Recent Algo Change
-
I was wondering if anybody can shed some light on any recent changes to the Google algorithm in Australia. A competitor, www.manwithavan.com.au has always been number 1 for the most competitive search term in our industry "removalists melbourne". However, in the last week, they have fallen out of the the SERPS and are now (according to MOZ) ranking outside the top 50.
As far as l can tell, they have a really well optimized site with good structure, great text and updated content. They are very active within social media circles and have some really good external links.
Can anybody tell me why they would have been hit so badly. The reason l ask is that i want to make sure we don't make the same mistake.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
-
Elementary, my dear Mosley.
-
Good work Holmes
-
Checking Ahrefs it is clear they have been hit by a penalty. They have over 700 exact match anchors for "man with a van" for example from just 30 domains, which makes up 67% of their backlinks!
-
Hi Robert
According to Algaroo, a tool that tracks the level of volatility in Google AU, there doesn't look to be anything out of the ordinary in the last few days.
I jumped into MajesticSEO to have a look at their backlinks, and what struck me was that out of their top 50 links (according to Majestic), around 20 of them have been deleted on the 21st and 22nd of September.
I'm also looking at their links on a whole - there are a lot of blogroll links, which looks quite unnatural, plus a number of directory links (which aren't necessarily bad but may have been devalued). A number of these blogrolls were site wide, so the deleted ones will have resulted in a very sharp fall in the number of links.
I can only speculate as to why those links were removed - whether prompted by Google or not - but it's clear that either removing them has caused the drop, or they have been prompted to remove them by Google after finding out about their link scheme (if it was one). Similarly the massive amount of directory links could be the cause - not because they're penalised, but because they have been devalued.
Hope that helps.
-
Are they in the SERPs what so ever? They may have been hit by panda or penguin, how about any of the other rankings have they changed ? Have you checked outside of Moz to confirm ?
If you go by the webmaster guidelines you can't go far wrong.
It could be they were up to some shady practices and got penalized for as such.
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
-
Changing the permalink estructure, worth the risk in 2017 ?
Hello, I have a wordpress blog that have more than 10 years old, when I created the blog the permalink had the date included. Example: site.com/2007/02/02/my-post/ Do you guys think is it worth the risk of changing my url escructure to remove the date ? Ofcourse I would do the 301 redirects and such... What I want to know if this will have any significant SEO advantage considering Google evolved so much ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Glinski
Thank you very much for reading my question 🙂0 -
Google Update? Anyone seeing a drastic change in rankings?
Hey everyone, Has anyone seen a drastic change in clients Google Rankings, we have one which has dropped from 9.5% visibility to 5.4% in one month.. It's extremely worrying as I have never seen a drop like this before since I've managed the account, in fact rankings have increased month on month since we took over the account. I've also looked at google, no penalty showing, I've started removing spammy sites who link to us and also added no follow to some of the links on the site which linked out to try and keep some link juice in the site. Anything else I can try / do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unbranded_Lee2 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Does data highlighter changes override the hard coded schema markup?
I hope one liner question explains what I'm looking for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOEnthusiast0 -
Possible to Change Domain Name without Negative Rankings
Is it possible to migrate to a new domain name without negatively impacting SEO? Our existing domain name (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) is a bit spammy. It has been used for almost 10 years. We would like to migrate it to www.metro-manhattan.com. The metro-manhattan domain has been registered about 5 years and it redirects to the nyc-officespace-leader.com domain. The nyc-officespace-leader.com has a domain authority of 23 and a page authority of 32. The metro-manhattan domain has a domain authority of 7 and a page authority of 23. Is it possible to make this transition without losing domain authority and page rank? I would think that having two domains might loo spammy to Google and this change would be a positive in the long term. We do understand that the redirects for each page would need to be done carefully. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Changing Domain
We have an old domain that we have had registered for many years(pinpoint;asersystems.com) and redirected to our regular domain (which is a short version of our name (pinlaser.com). Management wants to switch and use the longer version as the primary domain for branding purposes. I have cautioned against this for many reasons: Need to do 100's of redirects Potential loss of back links Most links will now be 301 redirects and not look natural to search engines. I would appreciate feedback on any and all risks associated with this potential move. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pinlaser0 -
Change Joomla to Wordpress (Better SEO)
Hi, I'd like to change my cms but I am afraid 😞 I have lots of content in Google, so I know I should make 301 list but what do you think about the change? Now I am in good position and I don't want to make bad my rank 😞 Please let me know which way is the best and secured 🙂 Thanks, Misi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netkreativ0 -
Changing Wordpress Permalinks Bad For SEO?
Hi, I have various pages set up such as http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is there any benefit in SEO terms to changing it to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer? I would presume that a keyword would be better for SEO than 'home' which is irrelevant? Also if I were to change it would all the links external I have on other sites pointing to http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer be lost as the url no longer exists? I suppose I could set up a manual redirect from http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer or would wordpress automatically redirect from the old to new? By redirecting I understand that some 'link juice' is lost along the way so is including the keyword in the url of enough benefit to warrant losing some link juice? Finally if I do change the url to include the keyword how do I do it in wordpress? I can only see how to change the page title using the 'edit' button when editing a page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK1