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
-
Sudden drop in rankings over 7 days
Hello fellow SEOs, I am having a few issues with one of the sites I manage. The site in question has dropped for a number of terms in the last 7 days, including: logo design - dropped 2 places, now 19th logo design uk - dropped 2 places, now 8th logo designer - dropped 3 places, now 20th bespoke logo design - dropped 3 places, now 10th I'm worry that the site might drop for more terms if I just leave it alone. I haven't made any changes to the site but I have noticed that our number of inbound links has increased by 58% in the last 7 days. I have put the site through OSE and used the spam analysis tool. There's only one domain linking to my client that has an orange spam flag but this link isn't newly acquired. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | UE-Web0 -
Ranking Drop
hey guys, I know there is always someone here asking this questions, but I have done my fair share of investigation and have not come up with a cause. my ranking dropped from page one to page 2 or 3 last sunday in time span of 4 hours. After that I read that google was updating panda with 4.1, but don't know why I got hit exactly. my competition is all clear and some have even gained rankings, and mine dropped even though my domain and page authority increased as well. any ideas would help. I already checked all the obvious ones (such as spam, links, content, etc)
Technical SEO | | s-s1 -
SEO quandary advice needed
I'm in a bind, I've been working on my SEO for a while now and have finally landed on the top page for [fishing kayak reviews] in Google US. The problem is it's not the page I want to be ranked! I've recently updated my reviews component to a more robust system but the url is slightly different. Looking currently [Reviews without Images] http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-reviews is ranking in Google but I would like [Reviews with Images] http://www.yakangler.com/fishing-kayak-review to rank instead. What would be the best solution for this problem? Adjust the url for [Reviews with Images] so it take the place of [Reviews without Images]? Do you think I will get any negative impacts from this?
Technical SEO | | mr_w0 -
How to improve ranking of a website again, after being penalized by Google?
The ranking of our website has gone down in past 2 months. The reason,
Technical SEO | | TGA123
I believe is that we had more than 300,000 spammy comments posted on it
(the website is based on wordpress) so Google treated it as
un-monitored forum and penalized. We have deleted the older comments
and new comments can no longer be posted. Need suggestions on what else
should we do to rank better. Any advice would be very welcome.0 -
How can i improve alexa rank of my website
www.meetuniversities.com Meet Universities - Get connected to your dream university
Technical SEO | | debal0 -
Event Landing Pages not ranking
Hi there I need to optimize the website of a club/concert venue. The site isn't bad and has authority, but the event pages don't seem to rank and I'm unsure about the reason. There is an overview page of the events: http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/ What happens currently when clicking on a specific event (on "WEITER", top right of each event) is that users get redirected to a hashtag page by jQuery. The href of "WEITER" itself links to another landing page (which is IMO the one we should see ranking for the specific event). Here is a concrete example: Look at the event "Tanz & Konzert: Andreas Vollenweider, Seven & ROKPA-KIDS" on /events by clicking on "WEITER", you get directed to http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/#2790/andreas-vollenweider the actual "WEITER" link in the source code though, points to the landing page http://www.kaufleuten.ch/event/andreas-vollenweider/ This seems to be done by an AJAX load: jQuery loads a DIV with the ID "ajax-content". Apparently, this is the code responsible for it: $(„.link“, click(function() {
Technical SEO | | zeepartner
el.find('.wrapper').load(target+' #ajax-content', function() {
});
return false;
}); I know the site has good authority and should rank well. however, the event landing pages never seem to appear, but only the page /events is ranking: SERP
(Strangely, when using the site command, the event page suddenly appears above: SERP. (But I have never seen this in a "normal search query", even though we are the organisers and should at least be among the top 5). Now my question: Does Google consider this AJAX load to be some sort of cloaking? (because the href in the code is different to you actually end up by clicking "WEITER"). Will the landing pages begin to rank if we disable this AJAX load? Or should we stick to hashtags and not even create landing pages? (but then, we will have no control over title tags of specific events, right?) Thanks for your help, I'm a bit lost here as my JS knowledge is meagre... Cheers,
Phil0 -
I think my ranking report is not accurate.
I think my ranking are not accurate... It says this but it think it is fault. Under here i put what it says. Is it possible that i get the wrong results? The site is www.mando-control.es And an other questions is : when people in spain search do they automaticly search on google.es or google.com ? | Mando a distancia
Technical SEO | | seoroyal
| Moved unknown 0 spaces | 1 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |
| Mando distancia | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 2 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |
| Mandos a distancia | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 1 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |
| mandos distancia | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 1 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |
| mandos distancias Keyword History Ranking Analysis | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 1 | Moved unknown 0 spaces | | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 1 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |
| Mando distancia | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 2 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |
| Mandos a distancia | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 1 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |
| mandos distancia | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 1 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |
| mandos distancias Keyword History Ranking Analysis | pending | Moved unknown 0 spaces | 1 | Moved unknown 0 spaces |0 -
Website isn't Ranking for Any Keyword
Hi, I launched a playhouses website in april this year and have been steadily link building to it over the past few months. I have gotten all of the internal optimisation correct (that I can see) however it is still not ranking for any keyword and suprinsgly all of our traffic is comming either direct or through bing. The website is showing as being in googles index however it is still not ranking for even the smallest of niche keywords. The only penalty I can see is that we have some spammy blog links that my colleague has gotten which I have been trying to counteract with high quality guest blogging. Any input is welcome the url is http://www.playhouses.co.uk/ Simon
Technical SEO | | GardenGamer0