PA59 DA51 Yet the site hardly ranks
-
Hello All,
I wonder if you'd kind enough to help with your insights...
The site is www.dataclinic.co.uk
It's been up and running since 2002 and is a data recovery related site that for years ranked on page 1 for lots of data recovery search terms.
Now it's hardly ranking at all, despite decent content and updated blogs. Google (via Webmaster tools) says the site hasn't been penalized for bad links... but we are searching for an explanation as to why it's so difficult to get our once good rankings back.... (For example, the main search term we'd like to rank for is "data recovery"... we are currently on page 8... [google.co.uk search]... why???)
Any ideas greatly appreciated... and I'll reply to each of you privately if you wish.
Thanks for your time.
Chris
-
Thanks Rikki - your time and advice are much appreciated.
Best,
Chris
-
Hi Chris,
Things link your robots.txt file, on page optimisation etc aren't screaming out any major issues like you are reporting so I don't think you are going to find a specific, easy to see, reason for your drop and have an overnight answer unfortunately.
There was also a Panda update in March. Given your two drops were around dates with Panda updates that would signal a bit of a warning.
As Matt suggested I would do a full analysis of your link profile and look to lessen the keyword rich nature if that is the case.
Rikki
-
Hi Matt, this clean link building is already underway... although this action should address the poor rankings it still doesn't remove the cause of the rankings loss obviously... Frustrating!!!
Best, Chris
-
I'm not sure if this is the issue but having looked at the link profile of that specific page it looks a little unnatural. There are lots of links pointing to that specific page on your site with anchor text. Granted, the anchor text is mainly long tail but still very keyword rich (hard disk failure).
It could have something to do with the issue. I'd recommend maybe building a few nice clean links to the page using branded anchor text or naked anchor text (www.mydomain.com). Even if anchor text isn't the issue, it should only help your website if the links look natural
I'll try and delve a little deeper later on, I have to jump into a meeting now I'm afraid.
Matt
-
I'm looking at it now.... Thanks!
Chris
-
Hey Matt,
Thanks for replying. I used that tool you recommended and there's a marked drop off from March 2012. Infact the traffic in June 12 is a quarter of what it was before the March 12 drop off. So obviously, this is very significant.
Typical keywords: "hard disk failure", "data recovery", "hard drive data recovery"
We used to rank on page 1 for them all...
Best,
Chris
-
Yeah its pretty cool. Its basic but serves its purpose nicely. Saves having to remember the dates of each algo update (or checking them manually).
-
Never seen that tool before Matt, do you rate is highly?
-
Hi Chris,
There were in fact a couple of Panda updates in November 2012, it may be worth looking into these to see if either could have effected you. More details at: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2012
-
Sorry to hear of the problems, Chris.
Can you give us an idea of the keywords that have dropped off and their relevant landing pages?
Also, it might be worth checking whether the drops in visitors coincided with any algo update. To check, try this great tool:
Matt
-
Hi Rikki,
Thanks for your reply - the site completely bombed ranking wise mid Nov 2012. We are not aware of any changes at this time.
In Jan 2013 a new site was created to replace the old (and hopefully fix whatever was wrong) and used 301 redirects to map old pages to new.
As of today thou, we are still ranking very poorly..
Thanks
Chris
-
Hello Chris,
Before I have a quick look when did you website stop ranking? Was it sudden or have you lost your rankings slowly over time?
