Is there anyway to recover my site's rankings?
-
My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'. My conclusions is I was dropped by Google because of poor quality links I've gained over 10+ years.
I have a Domain Authority of 40, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 42, user reviews and quality content.
Since Oct 2012 I've done some technical improvements and managed to get a few questionable links removed. I've continued blogging reguarly and got more active on Twitter. I've seen no improvement and my traffic is 80% down on last year.
It would be great to be able to produce content that others want to link to but I've not had much success from that in over 10 years of trying and I've not seen many others in my sector, with small budgets having much success.
Is there anything I can do to regain favour with Google?
-
No problem! If you notice several bad backlinks, you could use a tool like removeem.com. Is a paid tool, but it will help you identifying those back links and contact the site owners. I hope you get it resolved.
-
Thanks, for your help. I'll give that a try
-
There are several tools online to review your backlink profile. I would start with OpenSiteExplorer. Check all links and get those with very low authority, check those pages and see if they are related to your content, if there's no much value on them (content is unrelated, and the overall 'worthiness' is low) you could contact the webmaster asking to have that backlink removed.
-
Well I'm not really sure how to clean up my back link profile. How do I know links are a problem? A lot of my links are perhaps questionable. I'd be wary of removing links that are of some use. How do you evaluate this?
In regards to content, the regular blog posts are user focused, well written and relevant but not link worthy particularly. Over optimised content has mostly been removed.
-
Well, if you have cleaned your backlink profile, and there are still links that were not removed, you could try disavowing them using google's tool and see what happens. You should only use that tool if you are sure those are hurting you and have already done everything to contact the webmasters to have those removed.
If that doesn't work, then it is your content. Are you creating worthy content? Is people accessing your content pages? sharing it? Is that content really good for users? or was it built thinking on engines? Good, worthy content will give you some backlinks, which ultimately will increase your rankings.
-
I've been watching my competition for 10 years so have a pretty good idea what they've been doing. I stopped running singles events in about 2008 and started promoted other event companies events on my site in returned for a link back. Often these links were run of site in their footer. Although I varied the link text I think these type of links were unnatural and perhaps the cause of my problems now.
-
First step would be to check on your competitors. What are they doing? How have they reached those rankings? Do some research on them and then compare to yours. What are the differences? Are they doing something that you aren't?
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
-
404's and Ecommerce - Products no longer for sale
Hi We regularly have products which are no longer sold and discontinued. As we have such a large site, webmaster tools regularly picks up new 404's. These 404 pages aren't linked to from anywhere on the site any longer, however WMT will still report them as errors. Does this affect site authority? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Website Isn't Ranking & I'm Not Sure Why Based On The Data
Hi Moz Community,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ErrickG
I am having an issue that has been killing me for some time and I could really use another opinion. One of my client’s websites hasn't been ranking for some time and I can't put my finger on it. There are no issues showing up in the webmaster tools. If you compare the site with the tops ranking sites for the websites number one keyword, the website is just as good as everyone else. My clients website is the first one on the left in the attachment. We have better quality content but instead of showing up on page 1,2,3 the site is on page 21. I am just at a lost. Anyone have any thoughts outside looking in. Thanks,
Errick rrLJZ2G0 -
Is there a downside of an image coming from the site's dotted quad and can it be seen as a duplicate?
Ok the question doesn't fully explain the issue. I just want some opinions on this. Here is the backstory. I have a client with a domain that has been around for a while and was doing well but with no backlinks. (Fairly low competition). For some reason they created mirrors of their site on different urls. Then their web designer built them a test site that was a copy of their site on the web designer's url and didn't bother to noindex it. Client's site dived, the web designer's site started ranking for their keywords. So we helped clean that up, and they hired a brand new web designer and redesigned the site. For some reason the dotted quad version of the site started showing up as a referer in GA. So one image on the site comes from that and not the site's url. So I ran a copyscape and site search and discovered the dotted quad version like 69.64.153.116 (not the actual address) was also being indexed by the search engine. To us this seems like a cut and dry duplicate content issue, but I'm having trouble finding much written on the subject. I raised the issue with the dev, and he reluctantly 301 the site to the official url. The second part of this is the web designer still has that one image on the site coming from the numerical version of the site and not the written url. Any thoughts if that has any negative SEO impact? My thought it isn't ideal, but it just looks like an external referral for pulling that one image. I'd love any thoughts or experience on a situation like this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Starting Over with a new site - Do's and Don'ts?
