Hit hard on Google last October.
-
Hi all,
I'm just wondering if anyone is able to help me with why my website lost practically all its ranking last October (2012). My website is here: http://bit.ly/nAOfNj
Since early 2010, we have been ranking in the top 3 for our keyword when searched all around the country. Between end September, and end October 2012, we started dropping (from 2nd to 8th, then in December, 13th, January, 18th place... and then March back up to 13th, now ~10th).
The main problem seems to be that Google has changed how websites rank for our keyword (trampoline). In Brisbane, Australia (where we are based), we only rank in the local organic searches. We don't have a separate listing there anymore (with the meta description), even though we had a normal organic listing (and local listing) for the last 2 years! When searching from other states/suburbs further away, we dropped way off the first page. Our product is sold by resellers in 400 stores around Australia, so its not like we're just in Brisbane.
Has anyone experienced Google changing how they return results for a specific keyword like this? Did they do it a lot towards the end of last year?
We have a place page for Brisbane, but for some reason I have little to no control over it (Places/Local+ stuff up means I can't manage the page on Local+, can't add pictures/videos etc). My boss suggested we even try deleting the maps page or our local+ page to get out of there. We don't get anywhere near as much traffic through the local listing than a normal listing... I'm not sure if that's best though?
From what I can tell, the only Google algorithm updates that may have affected us at the time (October 9th) were the page layout updates that penalised(?) sites that have a lot of "ads" above the fold. Our website is designed to have splash banners on the top of every page to either promote our own product, competitions or the athletes we sponsor. Up until last week, the banners were always 500px high on larger screen desktops and 300px high on smaller desktops, laptops, ipad etc. I have recently changed them to all be 300px high to test, but I imagine i'll have to wait a while? Is this the kind of content that Google means by "ads above the fold"?
I've spent the last 4 weeks working on our SEO, from HTML validation, to rich snippets, content optimisation, a lot more internal linking, setting up some location-based content, doing a lot of keyword research, and now starting to work on cleaning up our Blog and creating some real sharable content that we'll share on our Facebook.
I really just wish I knew where the problem was so I could tackle that Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated!!
-
Hi Mario,
Thanks for your reply! Hmm... the thing is we honestly haven't paid for any links at all ever. The listing on linksjuice.com was premium because we put a reciprocal link in an old blog post. Are these types of big directory listings things that Penguin targeted? Because a number of our competitors (who weren't affected last year), are also listed in similar directories. A number of the directories we are in now are only recent additions (a month or so ago, in response to our big drop in traffic 8 months ago).
Did you find our most common anchor text from open site explorer's 'anchor text' listing? The anchor text you mentioned is only used 5 times according to OSE. There's 'trampoline australia vuly trampolines' as img text, did you mean that one? That's just one website who has a badge on each page of their website.
We started a campaign in April for our authorised resellers to have a badge linking back to our website, not for our primary keyword, but to our trading name and company name. We aren't paying or forcing them to put it on or anything, we have some very loyal resellers who love our products, and there are also some that are fake (which is also one of the reasons we started this) and pretend to sell our products but ship other low quality models.
We have a SEO company that also does work for us on link building sometimes as well. Thing is, I never know what they do or what links they build for us. We have left it totally up to them and never done any of our own link building until a few months ago to try and get back up.
So do you think it could still be a bad back-link thing? If someone were to link to our website's homepage, and we want to rank for 'trampoline', should the anchor text always be trampoline? That's something Google has been trying to fix up with Penguin isn't it? Noticing when its all the same anchor text and ignoring some of the links because of it?
If you look at linking root domains, you'll see stuff like stackoverflow, css-tricks etc (these are all from when I've posted and used my website's URL in the website field). Could this have diluted our ranking at all? Google should be smart enough to recognise that?
-
If you're traffic started dropping last October, its most likely that you have a Penguin issue. After looking at some of your links, this is most likely the case. A quick look at your link profile shows that your top anchor text is "vuly trampolines australia", which doesn't seem like a natural way that people would link to you, especially when links show up on pages like this: http://www.linksjuice.com/7/Sports
I would recommend that you compile a list of your inbound links, and work to identify and manually remove any links which you paid to have placed or were part of an exchange. Document what you are doing and then upload a disavow file in webmaster tools and make a reconsideration request. Then focus on building some great content and EARNING real links.
