Website dropping from page 1google uk
-
Hi all,
Firstly let me stress I am not really SEO minded, I know the very basics and that is about it. I am a driving instructor in the UK and have had my website (Wordpress) on page 1 for about 3 years now round the position 3 mark but for the last few months it has been dropping and is now right at the bottom of page 1 so no doubt a few more days and it will vanish completely from page 1 of google.co.uk .
I was wondering if someone could just have a quick look at the page to see if they can see anything obvious that wouldn't be seen by me! The search term is " Driving Lessons Worcester " and the page that has always show on page 1 of google is ..
http://www.passlee.com/driving-lessons-worcester.html
I also had another site on page 1 for about 2 years which was www.drivinglessonsworcester.com this has also vanished to page 5 over the last 3 to 4 months. What really hurts is I made a website for another local instructor using WP and with similar setup to mine and that is now showing as No.1 on page 1 of google.co.uk!! So how is it the website I did for him is doing amazing yet mine is dieing a death when they are setup the same way but obviously different content!
As I said I barely know the basics , I am sure a lot of you are thinking " Just go research " which I know I should and no doubt will, but I just wanted someone to have a very quick look to see if there was anything obvious!
Kind Regards
Lee Francis
-
Lee
Usually around a week or so, sometimes quicker in my experience, shouldn't be any longer than a week.
Regards
John
-
Any idea how often GWT updates the backlink list? just tried a very quick google with no joy.
-
Hi Lee
No problem, glad to offer an insight I can.
There is no one software that will always pick up links pointing to your website, no matter what they tell you, my advice is to use the list within GWT, its usually the most reliable, actually it is the most reliable.
Its really up to you ... you own your won website, but I would not advice removing all the links, you really only have handful of domains linking into your website, the bad ones are the obvious ones, really looking at them and asking your self are they associated with your industry, are they relevant to your website, was it a link earned as opposed added to a directory.
Removing bad links are never easy ... even using the Disavow tool as a last resort ... I believe the backlog there ,especially after the last update is quite extensive. While you are trying to remove the links, start focusing attention on the content, and don't ignore the social aspect, its more important than ever now, and that's not my opinion but the opinion of a lot more savvier people then me.
You have a couple of links coming from industry related websites ... They wont harm you, or shouldn't, I think If I recall one is an Authority on driving instructors in the UK .
Yes, you may have to use the disavow tool, but insure you try yourself before, use it as a last resort .... As they get lots and lots of requests from people who don't even try themselves, its a sort of tool you have one shot off ,so insure you get it right.
Best of luck
John
-
John,
Many thanks for your words of support and help, you have been amazing! I have already started to email some of the sites to get my links removed, one of the things I have noticed is the inconsistency in backlink checker tools, some say I have over 150 links other like GWT say much less but I guess the best thing to do is work with the one that gives me the higher number of backlinks,
I do struggle to understand which links are good and bad, do not really understand the terminology that these tools use when listing these links ie if they are good or bad links. However that site I did for my fellow instructor that is now no.1 on page 1 has no backllinks to it at all as I never did any backlink work on it, so I am very tempted to just try and remove ALL links from my site good or bad.
As for Remov'em, I used their "predict" box and according to them I only have 1 back link so I dont see much point in paying them for that.
I think the Rusrian backlinks are going to be hard to remove so perhaps I can use the google disavow tool for those but they are mainly on the 2nd domain which has completely vanished so I am not as worried about that at this stage.
Once again many thanks for you help and I will be following your words of wisdom to the letter, if you or anyone can think of anything to help my quest the help is much appreciated and I will keep all updated with what I have done as I hope it may help other in the future!
Once I have the links situation sorted I will tackle the content as that will be an easy fix, but I suspect it may take a few weeks or even months to sort the links problem out.
-
Hi Lee
You could try to manually have them removed, contacting the webmaster, and lastly you could use the disavow tool
Great article here explaining the whole process.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2237534/Unnatural-Links-Recovery-Emerging-from-a-Manual-Penalty ,now you have no notification that you were penalized, but none the less, you would need to remove the links that aren't good
If you have no quality warning from Google Lee in your GWT, that's good.
If I was you I would get rid of all those links into your website immediately, obviously the bad ones, you have some good relevant ones also (like the driving school authority and similar).
I have never ever used Remov'em but read other people talking about them and have not heard much negative ... Maybe someone else could qualify them.
You could of course pay some agency to carry out this work, but you aren't in a critical position in terms of penalties, your webpage is still ranking ... albeit slipping down the ranks ... but still number 10 (front page). As for the cost, each and every agency will charge accordingly as they see ... there is no one definitive price !
Work on cleaning the links, get relevant fresh content within your website, start utilizing your social media presence ... Just to clarify before I put the fear off God into you Lee, you aren't in a detrimental position here .. a little work on your side should see you hopefully improve / recover ..
Hope this helps a little more and clarifies for you
Regards
John
-
Hi John,
Many thanks for your reply, even if most of it is over my head, yes I did use some link building tools about a year or so ago, as for the content it is unique as my family and I wrote it together so looks like it has been copied, but its no big deal I will just re write it! How does one get rid of these links? I just had a look at a paid service to remove links.. http://www.removeem.com/ but put my url in and it said I only have 3 bad links! So don't think I will use them!
I do use GWT but admit don't really understand it but I have not had any negative or bad messages from them.
Can I pay and SEO company to do this and if so is it expensive?
Kind Regards
Lee
-
Hi Lee,
Have you had any warnings from Google over bad links ? Do you use GWT, can you check to see if you have any messages relating to your website ?
You seem to have a lot of links coming into your website from not so good directories. You could have been penalized as Google would not see them as relevant, or dare I suggest paid links
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.passlee.com
Similar to www.drivinglessonsworcester.com, has links coming from what look like link farms, websites with high DA located in Russia !!! ... I imagine his one of the reasons why it plummeted.
Further review on ahrefs.com shows lin ks coming in from all sorts of cr*p ...A lot of these first seen from early this year right up to last month ,did you use some sort of tool to creat backlinks ?
My advice to you is this links / directories are more damage these days than benefit, especially if you are paying for them. These directories that pop up everywhere, offering links are something to stay clear off
Also, the content on the page http://www.passlee.com/driving-lessons-worcester.html is replicated all over the internet, I just ran it through Copyscape and found at least 47 replications of the text above varying from 14% up to 63%
A few links below
http://www.surreydrivingforce.co.uk/
http://www.aditrainingashford.co.uk/driving-lessons-middlesex.html
The list goes on, as I said Copyscape throws back 47 websites above. I am not suggesting you copy and pasted the content, but it sure looks like you did.
You have to make the content unique and relevant ... more importantly try and make it unique, it seems every driving school is using the same content.
Your DA is better than any of the competitors ranking above you, your page you are ranking for is not though ... i suggest you clean up the links coming into your website, sort out the content on the page and you should recover, the term is not a high competitive term, your competition don't seem to have invested in any serious SEO work, so you should get back up there
BUT you need to clean up those links !!!!!!!
Hope this helps a little, maybe some of our more esteemed experts may throw up in advice
Regards
John
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
-
Any risks involved in redirecting low quality Infringement website?
Hi all, Recently we have over taken one of the websites (with Trademark Infringement )who been using our domain name in their domain. That website got no traffic or backlinks. Is there any risk involved in redirecting that website to our website? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do keyword target landing pages increase rankings?
