Seo advice / plan ? penalized ?
-
I built an ecommerce site for a client of mine just over 9 months ago now. To begin with the serps were great, everything was listed in the results but for some reason a few weeks in all the results vanished from google and now we're lucky to find anything. I've been as far as page 200 and havent found any results. Its been like this for a solid 8 months so i can only presume that the site has been penalised in some form. Searching for unique phrases from the site doesnt even return results.
The website in question is = http://goo.gl/A6Gz2
keywords we're aiming for = coloured contact lenses, fashion contact lenses
Target = Google UKNow im not really an seo guy but regardless of this my client has hired me to see whats going on and correct it. I've been scratching my head thinking all sorts of things but none of which im certain about so i'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction before i do anything drastic.
So to begin with here are some of my suspicions which i personally think are affecting ranking and possible penalisation.
#1 - Too many links on the page
#2 - Possibly over optimised
#3 - Lack of content on the product and category pages
#4 - Lack of backlinks and links in general coming from other sitesMy main concern is the lack of links from other sites and the odd link coming from low quality sites. I've also just found out that my client has been using an automatic link submitter which i've always thought of as a big no no. Some of the sites these links have been submitted to have nothing to do with the keyword we are targetting and are sort of spammy sites containing all sorts of links. Im wondering if these poor quality links could have caused the site to be penalised, google may be seeing it as a spammy site due to this.
Whats your opinions on the above, are my suspicions correct and can this be recovered ?
My planned course of action is to be as follows:
#1 - Re write the content currently on the site so that it is better written and include more keywords, especially long tails since i think these will help bring the serps up.
#2 - Write detailed category and product descriptions as well as making sure every page has some well written content with links and keywords.
#3 - Keep the above pages to one main subject / keyword so that google doesnt get confused.
#4 - Get some links on popular and relevant sites, the only problem here is the lack of fashion contact lens sites. Does anyone have any advice on how to find these or where i should be getting links placed. Are directories worth while ?
#5 - Get more involved in the social side ie facebook, twitterI will be building on the above over time, aswell as running google ads moderately for our chosen keywords.
Is there anything i have missed, anything i shouldnt be doing. Please advise.
Thanks.
-
Cool
I hope it keeps heading in that direction then... and now you know all about link juice too
-
Thanks again,
The search results have vastly improved since reducing the number of links, the majority of phrases on the site now show up in the search results so this is a major improvement.
I do agree with you on the page quality as there isnt exactly alot of content on there and as you have suggested the amount of links way out numbers those not linked. With this in mind im going to have some quality content wrote up, a couple small paragraphs for the homepage as we dont want to over do it. I'm sure the other pages would benefit from this also so i'll have something wrote up there too.
The crawl error tool did find a few issues but nothing serious, its warning about the too many on page links and the odd long url and title.
-
I would certainly think it will help what you've done already but looking at the site again, I'm swayed to suggest that some of the links come out of the body as well... I can't say for sure that I'm correct but intuitively I just have a sense that Google wouldn't be too keen. It's almost like there's more linked content in there than there is non-linked content. So to an extent, it's not even about the link juice in this case but Google's view on page quality. Hopefully somebody else will chime in here as I'm far from sure.
Aside from that, I'd still look at other possible factors too.
Have you used the crawl error report tool on here? If not, certainly check that out: Crawl Tool
-
Thanks Steve.
So what your saying is that the fewer links on page x the more equity or juice is passed onto page z etc. I can see the point in this now, more so after watching the video explaining the water.
So what i've now done is reduce the category dropdowns to just 2 levels, overall this has reduced the number of links by around 100 so compared to the 238 before theres now around 138 links on the page. Would you say this is a more reasonable figure or should i aim at reducing more links ?
-
Google can do better than 100 links per page now, but it's not about the crawling that I'm referring to, it's the spread of equity.
Your homepage has x amount of equity, which it passes through to other pages via links. Due to the sheer number of pages linked to, that x amount is only able to pass y amount to page a, where-as if there were less links then page a would get z amount of equity.
