Rankings Drop Penguin 2.0
-
Hey guys,
Suffering a horrible rankings drop after penguin 2.0. We have 4 popular sites and have seen a steady decline in rankings and traffic after 22nd May.
I've looked into it a little bit and am wondering if WordPress blog sidebar links might be hurting us. Specifically my brother and I both have sidebar links on our personal blogs which are getting indexed on every page, and I'm wondering if it's distorting our link profiles.
Specifically, I read something about links coming from sites which aren't relevant to your niche and overly optimised anchor text. Both sites have very simple single keyword anchor texts on the links.
We're pretty white hat in terms of SEO, we've never done that much link building, and when we do, it's usually with worthwhile directories or with sites we have relationships with. Therefore we don't have that many links.
Any ideas on how best to investigate this?
Thanks.
-
Thanks for the comprehensive reply.
We actually used to work like that under our company name. One of the main reasons for splitting at the time to separate sites was that Google stopped allowing different display URLs for AdWords - we would advertise buyahipflask.com but redirect to macdonald-sporrans.com. We got significantly better click-through rates for the individually branded domains.
We also felt that it was easier to develop good relevant content and social strategies around individual niches, rather than a single brand. IE I feel it would be hard to make our single site which might have 10,000 products on it, rank well for 'quaichs' which is only about 200 of those products.
However, I fully agree with your points about our current setup. Perhaps my ideal would be to have single sites with better names/brands!?
-
If you want to know how I would approach this in a new light and strategy. It would take some time, planning and work to develop, but the rewards down the line would be much greater! It looks like the way you have things setup now, look like a potential link wheel of sites playing off each other with specific 'KW anchor text rich links internally.
Here's a detailed plan I would put in place. Granted this is a rough outlook without having all access and full disclosure on the sites.
1. Look to develop your Brand! Build a brand name that you can expand on product wise. Develop out 1 site which encompasses all the products you sell. Perhaps later you want to add more? Is there any reason why you could not assimilate all these sites into 1 Brand site?
2. Plan to move all products under one shell site, and plan to redirect all your traffic to the new BRAND site Work with one domain you can build on for clients, products, social, content and link building.
3. Register a new BRAND domain once you have decided on one. Make sure to remove any <keywords>from your URL and build a brand people can relate too in it's product niche. Keyword rich domains have been hurt in various niche's from the last few updates. Build something that people want to share is your best bet.</keywords>
4. Migrate all your content, products, and pages to the new domain/brand site.
5. Plan out detailed 301 redirect from all your old sites, domains and internal pages to the new MASTER BRAND site where it will hold all your products for sale, keeping some of your link value.
6. Run detailed back link profiles in OSE on the old sites, to weed out the weak one's and the make to be very thorough. Remove any back-links you don't want (many methods), and clean up the link profile until it looks very clean
7. Plan and prepare a social media strategy around your products and brand. Get the clear one's setup and build out from there as needed (specific), to aid in reinforcing the brand and site.
8. Plan a content development strategy around your products. Develop out information, product details, where they can get them, why it' better. Find linking partners through sharing information and content. Build links to external sources that relate to product in your niche. Get people talking about you and what you offer
9. This way, when you tie in the social media strategy with content development, you can handle working with one domain, and drive all your efforts to one site/domain and location.
The way you have it setup now (4 sites and 1 blog), your are turning your efforts into more work!!?? Running multiple domains, social media and content development and link building. Why would you cause yourself so much work???
Ultimately, building a brand site is the best bet. This will also help you with the link building and content development to support the domain and site.
It's a rough sketch and requires work but would pay off in the long run. The way you have it setup now, needs to be modified to succeed in the long run
Hope to see a future post once you get it all aligned and working for you!
Cheers.
-
Thanks for the reply - interesting opinion.
I'm aware that our 'brands' are also URLs and contain keywords so perhaps changing the blogs from having keyword only anchor text to having brand name anchor text is better.
Ultimately, I'm happy to do whatever will be better. As we have control of the links it's very easy to remove them quickly. I thought about doing that and then recalled someone saying 'all links are good links' so wondered whether it wouldn't be worth the effort.
At least a good starting point is - from looking at our link profile - do you think those links from the blogs are the ones that we should be concerned about?
-
Personally, I think that the recent updates have targeted non-relevant linking heavily; I read an article somewhere written by the owner of a UK based web design agency. His company website was effected by the updates because they placed footer links on all of the websites he they had designed. When they changed the anchor text to brand their rankings started to increase again.
In my experience, a client of mine had dropped considerably in the rankings. I looked into their linking profile and realised they had blog roll links from several non-related websites (built by an old agency). I had them removed by contacting the website owners directly and we are now starting to see rankings return.
If you want to keep the links on your blogs, I would recommend linking with brand anchor text rather than keywords. I know this may be difficult given the URLs of the websites you have given haha.
-
Sure thing, probably should've done that in the first instance!
Sites are: buyakilt.com buyahipflask.com buyatankard.com buyaquaich.com
Blogs are: fer.gy callum-macdonald.com
-
I think you should share you sites and blogs (with links) to help us get a view and a better picture of what might actually be causing the issue
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
-
Odd one - dropping positions but traffic improving
Seem to have a bit of an odd one. For the last few months been running a backlink campaign for a 2/3 year old site, got good positions for some keywords/pages but seems to have plateaued the last 60 days or so with some keywords dropping in position.
Link Building | | seoman10
The odd thing is traffic seems to be still improving (according to GA and GSC). I am wondering if - have hit a niche ceiling
or rankbrain type thing i.e. google trying to work out what the site should be ranking for and messing with positions.
or because it is just a newish site. Any ideas?2 -
What is the reason my ranking down?
Hey Guys, My name is Niraj Jaiswal from India! My website is that Rakhi Bazaar and my lots of keywords like send rakhi to the USA, send Rakhi to Canada, send Rakhi to the UK, send Rakhi to Dubai my previous ranking is better than now ranking. I do not understand what's going wrong. My domain name is "https://www.rakhibazaar.com/". What I do??
Link Building | | Packersmove1 -
Will links from startup/tech blogs help a site rank for *money* keywords?
If a startup has a tech blog (say, domain.com/tech) and a startup journey blog (on domain.com/journey — think groovehq.com/blog), will garnering high PA/DA links to those pages help the root domain rank for keywords related to the startup's services? For example, continuing the Groove example, will quality links to their aforementioned startup blog help them rank the homepage for Online Help Desk Software? Even when those links are from non-helpdesk content on non-helpdesk sites? My theory is that links from high DA sites won't be a bad thing — as long as they're not from spammy pages and done naturally. In some niches, where it's hard to get organic product-related links, this might be a worthwhile strategy. Am I right? Or sadly misguided...? 🙂 EDIT: BTW. The niche I have in mind is fairly uncompetitive, and it'd be easier to garner links from the startup/tech community than the niche community itself.
Link Building | | brandrsn1 -
I need help: Website has dropped and I dont know how to bring it back
Hi All, So my website has dropped now to page 12, I have no idea why, I've tried myself to bring it back and I have also tried a few £1000 at outsourcing the SEO which has had no affect. There are no penalties in webmaster tools but I personally think something the algo doesn't like is holding it back - I could be wrong. I think this because some of the results higher than me are a lot worse, hold little to no content and there backlink profiles have no links, some are even 1 page new domains that have been live for as little as a month ranking a lot higher than me. At one point I was ranking page1, position4 for the term 'bank holidays' and now I don't rank anywhere. What's weird is if you search 'bankholidays' as one word I appear in that position. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on? Problem page: followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays - GoogleUK search. I need some help please.
Link Building | | followuk0 -
domains that harming my ranking
how can i know domains harming my ranking I ’ve seen a drop in rankings, Domain Authority , so I need to know sites who is linking to my domains that cause this decline.. i can use Open Site Explorer but i need to know the site that harm my ranking .. thanks
Link Building | | Alukah.Network0 -
How to Recover From a Google Penguin Penalty?
My web site is hit by penguin penalty and got the mail from Google to my web master tool saying. "Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Link Building | | tinyinnovative
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxxx.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site.
Recommended action
Use the Links to Your Site feature in Webmaster Tools to download a list of links to your site.
Ensure that unnatural links pointing to your site are removed.
When these changes are made, and you are satisfied that links to your site follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, submit a reconsideration request. If you're unable to remove links pointing to your site, please provide as much detail as possible in your reconsideration request.For an updated list of manual actions currently applied to your site, visit the Manual Actions page. If no manual actions are listed, there is no longer a need to file a reconsideration request."0 -
Is blog commenting still useful for SEO, post Panda and Penguin?
One website I checked is ranking well on Google. Upon checking its backlinks, I found that most of them are blog comments. Is blog commenting still valuable? Anyone encountered any recent problem (ranks gone down, etc)? Are there any specific strategy to blog commenting these days? Thanks!
Link Building | | AgentsofValue0 -
Pagerank 0 vs Page Authority 53....?
I sometimes see sites with PageRank 0 but Page Authority 50+. For instance http://auto.beginthier.nl/: PageAuthority = 53
Link Building | | PrizeWize
mozRank = 4,64
mozTrust = 5,69
Root domain links = 42
PageRank = 0 How should i interpret these stats? If or instance i'm optimizing for a car related website (a site about: car parts, car insurrance, classic cars), would these be a good place or a bad place to get links from (ignoring the benefits of direct traffic)? PA = 53 (very good) Vs. PR = 0 (very bad)?0