Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites
-
One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years.
Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products.
The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed.
The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable.
Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?
-
Sorry Doug, I should have said that there were two drops, one for Panda, and then one for Penguin, with one coming in Mid-Feb and one Mid-April. Panda was a large drop, then as the site was recovering slightly it got hit with the Penguin update.
The competitors are mainly Amazon and eBay. Both sell the products, but only sporadically and don't have them in any number.
The client has dropped on the 4 big keywords from 1st-2nd position, to 5th-7th. Not a massive drop by any means, but in a market so small it has had a huge effect.
The rest of the site’s rankings did drop, but they have recovered since then.
The backlinks are not overly impressive, but nothing too alarming. There have been no warnings in Webmaster Tools, nevertheless, I have been working on the link profile and trying to add variety.
After originally thinking this was the cause I have begun to reconsider, and in my digging found several faults on-page. I fixed most of these when I first got to work on the site, such as the internal linking and general optimization. There was also a spammy element to the internal linking which I got rid of.
Fixing the internal linking didn’t have the desired effect, so I have re-approached that and changed it further. I also found an issue with the CMS in which it was generating a series of duplicated page titles (that mirrored the index page due to an error in the CMS to the lower pages). This would fit with the Panda change and the aim to reduce duplicates. This month, I have eliminated these, cleaned up the internal linking further and looked to vary the link profile (I'm hoping this will fix the issue, I just need to wait until it gets indexed).
Also, as an experiment, I made a series of HTML pages (not in the CMS) to test the site. These ranked well within a month, and have continued to grow since then.
Another issue the site has is the site itself. The code is outdated and messy with inline CSS and Java (some of which seems redundant) that all make the code to content ration something to be desired. I’m wondering if this could be a cause. The CMS has a penchant for duplication and the ‘readable’ code is not very clean, dates, filled with redundant code and is old.
Thanks
-
I've encountered some very diverse serp results where niche terms are very niche and there isn't the search volume to out there and/or lots of alternative markets using the same terms to mean different things, but I guess it depends what you mean by not relevant to the search terms. If they're selling the niche products that's kinda relevant?
The first step to recovery must be to understand the problem.
Do you know why you got hit by Penguin? Are you sure it's Penguin that's caused the drop (when did it happen)? What does your back link profile look like? Have you had any warnings in Google Webmaster Tools?
How far has your client dropped? Are they in the index at all? Where are they ranking for other keywords - is it the same story?
Here's some penguin related SEOmoz blog posts:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recovering-from-the-penguin-update-a-true-story
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
So, first I'd confirm that it was Penguin and then try and see just how big a hole you're in! 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
-
Canonicals from sub-domain to main domain: How much content relevancy matters? Any back-links impact?
Hi Moz community, I have this different scenario of using canonicals to solve the duplicate content issue in our site. Our subdomain and main domain have similar landing pages of same topics with content relevancy about 50% to 70%. Both pages will be in SERP and confusing users; possibly search engine too. We would like solve this by using canonicals on subdomain pointing to main domain pages. Even our intention is to only to show main domain pages in SERP. I wonder how Google handles it? Will the canonicals will be respected with this content relevancy? What happens if they don't respect? Just ignore or penalise for trying to do this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Condensing content for web site redesign
We're working on a redesign and are wondering if we should condense some of the content (as recommended by an agency), and if so, how that will affect our organic efforts. Currently a few topics have individual pages for each section, such as (1) Overview (2) Symptoms and (3) Treatment. For reference, the site has a similar structure to http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/heart-disease-overview-fact. Our agency has sent us over mock-ups which show these topics being condensed into one and using a script/AJAX to display only the content that is clicked on. Knowing this, if we were to choose this option, that would result in us having to implement redirects because only one page would exist, instead of all three. Can anyone provide insight into whether we should keep the topic structure as is, or if we should take the agency's advice and merge all the topic content? *Note: The reason the agency is pushing for the merging option is because they say it helps with page load time. Thank you in advance for any insight! Tcd5Wo1.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | ATShock1 -
New site or subdomain
what are pros and cons of launching a new product site as opposed to placing it under a subdomain of the company site? will the new site be placed in the google sandbox? the main goal is to provide credibility for the product, and by placing it under the company site that has been live for over 10 years. It is not a consumer product - more dealers. So people would be pushed to the site or find it through the brochure.
Algorithm Updates | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com0 -
Links from high Domain authority sites
I have a relatively uncompetitive niche ranking around number 6 for my keywords. Would getting a few links from some Moz DA 80-90 and DA 90-100 sites help my rankings a lot? Some of the pages linking to me from these sites might be deep in the site pretty far away from the home page with pagerank of "unranked" or a grayed out bar and these pages linking to me might not have many links at all other than from the internal links of the site itself and would have a Moz PA of 10 or 20. Would these pass much pagerank or authority to my site or would they not be worth going after? These links to my site would be in context on a blog. Thanks mozzers!
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
Our Developer Site randomly drops 10+ places in Google searches for our Company Name. Why?
Hey everyone, At Betable, we have a player-facing site and a developer-facing site. We also have a developer-facing blog. We have this issue where our developer-facing site will randomly drop 10+ places in Google's Search results for the keyword "betable". This problem can be reproduced by others and in incognito mode, so it's not just one person's results. Furthermore, the developer-facing blog and our social media accounts all suddenly rank higher than the developer site. Even stranger, this problem randomly fixes itself after a few days. This has happened twice so far, and on each occasion there were no changes to the website that would have prompted a drop in rank. After the first drop, we did our best to neutralize any SEOMoz "red alerts" but to no avail, the drop happened again last week. Can someone help us understand what's going on? Are there ways to avoid this? Thanks, Tyler
Algorithm Updates | | Betable0 -
How to Link a Network of Sites w/o Penguin Penalties (header links)
I work for a network of sites that offer up country exclusive content. The content for the US will be different than Canada, Australia, Uk, etc.… but with the same subjects. Now to make navigation easy we have included in the header of every page a drop down that has links to the other countries, like what most of you do with facebook/twitter buttons. Now every page on every site has the same link, with the same anchor text. Example: Penguins in Canada Penguins in Australia Penguins in the USA Because every page of every site has the same links (it's in the header) the "links containing this anchor text" ratio is through the roof in Open Site Explorer. Do you think this would be a reason for penguin penalization? If you think this would hurt you, what would you suggest? no follow links? Remove the links entirely and create a single page of links? other suggestions?
Algorithm Updates | | BeTheBoss0 -
What is the best way for a local business site to come up in the SERPs for a town that they are not located in?
At our agency, we work with many local small business owners who often want to come up in multiple towns that are near to their business where they do not have a physical address. We explain to them again and again that with the recent changes that Google in particular has made to their algorithms, it is very difficult to come up in the new "blended" organic and Places results in a town that you don't have a physical address in. However, many of these towns are within 2 or 3 miles of the physical location and well within driving distance for potential new clients. Google, in it's infinite wisdom doesn't seem to account for areas of the country, such as New Jersey, where these limitations can seriously affect a business' bottom line. What we would like to know is what are other SEOs doing to help their clients come up in neighboring towns that is both organic and white hat?
Algorithm Updates | | Mike-i0 -
Does Google do domain level topic modeling? If so, are off-site factors such as search traffic volume taken into account?
80% of my site's organic traffic is coming through a resource that is only somewhat related. Does Google think the main topic of my site is terms this resource targets thus bumping the terms I care about to a sub-topic level of sorts? If this is the case, would putting the resource information into a sub-domain help to solve the problem?
Algorithm Updates | | tatermarketing0