After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website. Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake. Our original site,(call it mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the engine in the old one. We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page. There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net. Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign. All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new. We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again. We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net. My questions are: 1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go? 2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html ? Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site? It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site. 3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block? Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help 4. What have I forgotten? Cheers, all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenX0 -
What's next?
What's next with the tool? For SEOmoz users that have gotten their Crawl Diagnostics and On-Page issues under control, what's next? In other words, what do long-time SEOmoz users do with the tool? What ongoing weekly value do they get? Ranking reports? Link Analysis? It took me four weeks to resolve all my simple issues, which you can see in Crawl Diagnostics and On-Page reports. (It would have only take one week, if the tool crawled all my pages upon demand instead of only once a week.) But now that all my simple issues are resolved, I'm not sure what else to do with the tool. I don't want to hastily cancel the service, but I also don't know what else to do... I'd even pay more for an actual human to look in on me from time to time and tell me what to do next. But I'm self-motivating, so I'll try to figure it out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raywhite0 -
Can literally any site get 'burned'?
Just curious what people think. The SEOMOZ trust on my site has gone up, all while Google is dropping us in rankings for lots of keywords. Just curious if this can happen to anyone or once you are 100% 'trusted' you're good. We went from 120,000 page views down to about 50,000. All while doubling content, improving the design(at least from a user perspective), and getting more natural links. Seems counter intuitive to Google's mantra of ranking quality. I would guess 'authority' sites never get hit by these updates right? So when you make it you've made it.(at least from a dropping like a rock perspective, obviously you have to keep working). I'm guessing we just need a bunch more quality links but would hate to work on building links, quality content, trust etc for it to be something so finicky long term.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110 -
Don't want to lose page rank, what's the best way to restructure a url other than a 301 redirect?
Currently in the process of redesigning a site. What i want to know, is what is the best way for me to restructure the url w/out it losing its value (page rank) other than a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marig0 -
New Domain Name For Site That Ranks Highly on Key Terms
Here's my problem -- which is actually a pretty good problem to have. My client is a speciality service provider in an extremely competitive field. It charges 3 to 5 times what others do for providing a super-premium level of service. It doesn't have -- nor does it want -- many customers. I can't go into details, but let's just say the business model is a bit like the charity or premium newsletter publishing model. It is extremely hard to recruit new members -- but once recruited, members tend to stay for a long time at high price points. Personal referral is key. As result of my efforts over the last 90 days, the client's SEO results have skyrocketed. After a couple of false starts, we have focussed on key terms the target demographic is likely to search, rather than the generic terms others in the industry use. We have also had great success with a social media strategy -- since the few people likely to be interested in paying such high prices know like-minded folks. For the first time, my client is getting "walk in" prospects. They are delighted! But they are not really walk-ins. They have already found the site -- either through SERPs or Facebook or Twitter. Now we need to get to the next level. Here's the problem: the client's domain name sucks. It is short, but combines an acronym with one of the words in its long-version name. It uses the British spelling version of the long name fragment, even though most Canadians now use American spelling. And it is a .ca, rather than a dot.com So I think we have to bite the bullet and change to the long, dot com version of the name, which is available and has the additional benefit of having embedded within it a key search term. I am basically an editorial/content guy and not a tech guy. The IT guys at my firm are strongly encouraging me to make the change...in very "colorful" language. We can certainly do 301 redirects at the page level. But I would like some additional validation before proceeding. My questions are: how much link juice might we lose? I've seen the figure of 10% bandied around. Is it accurate? might we see a temporary dip in results? If so, how long would it last? what questions did I forget to ask? What additional info do you need to offer informed advice ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielFreedman0