Client's site dropped completely for all keywords, but not brand name - not manual penalty... help!
-
We just picked up a new search client a few weeks ago. They've been a customer (we're an automotive dealer website provider) since October of 2011. Their content was very generic (came from the previous provider), so we did a quick once-over as soon as he signed up. Beefed up his page content, made it more unique and relevant... tweaked title tags... wrote meta descriptions (he had none).
In just over a week, he went from ranking on page 4 or 5 for his terms to ranking on page 2 or 3. My team was working on getting his social media set up, set up his blog, started competitor research...
And then this last weekend, something happened and he dropped completely from the rankings... He still shows up if you do a site: search, or if you search his exact business name, but for everything else, he's nowhere to be found.
His URL is www.ohioautowarehouse.com, business name is "Ohio Auto Warehouse"
We filed a reconsideration request on Monday, and just got a reply today that there was no manual penalty. They suggested we check our content, but we know we didn't do anything spammy or blackhat.
We hadn't even fully optimized his site yet - we were just finishing up his competitor research and were planning on a full site optimization next week... so we're at a complete loss as to what happened.
Also, he's not ranking for any of the vehicles in his inventory. Our vehicle pages always rank on page 1 or 2, depending on how big the city is... you can always search "year make model city" and see our customers' sites (whether they're doing SEO or not). This guy's cars aren't showing up... so we know something is going on...
Any help would be a lifesaver. We've been doing this for quite some time now, and we've never had a site get penalized. Since the reconsideration request didn't help, we're not sure what to do...
-
(rolling eyes)
I need a big "I heart google" shirt...
so we filed a reconsideration request the week that this happened, then got a reply that it wasn't a manual penalty and that we should look at the content.
so we filed another one, with a very in-depth explanation that we hadn't changed much content, we weren't violating any Google guidelines, and we hadn't done anything to trigger an algorithmic penalty...
since this started, we didn't do anything on his site - zero changes to content (wanted to wait until we heard back from the 2nd request) - we added a single link from a car dealer directory site (that you have to call to be listed in) the day we realized he had dropped from the SERPs, but nothing since then...
the ONLY thing we did was finally sort out his + Local listing - the address was displaying as 916 but is really 915 - but since he didn't know who registered his Places page, we had to re-verify... so there were 2 verified google accounts with access to the Places dashboard, which apparently causes issues and problems... we got that sorted out so that we're the only account with access... and we updated the address...
then we got a reply Monday from our 2nd reconsideration request that was word-for-word the same as the first one - no manual penalty, check your content, blah blah blah...
and as of Tuesday of this week, BAM - he's back in the SERPs... he's around page 3 or 4 for most of his targeted terms, so the little bit of initial optimization we did has him ranking higher than he was before he signed up with us...
so - don't know if the Places/+ Local address being off by a few numbers was the problem (probably not, cause that problem was there before we started) or if the second reconsideration request got someone to look and fix something... or if it was just a really random algorithmic hiccup...
-
Hey Greg, any resolution on this?
-
I doubt it buddy! No one said this was fair and I would certainly try to make as much of it as unique as possible to get out of this hole!
-
Thanks Marcus -
as far as the Craigslist stuff - it's duplicated because he lists his inventory on Craigslist. We see this with all of our dealers who list inventory on CL, but it's never penalized anyone.
Also, inventory is fed out to hundreds of classified sites, so you'll see supe content there as well - but it's never hurt any of our dealers (and it's extremely common in the auto industry)
As far as the other websites that come up, they're other customers - 99% of our websites have the same menu buttons, as they're pretty standardized in the auto industry... and for those customers who don't do SEO, there's really generic basic text which leads to similar/duplicate content issues. But again, it's never caused a penalty before...
can't do anything about dupe content on the vehicle side of things, but we'll definitely update the content on his custom pages... and obviously we'll start linkbuilding...
hopefully that will be enough to get him back in...
-
yeah - the system shows the home page whenever a sold vehicle page is requested (i know, not the right way to do it at all - fighting that battle with our dev team already)
but the same thing happens with all of our customers' sites (over 1000), and no one else is penalized for it...
-
Just one more, you have some weird internal duplication going on too. The following URLs are indexed but render the homepage:
I bet there are more of these too. Maybe these pages are supposed to 404/redirect and instead are mirroring the homepage? That could be causing the issue.
-
Hey Greg, this sounds like an algorithmic penalty. It could be to do with the site itself or more likely it could be to do with external aspects that are / were beyond your control.
Google has replied and told you to check your content so this certainly needs some investigation for starters.
1. External Duplication
I did a quick copyscape search for the homepage and it came back with 26 other sites with the same or similar content (mostly craigslist sub domains).
I did another copyscape search for one product page and it came back with 80 results of sites with the same or similar content.
You have external duplication issues.
2. Link Profile
There is no link profile to speak of so that is not the problem - 16 links from 6 sites. Nothing of any quality.
So, without getting all CSI on this, you have a site with no links and a whole bucket load of content duplication on other sites. Whether they are cutting and pasting this content and dropping it on other sites or they are taking it from other places, you need to A) sort this out & B) educate them going forward.
Get the duplication sorted, get a few decent links, add a bit of unique content (try moving the blog onto the main domain instead of on the blog. sub domain) and you will bounce back for these long tail searches at least.
Seriously though, I have seen this a bunch of times. I have even seen older static sites have their content so pillaged and scraped that they got penalised but it was easy fixed by just making the content unique and leave the old duplicated stuff to the haters and scrapers. You probably can't control all these external sites as easy as you can edit the site itself so get onto that quick smart and tell your client to stop dropping this content on every single website imaginable.
As google hinted - look at your content.
Hope this helps! Shout if I can help!
P.S. Oh, and the URLs are horrible, something a little shorter and less obviously dynamic would be better for users.
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
-
Sudden site drop google, not banned or penalised?
Hi all, We've been working on our site weldingmart.com for a while. 4 weeks ago we got a sudden drop from google rankings even with our own brand name. No clear cause found, and decided to walk through all technicalities of the SEO fundament. thus we did the following
Technical SEO | | jkossel
-> Setup google webmasters tools
no issues found, a few 404's, few 410's sure thats all ok,
-> Setup robots.txt to only index homepages, lister pages, content and product detail pages (disabled all filters and search queries) Also we banned russian and spammy bots for performance-sake.
-> Added sitemaps, and around 14k pages seemed to be already indexed.
-> When searching for "site:weldingmart.com" i can find 14k pages.
-> we had a low 33/100 page speed score and improved this to 76/100 So we did a lot of clean up and improved a lot of items. but still 2-weeks in. we still have no ranking improvements. Before we went down we had around 100 clicks a day from google. now 5 avg. by the way i think a main issue is the low link count of course but still googling your own name should return us in top3 right. Is there something we are missing, do we need more time. I just want to verify that we do not mis anything!1 -
Another company's website indexing for my site
Hi, I am looking at all the pages which Google are indexing for my website and have come across pages of another company's website. I have contacted them through their online form and Facebook page asking for them to remove their listings for us, but to no avail so far. Is there a way I can do this myself?
Technical SEO | | British-Car-Registrations0 -
Is new created page's pagerank 1 ?
Hey I just want to know,
Technical SEO | | atakala
If I create a web page, is the pagerank of the page would be 1?1 -
Internationalised Domain Names (IDN’s) and SEO
Hi, recently Internationalised Domain Names (IDN’s) are supported. Can anyone give me any indication if there is any SEO benefit in registrering that type of domain names? With Internationalised Domain Names I mean domain names containing "strange characters" like à, é, è, ô, ... . Typical characters used in French, German, Swedish, ... It is now possible to register domainnames (ex. www.hörmann.be). And I was wondering if anyone sees any SEO substance in having this type of domain names.
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Help with site structure needed - any assistance welcomed!
Hi all, I am currently tasked with finding a better way to optimise our website ukdocumentstorage dot com. For starters, I would like to know what our site structure actually is at present. So I would like to be able to see which pages are linking to what at the moment & which pages have broken links on which I need to remove from the content. Hopefully I'd then be able to tidy up any errors that the site already has in its internal linking. Is there a way to do this easily? Or to have a graphical representation of the sites structure? I have just signed into our Webmaster Tools account and I am faced with a list of 10 'Crawl Errors' which are all 404 errors. Some of them do not actually exist anymore, but are still being linked to from a few pages according to WMT. For example, /industries_served_legal.htm is still being linked to from 5 of our pages (including /industries_served_local_authority.htm) However, this doesn't seem to be a case at all on the page as I can't find a link to /industries_served_legal.htm on /industries_served_local_authority.htm. Any advice as to why this is happening? Is there a way to find out easily where these broken links are situated on the page? And if I do actually manage to find our broken links, how would I go about removing them? The page /document_security.htm doesn't exist in our Sitewizard list of pages anymore, yet still exists online. How do I go about deleting this unecessary page properly? And does this harm our rankings? The document_security page also has an extra link on the top toolbar to a Document Management page, an addition which is no longer present on our up to date pages. Now this page (and the extra dropdown page when you hover over it) still exist on our list of Sitewizard pages at the moment, but we obviously no longer want to have these online anymore. How should I remove these? I understand that this is a lot of information, and so I would appreciate any help that can be given on these! Many thanks
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
No manual spam actions found - still my site does not rank
I noticed it on the 1st of October 2012 - that all my rankings disappeared - i filed a reconsideration request w google and i got this - No manual spam actions found. I have no idea why my site would have been subject to an algo change which made my rankings completely go away - i have not used spam, not used any kind of linkbuilding. Can you guys look at my site and see if you have any ideas: http://tinyurl.com/9a5k38u Thank you, Cary
Technical SEO | | CMTM0 -
Keyword targeting by page, site, or both?
Hi, We recently discovered that a product we sell has a misnomer, and that a ton of people take to Google and use variations of that misnomer while trying to find us. Unfortunately we don't rank in Google for this keyword, and its costing us thousands in lost sales. I've been slowly building the misnomer into the content of our site in hopes that the spiders will pick up on it. It has started to work in the last couple weeks, but we're nowhere near the top (and we are #1 and #2 for most of our other prime keywords.) The site which sells the product is specialized, and only sells this specific product (in different models, but they're all the same product essentially.) With that in mind, I'm trying to figure out the best way to attack a new keyword. I know that normally you would dedicate a specific page (in an eCommerce store probably that product's own page) to employ your SEO tactics. However, because this site specializes in this product and offers different models and information about it I'm confused about the best approach. Does Google take into consideration the entire site a s whole, or are the pages within my site competing against each other for rank?
Technical SEO | | ninjaprecision0 -
How do I 301 url's with numbers in them?
I have a number of 404 error pages showing in webmaster tools and some of the url's have numbers, % symbols, and some are pdf's. My usual 301 redirect in my htaccess file does NOT redirect these pages where the url's have special characters. What am I doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0