Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites
-
One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years.
Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products.
The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed.
The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable.
Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?
-
Sorry Doug, I should have said that there were two drops, one for Panda, and then one for Penguin, with one coming in Mid-Feb and one Mid-April. Panda was a large drop, then as the site was recovering slightly it got hit with the Penguin update.
The competitors are mainly Amazon and eBay. Both sell the products, but only sporadically and don't have them in any number.
The client has dropped on the 4 big keywords from 1st-2nd position, to 5th-7th. Not a massive drop by any means, but in a market so small it has had a huge effect.
The rest of the site’s rankings did drop, but they have recovered since then.
The backlinks are not overly impressive, but nothing too alarming. There have been no warnings in Webmaster Tools, nevertheless, I have been working on the link profile and trying to add variety.
After originally thinking this was the cause I have begun to reconsider, and in my digging found several faults on-page. I fixed most of these when I first got to work on the site, such as the internal linking and general optimization. There was also a spammy element to the internal linking which I got rid of.
Fixing the internal linking didn’t have the desired effect, so I have re-approached that and changed it further. I also found an issue with the CMS in which it was generating a series of duplicated page titles (that mirrored the index page due to an error in the CMS to the lower pages). This would fit with the Panda change and the aim to reduce duplicates. This month, I have eliminated these, cleaned up the internal linking further and looked to vary the link profile (I'm hoping this will fix the issue, I just need to wait until it gets indexed).
Also, as an experiment, I made a series of HTML pages (not in the CMS) to test the site. These ranked well within a month, and have continued to grow since then.
Another issue the site has is the site itself. The code is outdated and messy with inline CSS and Java (some of which seems redundant) that all make the code to content ration something to be desired. I’m wondering if this could be a cause. The CMS has a penchant for duplication and the ‘readable’ code is not very clean, dates, filled with redundant code and is old.
Thanks
-
I've encountered some very diverse serp results where niche terms are very niche and there isn't the search volume to out there and/or lots of alternative markets using the same terms to mean different things, but I guess it depends what you mean by not relevant to the search terms. If they're selling the niche products that's kinda relevant?
The first step to recovery must be to understand the problem.
Do you know why you got hit by Penguin? Are you sure it's Penguin that's caused the drop (when did it happen)? What does your back link profile look like? Have you had any warnings in Google Webmaster Tools?
How far has your client dropped? Are they in the index at all? Where are they ranking for other keywords - is it the same story?
Here's some penguin related SEOmoz blog posts:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recovering-from-the-penguin-update-a-true-story
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
So, first I'd confirm that it was Penguin and then try and see just how big a hole you're in! Good luck!
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
-
Bounce rate seems to decrease as site climbs the SERP but SERP ranking always drops down after a few days - WHY ?
Like quite a few sites recently we've seen some large fluctuations for our domain the SERPs over the past 6 or so weeks. One thing ive noticed, is that when the site seems to rank higher in the SERPs we get a lower bounce rate. If the sites average across all of its main keywords in #5 the bounce rate is c. 40% (this site is a creative portfolio site, so i guess the niche has a slightly higher bounce rate than normal as you will get some people who click through an notice straight away that the style of the portfolio isnt what they where looking for) But when the sites ranking averages #2-3 the bounce rate tends to be about 25%. (The thing is that we tend to always drop back down after a fews days or so) Has any one else noticed this ?
Algorithm Updates | | jpeg801 -
How on earth is a site with ONE LINK ranking so well for a competitive keyword?
Ok, so I'm sure you get the gist of what I'm asking about in my question. The query is 'diy kitchens' in Google UK and the website is kitchens4diy[dot]com - which is ranking in third from my viewing. The thing is, the site has just ONE BACKLINK and has done for a good while. Yet, it's ranking really well. What gives?
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve0 -
Subdomains or Subfolders for a multilingual site?
What kind of structure would you propose for a site with multiple languages, subdomains or subfolders?
Algorithm Updates | | dublinbet0 -
How to speed up indexing of my site...
Only 4 out of the 12 pages of my blog/site have been indexed. How can I ensure all the pages get indexed? I'm using a wordpress site, and I also wondered how could I speed the indexing process up (I have submitted a site map) Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | copywritingbuzz0 -
What determines rankings in a site: search?
When I perform a "site:" search on my domains (without specifying a keyword) the top ranked results seem to be a mixture of sensible top-level index pages plus some very random articles. Is there any significance to what Google ranks highly in a site: search? There is some really unrepresentative content returned on page 1, including articles that get virtually no traffic. Is this seriously what Google considers our best or most typical content?
Algorithm Updates | | Dennis-529610 -
Google seems to have penalised one section of our site? Is that possible?
We have a page rank 5 website and we launched a new site 6 months ago in February. Initially we had horrible urls with a bunch of numbers and stuff and we since changed them to lovely human readable urls. This had an excellent effect across the site except on one section of the site: http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduate-employers Although Google has indexed these pages and several have a PR 2 they do not appear in Google when previously they were on page 1 when we had the old urls. We figured we just needed some time for Google to get used to it, but it hasn't done anything. It is also worth mentioning we changed the page titles from: FIRM NAME | DOMAIN NAME then... FIRM NAME | Graduate Scheme, Jobs, Internships & Apprenticeships | DOMAIN NAME then.. FIRM NAME | Graduate Scheme, Jobs, Internships & Apprenticeships Do you think these are being penalised? There are two types of page: Example A: http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduates/addleshaw-goddard.htm Example B: http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduates/accenture.htm
Algorithm Updates | | jack860 -
High bounce rates from content articles influencing our rankings for rest of site
We have a large content article section on our e-commerce site that receives a lot of visits but also have very high bounce rates. We are wondering if this is hurting the rest of our site's rankings. **When I say bounce rates I mean what ever metrics Google is using to determine quality content (specifically after the Panda update). ** We are trying to determine if having the content articles on our domain hurts us. We only have the content articles for link building.
Algorithm Updates | | seozachz0 -
Which is better for SEO. 1 big site or a number of smaller sites.
Hello , I am about to create a website with product reviews for a certain niche. What i want to know: Is it better for me to have a site with all reviews , like nicheproductsreviews.com and then have nicheproductsreviews.com/product-one-review.html and nicheproductsreviews.com/product-two-review.html or buy multiple domains to have product name in the domain name, like product-one-review.com and product-two-review.com As far as I understand, first approach consolidates all pages on the same site , consolidating all the link juice to it. However, second approach lets me have the product name in the main domain URL. Which way is better for SEO and why?
Algorithm Updates | | voitenkos0