Look at this:
Disregard the stuff on that page about NoFollow helping to retain linkjuice though, that turned out not to work that way and you still lose that link juice anyway even if it is nofollow.
-
Im having second thoughts on reducing the links, is it really such a big factor ?
At the moment we have approx 238 links on the site, more a less all of which are coming from the category dropdowns. Now from my understanding the number of links doesnt affecting ranking directly but google can only index around 100 links per page so they may be missing the other 138 links.
However, with the above in mind how does google index a page, is it from top to bottom ? If this is the case it really shouldnt be too much of a problem as the category dropdowns are absolute positioned so there right at the bottom and google should be getting to those last.
I could easily reduce the dropdown categories to show only 2 levels but i personally feel the dropdowns add to an overall better user experience. Also, just looking at the competition that is ranking on page 1 the majority have a similar number of links, that is around 200.
Also, as another sub question what would be the best strategy for writing good content for the homepage. Baring in mind that the sites main focus is to sell fashion contact lenses but with the odd other bits in there too. Should i keep the homepage stricty to contact lenses or is it worth mentioning and linking to the other products. How indepth should i be about these other products ?
Any advice anyone can give would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
-
I think you're right about too many on-page links, I'd address that first for sure... spreading that link juice way too thinly
And yeah it's a little shy on links & link diversity, etc... and of what it has got, there's no deeplinks.
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
-
Quick SEO Audit of my site.
Hello, I hope you are doing great. I am working on a website that is related to flea collars for cats and dogs. And I want you to make a quick audit of the site where am I lacking. It could be great if you can help ASAP. You can view my site here :
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Request4peace0 -
Algotihmic Penality
Hello friends need help 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gurpreet1234
Site age : 2 years but constructed 2-3 months ago.
Yesterday suddenly ranking for all keywords dropped (even for brand name). 1st page to 8-9 page
Niche : mp3/videos download
One of my competitors also has same problem. (Their site is 3 yr old). Common between us :-
1.Meta description same for all pages,
2.Having nofollow links (Example user landed on page A, page A has nofollow links to page B (download links to file exist).
This happen first time with me can anybody help with his knowledge.. Someone suggested me to do a 301 to new domain.0 -
SEO Experts: Where did you start?
Hi all! I'm beginning to travel down the road of becoming an SEO expert! I've attended the latest few webinars on Moz, and have started watching the White Board Fridays. However I'm wondering, for the current SEO Experts, how did you get to where you are today? I.e. What books did you read? Did you pay for classes or just learn everything from Moz? Where is a good place to get an SEO Expert Certification/Is it necessary? How long did it take you to become an expert? (Stuff like that) I suppose I'm looking to make a list for myself, organizing what I should learn first, and then create a timeline moving forward. Thanks for your help Mozzers! - Briana B.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCWhelan13 -
How to lay off your SEO compnay?
I have decided to replace my seo company. The pint is this company has been partly my developer too. So he has set up a demo server of my website. 1- Should I be worried about duplicate material when I end my cooperation with this company(The demo server) 2- Should I be worried that if they do not like it, they go and delete all the submitted materials and destroy my pages rankings? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Is there any SEO advantage to sharing links on twitter using google's url shortener goo.gl/
Hi is there any advantage to using <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> to shorten a URL for Twitter instead of other ones? I had a thought that <cite class="vurls">goo.gl/</cite> might allow google to track click throughs and hence judge popularity.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
How important is a good "follow" / "no-follow" link ratio for SEO?
Is it very important to make sure most of the links pointing at your site are "follow" links? Is it problematic to post legitimate comments on blogs that include a link back to relevant content or posts on your site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
SEO Ecommerce Keywords
Hi guys got a question regarding ecommerce seo do you think its a better idea to target more long tail terms and try get links directly to product pages, brand pages and categories. Rather than focus on short keywords that do bring in good traffic but are very broad, i will prob do both, but i would like a second opinion please about other users strategies thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0