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
-
Only homepage is ranking after site re-launch
We've been moving all our sites over to a new platform (Demandware) this year. In the process, they've all gotten updated designs (from the same template), on-page optimizations, etc. Since they're all on the same platform and are essentially copies from one template, any technical issues found have been fixed across all sites. The problem I'm seeing is there are a few sites that haven't really seen much/any recovery from the site launch, and these are sites that were done 4-5 months ago. There's one in particular that's especially concerning, since it's showing issues that none of the other sites seem to have. In my Moz reports, it looks like of all the keywords that are ranking, they're only ranking the https version of the homepage (and from what I'm seeing, the https version wasn't picked up and ranked until the beginning of October, which was also the time that WMT shows a huge drop in clicks and impressions). I've crawled the site (ScreamingFrog), done a site search in Google (all pages look to be indexed), etc. and I haven't come across any specific problems there that would suggest a technical issue. We're wondering if it might be a link authority problem, since this site had the most dramatic change in navigation. The navigation used to be product based (Boots, Shoes, etc.) and is now broken up by gender. I've noticed that a few other pages that are ranking are dual gender pages that also existed on the old site, whereas all of these new categories aren't ranking at all and I'm not seeing this happen with any of our other sites. I've gone down a bunch of different paths trying to figure this out, but I haven't come up with any concrete answers as to why this is happening and how to fix it. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into or try for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements Page Blank / Site Not Ranking Well
I have an ecommerce site that is not ranking well currently. It has about 1,000 pages indexed in Google but very few appear to be ranking. I normally find issues in Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements but for some reason it does not see a problem with the site. There are problems, trust me. Moz shows many issues. Google nothing! There is a problem somewhere but I am not seeing it. Why are HTML Improvements blank and the site not ranking? Am I in the dreaded sandbox? Any ideas? Sean We didn't detect any content issues with your site. As we crawl your site, we check it to detect any potential issues with content on your pages, including duplicate, missing, or problematic title tags or meta descriptions. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site. For example, title and meta description text can appear in search results, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optin0 -
Consolidate Local sites to one larger site
I am a partner in a real estate company that operates in 10 different markets across the country. Each of these markets has it's own individual domain. My question is should we consolidate each of these markets into one domain that services all markets? What would we possibly gain or lose from an organic traffic standpoint? In some of our more established markets (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Charlotte) our organic traffic accounts for 50-60% of our total traffic. In some of our newer markets (Denver, Phoenix, San Diego) it accounts for less than 15%. We do operate under two different brand names. EasyStreet Realty and Highgarden Real Estate. EasyStreet has been around since 2000 with most of our Highgarden sites only up for 6-24 months. Another question is we are considering converting all EasyStreet divisions to Highgarden. I am a little reluctant to do so, since most of our organic traffic is coming from our EasyStreet sites. Thoughts? You can find links to all our sites at www.easystreetrealty.com or www.highgarden.com Thank you in advance for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
Site Not Ranking- No Reason Why
I have a client with a HUGE website who should be ranking for it's competitive keywords. No penalties, or bad links. Old domain. Not ranking for anything. Client has a huge AdWords spend and my theory is that it's not ranking organically because of the AdWords spend. I can't think of anything other reason. Anyone? Thanks. The keywords I'm trying to rank this client for aren't even competitive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
I manage a site on the 3dCart e-commerce platform. I recently updated the SSL certificate. Today, when I tried to log-in via FTP, I couldn't connect. The reason I couldn't connect was because my IP had changed. Last week the site experienced almost across the board rankings drops on lmost every important keyword. Not gigantic drops, a lot just lost 2-4 postiions, but that's a lot when you were #2 and you drop to #4 or # 6. Initially I thought it was because I was attempting to markup my product pages using structured data following guidelines from schema.org. I am not a coder so it was a real struggle, especially trying to navigate 3dCart's listing templates. I thought the rankings drops were Google slapping me for bad code, but now I wonder....could I really have dropped down because of that IP address change? Does anyone have a take on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
In mobile searches, does Google recognize HTML5 sites as mobile sites?
Does Google recognize HTML5 sites using responsive design as mobile sites? I know that for mobile searches, Google promotes results on mobile sites. I'm trying to determine if my site, created in HTML5 with responsive design falls into that category. Any insights on the topic would be very helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Site: on Google
Hello, people. I have a quick question regarding search in Google. I use search operator [site:url] to see indexing stauts of my site. Today, I was checking indexing status and I found that Google shows different numbers of indexed pages depends on search setting. 1. At default setting (set as 10 search result shows) > I get about 150 pages indexed by Google. 2. I set 100 results shows per page and tried again. > I get about 52 pages indexed by Google. Of course I used same page URL. I really want to know which data is accurate. Please help people!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0 -
Ranking problems
Hi All My site is live for a year now. I;m getting tons of traffic (alexa 54k) and business are good. The only problem is that I have 0 page rank....I have checked again and again the site;s structure to see if there is anything wrong with the site but everything seems to be ok. Google just added search links to the site (megamoneygames) which looks very nice. For example, none of my competitors have search links but they all have page rank of 4 while I have 0. In addition, for some reason the site's age (days) shows 0 although it is live for a year now... Do you have any idea of what is going on? do I have errors in the site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pariplay0