From what I've read, it will take some time for the site to recover, but this is the correct way to address the problem. Good luck.
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
-
Did I get hit with a panda update?
I have a site that is a marketplace. We don't own any items, the sellers fill everything out and then it goes up on the site. Many of our sellers also have their own sites and just send us a spreadsheet with all of their items and we bulk upload. In that case what we are putting up is very similar to what they already have up on their own site. I used the Fruition penalty checker and they seem to be suggesting that we got hit with some penalties for Panda and Quality Content. With the Google Algorithm it is hard to know for sure what we got hit with. Is it possible Google sees us as one of those crappy scraper sites? Is there anything we can do? We never see the items so I can't add to peoples description.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How to reverse declining Google rankings?
We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back. We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to: perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Google Seeing 301 as 404
Hi all, We recently migrated a few small sites into one larger site and generally we had no problems. We read a lot of blogs before hand, 301'd the old links etc and we've been keeping an eye on any 404s. What we have found is that Webmaster is picking up quite a few 404s, yet when we investigate these 404s they are 301'd and work fine. This isn't for every url, but Google is finding more and I just want to catch any problems before they get out of hand. Is there any reason why Google would count a 301 as a 404? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Buying a Google News website, against Google Terms?
We are looking at buying a business that has a number of websites Is it against buying a business that has a Google News website and continue to use the site? Once the business is sold, would google remove the site from its News?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Why, oh why does Google hate us?
My URL is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | candylotus
www.drupalgeeks.org I have tried my very best to cover all the usual SEO items.... But nothing... We are a legitimate company offering a legitimate service. Ideally we would come up in the results for: "Drupal Developers"
"Drupal Development" and
"Drupal Designers" Yet, we cannot break the top 50 for any of these.... We have:
Optimized Meta Tags
Written Quality Content
Maintained a Social Presence in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, and Google Plus
Blogged with some consistency
Guest Blogged
Canonicalization
And dozens of other things And we are all around nice people and a good company....... Why oh why? Can anyone take a look and see if there is something blatantly obvious I am missing? Are we using "drupal" too much?? Thank you in advanced for any assistance. Candice1 -
Multiple Google Places Listings?
Hi everyone. While I have read answers regarding this on Mike Blumenthal's blog, I have not been able to get an exact clarification on having multiple Google Places listings. According to Mike Blumethal, Google accepts multiple listings in the Places area for specific industries. e.g. One listing for a Dental office, one listing for EACH dentist. This could include a separate website for each. If this is the case, how far away are we from having one maxed out business owning muiiple positions in the local listing space in the search engines. specifically Google? I would love a good explanation of what is and isn't allowed to have multiple listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dignan991 -
Google Places / Google Analytics
I apologize first if this comes across as extremely novice, but I realized I really didn't know the answer and so - here I am. 🙂 Is anyone familiar with tracking google place traffic in google analytics? Is it possible? I'd love to know how many of our visitors are coming from our google place listings (we have several locations throughout the state.) Much gratitude in advance ~ Alicia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aaronetics0 -
How to prevent Google from crawling our product filter?
Hi All, We have a crawler problem on one of our sites www.sneakerskoopjeonline.nl. On this site, visitors can specify criteria to filter available products. These filters are passed as http/get arguments. The number of possible filter urls is virtually limitless. In order to prevent duplicate content, or an insane amount of pages in the search indices, our software automatically adds noindex, nofollow and noarchive directives to these filter result pages. However, we’re unable to explain to crawlers (Google in particular) to ignore these urls. We’ve already changed the on page filter html to javascript, hoping this would cause the crawler to ignore it. However, it seems that Googlebot executes the javascript and crawls the generated urls anyway. What can we do to prevent Google from crawling all the filter options? Thanks in advance for the help. Kind regards, Gerwin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footsteps0