Rankings have fallen suddenly - I need a plan of attack.
-
I started my business a few years ago. Only recently (6 month) I started to get some good traffic and sales.
At first I was ranking pretty well 3-5 for my main keywords and business began to pick up. After Penguin I was hit hard and I'm placing 10-17'ish. My Google local/places has disappeared too.
I haven't received any contact from Google about unnatural links (but I'm not sure where that would appear? Email? Web Master Tools? Horses head on my pillow?).
I've read so many different things online about what I 'could' do. I'm not sure where to start. I've checked and I know we've created lots of questionable back links. Using the Open Site Explorer lots of the backlinks don't have terrible DA but some do.
I guess I was hoping someone would give me a checklist or priority list of things to do. It's just me so I need to use my time as best I can. What should I be doing first? Should I be trying to:
- Remove my bad backlinks?
- Spend my time making quality backlinks.
- On-page issues that I can't see?
- Telling google i'm sorry via web master tools.
- Changing to new domain (eek)
I'm very time poor and hoped the seoMoz community might save me from wasting my time.
Keywords: indesign training, web design courses & photoshop courses
Thank you in advance.
Dan
-
Hey Cryus,
Thank you so much. This is exactly what I was looking for.
I'm ready for the hard work. The tricks I got my SEO company to do were bound to get me into trouble.
It's great to have some expert advice
- thank you Cryus & Trickshotric!
Dan (from NZ)
-
Hi Dan,
Sorry to hear you got hit by Penguin. Because Penguin is an algorithmic action, you often won't receive any messages in Google Webmaster Tools, unlike when they place a manual penalty on your site. But it's not uncommon to receive both a Penguin slap and an unnatural link warning.
Ok, deep breath.
1. First things first, you need to take a deep hard look at your backlink profile to see where you stand, if clean-up is worth the effort, or if you should start over.
If you engaged in questionable link building practices, you need to asses if you have any links worth saving? Do you have any editorial (non robot generated) links that you didn't pay for and/or didn't control the anchor text?
You probably know the answer, but for more complex cases a couple of resources that might help:
A. Manual Review - In the end, you're own eye is the best tool you have. You want to look for:
- links with keyword-rich, optimized anchor text
- Comment Signature and Forum Signature links (these are different from the more legitimate forum links)
- Sitewide links, such as in the sidebar or footer
- Obviously paid, or suspicious looking links on low-quality sites
Our friend Paddy Moogan wrote a great guide on how to do this step by step. You should check it out.
B. Link Detox - http://www.linkdetox.com/ For $40 dollars it will analyze your backlinks (be sure to upload them from Google Webmaster tools) and give you a full analysis of what links they think are bad.
Most of the links I'm seeing for your site are similar to this: http://www.computer-desk-furniture.net/date/2012/06/ which would be considered a low quality link.
2. You may decide to try to get the links removed, which to be honest can be a long, arduous process.
Even if you didn't get a link notice, you can file a reconsideration request to see if they will verify a penalty. Sometimes this will get you more information then you had before. In any case, it might be well worth it to do a complete link audit and cleanup, and even go through the disavow process if necessary.
in addition to removing suspicious links, I'd continue to build good, high value links as well. If you need inspiration, here's a good place to start: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
Hope this helps clear things up! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Awesome thanks!
-
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843 third option at the bottom.
You will need to be logged into your Google webmasters account.
-
Has anyone else got time to have a quick look into my post. I'd love some more feedback before I set off with my SEO strategy.
Any and all opinions are welcomed.
Dan
-
Great advice. Thanks Trickshotric.
The reconsideration request you mentioned - Where is that done?
Thanks also for the content advice. End results is something I'll work towards & shouldn't be to hard to create.
-
Before removing links it is worth posing a reconsideration request to google. This will confirm if your site has been manually punished.
This removes a lot of the doubt out of the process so definitely do this first.
If you have lots more links like this http://kierszencweig.com/with-wordpress-website-design-to-make-websites/ (this is super dodgy!) then you may well have a unnatural link penalty!!
I think your site is pretty good but would also be nice to show-off some of the end results e.g show some great images that your students will be able to achieve. This is more of a salesy point rather that search engine ranking one, however, if you have some great images on your site you could start getting some real good natural links!.
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 -
Why is this site ranking higher?
We've put a fair bit of effort into delivering value here: https://lewescountycars.co.uk/ But a search for "Lewes taxis" or "taxis Lewes" puts this site above us: https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/ As you can you see, this is a tiny site that we outperform in most ways.... what can we do to rank above it that we haven't already done? Thanks in advance - Gerard.
Technical SEO | | Paul7301 -
Website rank 5th position than bounce
Hello A website client won't rank dor branded keyword (site name) for several months, i optimize onpage seo, did some backlinks, the DA jump to 8 (from 1). Yesterday the website rank for branded keyword 5, than 4, tomorrow can't found it.
Technical SEO | | Zidani0 -
This my site i want rank in doubi any advice for me
this my site i want rank in doubi any advice for me http://alsuntranslation.com/
Technical SEO | | ATS_SEO0 -
2 pages ranking for same keyword.. Need some advice on what to do.
Here's my question. When I first started my website we started Using keyword anchor building links To my homepage . Over the years Our business has expanded to more than just baby headbands. I now have a baby headband page. When tracking my rankings. I sometimes see Both pages in Google for the same keyword. Other days I do not see both of them. My question is Should I continue building links and keyword anchor text for the home page Or should I switch them and start building keyword-rich anchor text for my baby headband page. I'm just wondering if the Search engine is confused by the two. When searching for the keyword baby headbands. I will sometimes show up for eight and nine. 8 is my home page and 9 is for the baby headband page. I have always shown up for the keyword "baby Headbands" for my home page.
Technical SEO | | PB20070 -
How to rank for several keywords
Hi there Mozers, So far I have been building my webshop ouibonjour.com over the course of several weeks while studying the awesome educational content here on Moz and other SEO-related sites. I think I have done an OK job so far, and I have managed to rank #1 on several long tail keywords after a couple of weeks. Problem is - there are more long tail keywords I want to rank #1 for as well! **What I have done so far: ** I have taken the strongest keywords that can generate conversion and added them in page titles, title heads, main anvigation titles, in my alt text in images and so forth. The page is not screaming "SEO!" and I am happy with that. Nevertheless, I think the SEO measures here are done in an effective way. If you bothered to click on my page, you can see that the home page has only 5 posts (posts, not pages). They redirect visitors to other important parts of my site, and I change the image and/or the title once every 3 weeks to not keep the page too static. In a /magazine subfolder, I have a blog that ranks pretty good for several keywords, but the content here is not directly related to my products, but rather articles that fits the interests of my potential buyers (lifestyle, culture, etc). **What I need - but not sure how - to do: ** I basically want to rank for way more long tail keywords that relate to my products, but I don't want to continue setting up posts that have these keywords, because the content on the main page will be too heavy on the SEO, and therefore lose value for my visitors. How can I rank for more keywords without having to pepper my site with posts full of these keywords? I do not want to write articles on my blog that focuses on different combinations of long tail keywords neither, because it will get too spammy and make my visitors not return. I need help! I hope I have managed to explain my problem clearly. If there are any Whiteboard Fridays or posts on this subject that I have missed, please link me directly. If not, I would be tremendously happy and appreciative for any tips and tricks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Fernando_0 -
Sudden drop in rank and OSE index
I had improved the rank of chairmats.net from page 3 to top of page 2 in Google over the course of a few weeks using on-page, content building, and "low-hanging fruit" link building. All the sudden in the last 2 weeks, we have dropped to 22nd, have dropped out of the OSE index (chairmats.net doesn't show up, but some old links to www.chairmats.net show up), and PA is now 1. DA wasn't high before but also dropped a point. I don't know why the sudden shun (I read about an exact keyword match for low quality websites update with Google recently, but this site has been around for awhile, and is a large supplier of chair mats.) I'm working on getting quality links, it seems a little tougher for a supplier company like this. Any suggestions on recovering?
Technical SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Please advice needed SSL .htaccess
Hi everyone, I recently installed verisign ssl. the idea to have page https://example.com all redirect from non-http to https work properly, but in IE whenever smbdy types https://www.example.com it shows the red screen with invalid certificate. If you click "proceed" - everything goes to normal page and on server redirect www to non-www seem to work fine. Is there way to get rid of the warning? Is it server or certificate issue? Here is the peice of code from htaccess. Please, advice needed! RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L] RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Kotkov0