Pages plummeting in ranking
-
Hi all,
I have a question, which i hope you can answer for me. I have a site www.betxpert.com (a danish betting site) and we have tried to do some SEO to improve conversions.
One of the steps we have taken was to link to all of our bookmaker reviews in our menu (a mega menu). All of our bookmakers have an img and text link in the menu. The menu is shown on every page of the site.
Since we have made this change we have been plumeting down the SERPs. For the search "betsafe" this page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe is no longer in the top 50.
We also added the "stars" so that the google result will show our over all review for the bookmaker, in order to stand out in the SERPs.
Can anyone explain to me what the problem might be? Over extensive internal linking or?
-
You can always private message me thru moz as well.
Best of luck. -
Okay. Thanks a lot for the effort and answer. I hope it helps me...lets see when the changes take effect. I will post back here in a couple of weeks if i see improvements.
I have removed the links from the menu, apart from on the frontpage. Also i have added nofollow to the links in the section which caused the "extreme linking" warning. This should stop the fall in ranking if this in fact is the issue.
I will try and reduce the number of links on the page. In general we have a lot of links on every page. But if that is a crime i will try to avoid it
-
Based on GWMT, the links still count toward the total. I am not sure, if it would reduce the likelihood of a penalty though or if it would negate a penalty in place. I did a quick in WMT and could not find an answer to that portion.
-
Will it help me in getting fewer links if i set "nofollow" for some of them? Will google regard this as fewer links?
-
Yes, absolutely, it can and likely does have something to do with the fall in rankings. The rel= "no follow" should help. What is happening, is that they are seeing way too many links and that is considered "spammy."
What I would suggest is to take off links where they are not really needed. This should assist you immediately. If you make a big enough dent in unlinking (I suggest no more than 100 internal links per page...but, not on every single page if you can avoid it.) you should then consider submitting for reconsideration. A question is: Are any of your pages showing up in search?
The other thing you should consider is backing up a step and looking at the overall mapping of the site: Does it make sense? (remember, I am in the US, speak passable Spanish and no Danish..sorry) Using Google translation, I think some of it could be streamlined to provide a better experience for your bettors. Take off the articles if they are not needed. (Do people spend time on them? Do they migrate to betting from them?) There is a lot to look at and that, even for a bettor, may be too much.
Hope it helps,
-
Hi,
Thanks for the fast answer.
One thing i did not mention, but could be of relevance. A year ago the site was rebuilt and therefore a lot of URLs were redirected with 301 redirection. However a lot of links in a section of the site did not redirect due to settings on the new server. This issue was fixed last month, so now all the old URLs are being processed by Google and the pages which they redirect to have a lot of links (it is a statistics section) and i have received a warning in webmaster tools about an extreme high amount of links in the web site. I have today set rel="nofollow" on the larger part of the links on these pages (since i really do not want them all indexed).
Can this warning have anything to do with the fall in ranking? I am thinking if we are punished by having pages with too many links - all with links to the bookmaker pages on them?
In general we have a lot of links on the site. Is this really a problem? Is it a known fact that Google punisheds for having too many links in pages?
Regards,
Rasmus
-
Rasmus,
First, not knowing when the changes were made and assuming the only changes made are described above, here are some possibilities:
If the change is in the last few weeks, it may be a temporary fluctuation in the rankings and you may need to wait 3 to 6 weeks to see if there is a bounce back.
If that is not the case, in my opinion with the number of links you have, you have two issues: First, from GWMT:
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
There are other issues beyond this, your H1 is picking up the articles in the middle of the page (makes it unclear). The load time is long (D or F in YSlow depending on which test version). etc.
However, I would look at it from the standpoint of what did you change given the site itself. Again, if the only change was the links you described, it would be easy enough to delink them and see if you come back.
I understand with a betting site you want to show all a person can bet on and that you are trying to get people to look at info on their favorite sport, but to me the site is way over busy and could use some simplification. I cannot tell you whether or not Google sees it as spammy. I do believe there are too many links. Without testing it and just looking at it cursorily, I came up with close to 200.
Hope this helps,
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page ranked then disappeared
Recently there have been a a couple of pages form my website that ranked well, in top 5 for a couple of days then they disappear suddenly, they are not at all seen in google search results no matter how narrow I search for them. I checked my search console, there seems to be no issues with the page, but when I check google analytics, I do not get any data from that page since the day it disappeared, and it does not even show up on the 'active pages' section no matter I keep the url open in multiple computers.
Technical SEO | | JoelssonMedia
Has anyone else faced this issue? is there a solution to it?0 -
Filter pages - Shopify
Hi there, /collections/living-room-furniture/black
Technical SEO | | williamhuynh
/collections/living-room-furniture/fabric Is that ok to make all the above filter/tag pages canonicalised with their main category /collections/living-room-furniture OR I keep them as it is, so /collections/living-room-furniture/black can rank for filter keywords, example: black living room furniture, /collections/living-room-furniture/fabric fabric living room furniture etc. Also, does it needs to be noindex, follow as well? Note - already removed the main category content from filter pages, updated meta tags as well. Please advice, thank you0 -
Why are crawlers not picking up these pages?
Hi there, I've been asked to audit a new subdomain for a travel company. It's all a bit messy, so it's going to take some time to remedy. However, one thing I couldn't understand was the low number of pages appearing in certain crawlers. The subdomain has many pages. A homepage, category pages then product pages. Unfortunately, tools like Screaming Frog and xml-sitemaps.com are only picking up 19 pages and I can't figure out why. Google has so far indexed around 90 pages - this is by no means all of them, but that's probably because of the new domain and lack of sitemap etc. After looking at the crawl results, only the homepage and category (continent pages) are showing. So all the product pages are not. for example, tours.statravel.co.uk/trip/Amsterdam_Kings_Day_(Start_London_end_London)-COCCKDM11 is not appearing in the crawl results. After reviewing the source code, I can't see anything that would prevent this page being crawled. Am I missing something? At the moment, the crawl should be picking up around 400+ product pages, but it's not picking up any. Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Local Landing Pages struggling with rankings although I've done most things needed. Any idea?
Hi Mozzers, I am wondering if someone could advise if there's anything obvious here as to why my local landing pages suck ranking wise even though I have done all of the following. http://goo.gl/Lr4HXa I am trying to rank for Garden tool hire Bristol on my landing page. Main category page is garden tool hire Consitant NAP - Citations. Local branch address on Page , in title tag, H1 tag and the address is in on page content which is unique. Schema.org has been set up with address in this aswell etc. Pagination set up and view all page has concanical tag pointing to page 1 Speed not an issue as this is a fast site. Currently all the product links on the page are H3 tags but I've seen this on lots of other sites. All my NAP Citations point to the parent branch pages although I don't have any individual deep links pointing to this page. Unique Content I currently don't have internal links to relevant articles on my blog page as I have those on my main category landing page as you can see here - http://goo.gl/sO9A9U but I can add these as well to all my location specific landing pages if you think it would help. Any thoughts greatly appreciated Pete
Technical SEO | | PeteC120 -
If the order of products on a page changes each time the page is loaded, does this have a negative effect on the SEO of those pages?
Hello, a client of mine has a number of category pages that each have a list of products. Each time the page is reloaded the order of those products changes. Does this have a negative effect on the pages' rankings? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Kerry_Jones2 -
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Not ranking on Google
Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com. I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site. 1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? 2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
Technical SEO | | ICON_Malta0 -
Duplicates on the page
Hello SEOMOZ, I've one big question about one project. We have a page http://eb5info.com/eb5-attorneys and a lot of other similar pages. And we got a big list of errors, warnings saying that we have duplicate pages. But in real not all of them are same, they have small differences. For example - you select "State" in the left sidebar and you see a list on the right. List on the right panel is changing depending on the what you selecting on the left. But on report pages marked as duplicates. Maybe you can give some advices how to improve quality of the pages and make SEO better? Thanks Igor
Technical SEO | | usadvisors0