up in search results as hubpages hubs some turn up as my subdomain with the title - I am a little confused. I still have not come across any that I could not find with a snippet. of content or the url of the page. Also due to using the title tuner, many of my page titles are not the same as the wording in the url. Alison
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  I mean title not url. Your hubs should normally come up in Google search for their full title in quotes ahead of any links to them, regardless of whether they are listed via your sub or HP. When they don't it can be a strong indication of a Google penalty.
  
  There are exceptions of course, like if your title happens to be a very competitive search phrase, you've recently changed the title or the hub is very new - so keep those in mind too.
  
  Here are a few of the searches I did (I specifically chose some of your longer, less compeititve titles) and I'm assuming these are featured hubs.
  
  search 1
  
  search 2
  
  search 3
  
  search 4
  
  search 5
  
  search 6
  
  EDIT: Worryingly, some of your hubs only show in the search results when I select "repeat the search with omitted results included"
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  94
  Alison Grahamposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Interestingly all those hubs have a large full width image at the top of the page. Hubs getting more traffic have either a half picture on the right or a block of text with an image below. I need to do some more investigating.
  Thank you Susana
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  87
  Will Apseposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Susana is one of the few people who escaped from a full-on Panda hit. She is worth listening to. I wouldn't be worrying about pictures. I would be thinking about cutting poorly performing pages, reducing affiliate links and beefing up pages which might be marginal. But then I have never brought a stricken sub round.
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Thank you Will, that's very kind
  
  I have been hit a couple of times but by doing the things you stated there (cutting poorly performing pages, reducing affiliate links and beefing up pages which might be marginal), plus a few other bits and bobs like de-optimising pages a bit, I managed to get the account to bounce back.
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  94
  Alison Grahamposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Susana, how long after making the changes you suggest did you see the account bounce back? How soon did you see improvement in individual hubs after editing.
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Initially Panda was run about once a month so it took until the next Panda update to see any positive traffic/serp changes. Now that Panda is run continuously I've found it takes around 24 - 48 hours for changes to take place, when the changes made are the right ones.
  
  To answer your second question - I look at this as a "whole account" thing. Think of your subdomain as a stand alone website. In my experience, when you shake off a panda penalty lots of hubs will improve in visibility at once. It basically comes down to how much Google trusts your subdomain.
  
  If you haven't already, I suggest studying google's rater guidelines (the full version not the recently published version) - it's time consuming but worth it.
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  94
  Alison Grahamposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Thanks again, I will do as you suggest. One final question. I have got my subdomain on hubpages but many hubs appear only as on hubpages. My webmaster tools does not have as many indexed as I have published - is this because Google is taking the hubpages.com version as the first one, not my subdomain url version (I know that non-featured hubs are often not indexed but I only have two non-featured hubs so this is not the reason for the large discrepancy) - it is all very confusing but if this is a problem, what can I do about it? I appreciate your time and the benefit of your knowledge, thanks again. Alison
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  33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  You can make sure that Google crawls and indexes the URL you want by using your Google Webmaster Tools account:
  
  From the left menu, click on 'Health.'
  Choose 'Fetch as Google' from the drop-down menu.
  Then, add the URLs.
  When they have been successfully 'fetched', click on the box that says 'submit to index' if it appears. (If it doesn't appear, it means that Google already has it.)
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  94
  Alison Grahamposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  will this cause a problem if the page is in the index as a hubpages.com rather than mysubdomain.hubpages.com ?
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  33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  No. Try it for one of your Hubs and then check search results in 24 hours.
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  33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  I think one of the reasons this is happening is that HubPages' programming doesn't add a canonical URL tag referencing the URL to the header of the page, which it should be doing!
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  I don't use WMT for Hubpages but I've seen other threads where people that do have said not all hubs were listed as indexed and that it did have something to do with whether hubs were being listed in the search results via sub or HP's main domain. http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/112471#post2394653
  
  This is something that Google is doing independently so we have no control over it. Paul E has said that where hubs are being listed via HP main domain the traffic to them is improved so it's probably not something you'd want to change even if you could.
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  33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  It could be that Google is picking up the "high-trafficked" Hubs from rankings on Topic pages. I think the error could be solved by HubPages adding code to the Header. I followed the link you gave and noticed that Matthew Meyer has started another thread on this problem at:
  http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/112722#post2422220
  
  So, hopefully it will be resolved.
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Looking at some of my very low traffic hubs and how they appear in Google's search results, that theory doesn't seem to hold true. They're nowhere near prominent on topic pages though they are listed in the serps under HP's main domain. Weirdly, one hybrid result also shows my authorship image/name.
  
  Personally, I'm not that into the technical side of things, but Matthew did answer a question about whether it might be to do with canonical issues and he said no: http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/111275#post2394651
  
  What we do know is that HP have not had an answer from Google about it yet.
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  33
  Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  I went to that thread and noticed that Matthew commented about the thread he opened under Technical Problems. I am beginning to suspect that this is a much more serious issue. Those five forum threads on this topic are all from five weeks ago, just the time when Paul E. said he thought the site was hit by Google Panda.
  
  If Google detects the same content on different URLs on a site, the site can be penalized.
  
  HubPages may need to do massive, server-side 301 redirects.
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  74
  creativegeniusposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Not true with full-size images. I use full-size images and this has not affected my Hubs.
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  93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  You're welcome. Let us know how you get on!
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87
Will Apseposted 10 years ago
I should thank you. It got me thinking more clearly about a way to look out for Panda damage.
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1. 0
  Beth37posted 10 years agoin reply to this
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94
Alison Grahamposted 10 years ago
That's good to hear Will, I hope you will let us know if you hit upon anything new in this regard.

Alison
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63
wabondposted 10 years ago
Google is no longer a unbiased search engine. It stands to reason people will pay to have their websites first on the Google list, in the keywords that are on their site. And so Google is providing this service. If you cannot pay Google to do this for you then you are going to be demoted.
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1. 93
  Susana Sposted 10 years agoin reply to this
  Google have been doing this for years - it's called Adwords.
  reply report

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