Let's say we create landing pages for targeted keywords in our niche. So like we have landing pages optimised for 80% of the top keywords with decent search volume. If these pages started ranking at first page or around; will this scenario improves the ranking of website? Right now, only few of our top pages are ranking good. Planning to create more of such.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Website and landing pages - Proportionate authority
Does website's (homepage) ranking going to influence landing pages ranking or vice-versa? If the homepage is ranking good for a "keyword", will that improve ranking of other landing pages which are optimised for related "keywords" & Vice-versa?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Absolutely gigantic drop in Ranking overnight
The site in question has been operating for around 3 months and for the first two months was nowhere to be seen in google results (literally page 10, 11 etc for all but branding searches). Then through a lot of hard work and the help of MozPro I managed to build it to a respectable 6th-10th place for the main keyphrases. Overnight on Wednesday we suddenly dropped half a dozen places or so and were rooted firmly mid table page 2 for both these phrases. Last night however we suddenly dropped from 14th to the very last result on page 10! for the biggest keyphrase where it has slowly dropped through the day to currently be sitting in 8th on page 11. Nothing is showing in Dashboard, theres no reason that I know of to be penalised, however even if we were penalised then surely that would be the site as a whole and not just 1 keyphrase? The weird thing is, when you look at the 1st 2 pages of the search a number of items have changed, a competitor which closed down is suddenly sitting mid table while other newcomers that were doing well have dropped, some of the older faces have gone up suddenly. If I didnt know better I would say that google has suffered a timewarp and is now serving results from a month ago for this keyphrase. Ive now noticed that the MozCast is reporting very stormy weather last night, surely however this couldnt be down to a change in Algorithm etc, not to produce such a massive drop for a site that has followed the rules (I refuse to link with a site that even remotely could be thought of as spam). Someone please tell me that google has been glitching and all will be well when I wake in the morning? Peter
Algorithm Updates | | Pwhitfield0 -
Google sidebar advertising dropped
Has anyone noticed how the google sidebar advertising has completely disappeared? They only display top 4 adwords and then remaining on the bottom of each search page. I can't find any info on it or when it actually happened?
Algorithm Updates | | Purplesars110 -
Trafic drop after a huge indexation
Hello everyone, My website used to have about 500k indexed pages in Google. After publishing fresh sitemaps and a little local "buzz", it now has about 6 millions indexed pages and the numbers are skyrocketing (GWT says 7 millions and it will probably keep going). My website has a total number of pages of 10 millions. I used to have about 5k organic visite each day, but since the big indexation has started, I now have half less. I read many things about that kind of trafic drop, and it seems to be a normal step when indexing a huge site. I just wanted to know if you guys had any similar experiences and if yes, if there are specific tasks to do in order to recover/develop the organic trafic or if it's just a matter of time. Thanks for your help and share of experiences 😉
Algorithm Updates | | Pureshore0 -
Significant Drop in Rankings without Explanation
My company has experienced a significant drop in rankings in the last month or so. How significant? Across our top 11 keywords, we've dropped an average of 6 positions. Some have dropped less (1 or 2) and some have dropped way more (38). We work really hard to provide great content on our site and have been building out our link profile with guest blogging on relevant sites (dailyshotofcoffee.com, for example). No major changes have been made to the URL structure or content on the pages that are ranking for our key terms, so I am not sure where the drop is coming from. For example: One of our key terms is "espresso machine" and we went from #9 to #22 in the last few weeks. We have not made any changes to the main content on the page that is ranking since September. Our on-site page report for this page has us nailing all of the critical factors, most of the high importance factors (not exact keyword in page titles - we use "espresso machines" as that is one of our other terms - or "avoid keyword stuffing" - unfortunately, our products are also named with "espresso machine" and i can't very well not follow those links or remove the term from their names), all of the moderate importance factors, and most of the low importance factors. It has been reporting this way since September. Most of our key terms are this way (haven't had content changed in the last several weeks to months and have great on-page grades). We don't engage in spammy link building (though I did some work this fall on cleaning up bad links a previous SEO company had built out). I'm just really taken aback by the sudden drop in rankings across the board. Any insight or advice anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | Marketing.SCG1 -
Google said that low-quality pages on your site may affect rankings on other parts
One of my sites got hit pretty hard during the latest Google update. It lost about 30-40% of its US traffic and the future does not look bright considering that Google plans a worldwide roll-out. Problem is, my site is a six year old heavy linked, popular Wordpress blog. I do not know why the article believes that it is low quality. The only reason I came up with is the statement that low-quality pages on a site may affect other pages (think it was in the Wired article). If that is so, would you recommend blocking and de-indexing of Wordpress tag, archive and category pages from the Google index? Or would you suggest to wait a bit more before doing something that drastically. Or do you have another idea what I could to do? I invite you to take a look at the site www.ghacks.net
Algorithm Updates | | badabing0