Hit hard by EMD update, used to be #1 now not in top 50, what can I do?
-
We have what I think is a pretty good site, unique articles a few widgets, lots of reviews, decent enough bounce rates and user times (60% and 2:15) based on drupal. Previous updates haven't touched us and an almost identical duplicate (same site compltely different content) of the site targetting a different but related EMD is unaffected which provides a control.
I have seen some discussion on it having to do with link profiles. We did pay some backlinkers to link to us, much more on the site that has dropped, and quite a few for a partial match keyword. I'm supposing this is a lot of the issue. If we try and delete these backlinks will it make the situation better or worse?
I have also notice some duplicate content warnings in seomoz that weren't there previously.
Any ideas?
-
In regards to diluting your link profile with new and better links is indeed possible as mentioned by Karl. However, this will be a massive job that will take ages to do.
Consider the following: a good standard of having either brand-name or exact match anchor text is about 30% of your overall link profile (I wish I had that article to show you, forgot where it was). Now currently, you have 76 out of 77 links with the exact anchor text of "whey protein". In order to get those links into the 30% of your overall anchor texts in your link profile, you would need to create A LOT of new high-quality links.
My best advice is to either change as many anchor text as you can, or just get rid of the backlink if it's on a low-quality page.
-
In regards to your ranking being incorrect on SEOmoz, it has happened to me before.
The best way to check what your current ranking are, is to use either incognito mode on Chrome (Ctrl+Shift+N) or "private browing" on firefox. By using either one, it ignores whether you are logged into gmail or not, as well as cache and a bunch of other things.
Otherwise you could also use Rank Tracker by SEO Powersuite, but even then I prefer to just manually check my rankings myself.
-
Yip, I'd be looking at your anchor text for sure. too much keyword rich anchor text mixed with an EMD is a bad sign to Google. Diluting it with high quality links with varied anchor text (not always with keywords of course) is an option if you can't change the anchor text yourself. Of course quality linkbuilding isn't something that just happens overnight. You really need to work on a linkbuilding strategy that builds natural links.
I agree with you that the site content is not thin, it's quite a useful site. But beware of spam signals like repetitive exact-match anchor text for your internal cross-linking.
I haven't delved too deep, but I noticed on the article "Protein powder and weight loss" you had cross linking with the anchor text "weight loss" 8 times. And I've seen "whey protein isolate" linking many times in articles.
This could be seen as a low-quality signal by Google. You should keep it down to a couple per page, and maybe change up the anchor text a bit. Such as interchanging "Whey Protein Isolate" with "WPI" or "Whey Protein Isolate (WPI)" or interchanging "weight loss" with "losing weight" or "fat loss" etc.
-
If it's going to be hard to delete or change this anchor text, is diluting it with new better, nice safe links going to help? Or is changing this literally the thing that needs to happen now?
-
thank you very much, those are my thoughts as well. I'm also a little confused here as seomoz is saying we're not in the top 50 but we've "only" lost 66% of our traffic and comparing before and after the same keywords are getting traffic, just less, consistent with dropping rank a bit, but not being wiped out like seomoz is saying. I also rang someone who had never searched our site before just now to ask whether we were on the front page at all and we were.. maybe google is jumping us around intraday?
-
Hi btrr69, by looking at your OSE data every single backlink you have (except 1), has the anchor text of "whey protein". There are a total of 76 links containing that anchor text. I am getting the feeling that you might actually be punished by Penguin.
Anchor text should be super diversified, with only about 30% of total links containing either your brand name or chosen keywords.
If I were you, I would change as many anchor texts on those links as quick as possible.
-
Hello Karl, thanks, here is a link to some data: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v201/jamtart/pp.jpg - i'll try and keep it off this thread.
Traffic dropped on Sept 29 the day of the update. The dupe content warnings are from Drupal nodes with no content on them and predates this. There is also a Drupal metatag being placed on each page which is being read as duplicate.
I wouldn't call it a thin site at all, we had facebook likes every other day (although seomoz isn't picking this up).. no ads or adwords, no products for sale, just a largish product review site.
-
Hey btrr69...If you put up a link to your site it will be easier for us to analyse the specifics and give a more helpful answer. There are a lot of factors at play, and Google also released another Panda update around the same time as the EMD update which may have affected you. Without seeing your site it's hard to answer accurately.
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
-
How to use robots.txt to block areas on page?
Hi, Across the categories/product pages on out site there are archives/shipping info section and the texts are always the same. Would this be treated as duplicated content and harmful for seo? How can I alter robots.txt to tell google not to crawl those particular text Thanks for any advice!
Technical SEO | | LauraHT0 -
Update page for better SEO score?
Hi, Is it important to update a page sometimes to score better in SEO?
Technical SEO | | parfumerienl
Or if i make a page and never change it, it would be good enough.0 -
How can I optimise for Google Products?
Has anyone got experience of optimising Google Products (Google Base) feeds? I've noticed that, although my site doesn't often appear on page one in the standard results, we occasionally appear right at the top because of the "universal" shopping results. My question is: how can we make this happen more often? There seems to be a lot less competition (presumably because our competitors haven't worked out how to provide the feed to Google yet!), so I imagine it should be easier and quicker to reach the top this way than any other way. Thanks! Alex
Technical SEO | | reddogmusic0 -
Is using splash pages considered cloaking?
For example I'm thinking of running people through a squeeze page when they come from search engines (for first time visitors only/cookied) ... example: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ Is it going to hurt SEO? Because basically you are serving a page that is different, than the one displayed in the SERP's.
Technical SEO | | achilles130 -
Optimizing a website which uses information from a database
Hi, Sorry if this question is very general. I am in the process of building a website for local business, and it it will be heavily dependent on a database. The database will contain loads of information which can be optimized such as business directory listings, articles, forums, questions and answers etc. The businesses will also be able to link to and from the site. Which is the best way to display this information so that it can be optimized the best? I was going to use drop down boxes on a single page, ie main category, sub catagory, then display the business listings based on this. However, as the information on the page changes constantly based on the drop down the robot / user uses, I am assuming this is very hard to get optimized well. Does anyone know a better way? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | PhatJP0 -
How can you manually diagnose the canonical problem
Good Monrning from snow dusted minus 3 degrees C Wetherby UK... Is there a quick way to diagnose wether or not a website has a canonical problem or not? So far Ive been doing this for example: Typing a full web address then one without the w's and seeing if a 301 redirect has been set up. But I'm not confident this is the best way to diagnose if there is a canonical problem with a site. I would like to ad that I want to see if a canonical problem exists with any site and webmanster tools is not available. Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing1 -
Can hidden backlinks ever be ok?
Hi all, I'm very new to SEO and still learning a lot. Is it considered a black hat tactic to wrap a link in a DIV tag, with display set to none (hidden div), and what can the repercussions be? From what I've learnt so far, is that this is a very unethical thing to be doing, and that the site hosting these links can end up being removed from Google/Bing/etc indexes completely. Is this true? The site hosting these links is a group/parent site for a brand, and each hidden link points to one of the child sites (similar sites, but different companies in different areas). Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | gemcomp1230 -
What link tracking solution do you use?
What solution do you use to keep track of links that you have acquired or purchased?
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw0