Why has my authority article gone from P1 to below the top 50? Along with the rest of my site...
-
My site has run into some serious and unexplained SEO issues over the last 6 months, i.e:
I wrote the content at http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/flat-roof-insulation/ about 3-4 years ago, and ever since it's competed for position with the huge PLC websites and hovered around the top 3 spots in google.co.uk.
However, since May this year things have declined rapidly and now isn't even in the top 50 for [flat roof insulation]! Why??
I am aware that this content has been pretty heavily plagiarised since day 1, with some other sites making the effort the 'rehash' my wording and others just blatantly copying. At the same time it's also been relatively well linked to (for a very boring subject) since day 1.
Over the same period (since May) the site has suffered a huge decline in traffic and rankings, as can be seen here http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Capture.png, but I find the huge drop harder to justify for a relevant article than for the homepage/site in general.
What strikes me about the above is the two step changes in traffic volume; one in early June and the other in late October. I am vaguely aware of the penguin update etc, but it seems to me like I've been manually banished somehow?
Thanks in advance for any advice!
-
One part Panda + one part Penguin. It's not a manual penalty but algorithmically, you're eating it pretty hard. You need some link balance, content refreshed and basically to put the past as far into your past as you can. Good luck!
-
Sent you a PM with more info
-
Thanks Richard
I have suspected that might be the case, thanks to providers used in the past.
Would you be interested in giving me a proposal/some costs for SEO to try and undo this mess?
I don't really want to dominate the SERPS any more, as I was for a while and it just resulted in me fielding thousands of calls which weren't worth my time.
I'm looking in particular for these pages to rank well again http://www.flatroofs.co.uk/projects-case-studies/
I've never had any onsite SEO as I haven't trusted the providers with back end access, so there's probably some improvement to be made there too...
-
You dont have a manual penalty.
But you are or used some questionable link building in the past.
Quick breakdown
#1 You need more branded keywords because your top linked/anchored word is Flat roofing. The top referring keyword should be http://yoursite instead of a single keyword
#2 A lot of the links you bought (or your SEO company did) are using private blog networks or sites blog sites built for SEO. Consider using other methods.
The exact times in traffic drop are due to the updates.
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
-
Is my client's site penalized and if not, why are other lesser quality sites ranking with lower metrics than my client's?
Hello, I'm trying to explain to a client, as to why certain websites that appear in the top 50 listings for a keyword are there when they don't have very good backlink profiles, and for this keyword, seems you need a high PA above 20 or DA above 25, just to page for page 2 - 3. Running a full SERPs report, I have seen that backlinks to the page that's ranking seems to be as high of a factor as PA, followed by DA and overall backlink profile. Having a high score in one of these 4 areas seems to increase your ranking. However, going into page 3 and beyond, seems that things kinda take a weird turn. After comparing the client's site to those ranking on page 2 I could see that all of them had better PA and more links to the page ranking for that keyword, so page 2 I understand why we don't rank on yet. However, looking at page 3, I see that the client's site in question has better PA, DA, links to page and overall links to domain. Which leaves me to think we have a penalty that's keeping us ranking 50 or beyond. Since our metrics across the boards for what MOZ is showing as ranking factors. The more odd issue is that looking at the line graph, shows right at the time we implemented sitewide https our ranking for this one keyword dropped, while rankings for our other keywords increased. Am I to assume it's a keyword density penalty? What penalties are there with a outcome of ranking limits?
Competitive Research | | Deacyde0 -
I am looking to find the top pages based on traffic volume on my competitors websites, does anyone know of any good resources?
I want to know how which pages on my competitors websites are the most popular based on the traffic volume. I do not care how many links or directed to that page or any other metric. Only thing I am looking for is the traffic volume. It would also be nice to know the length of time spent on that page.
Competitive Research | | kanteenboy0 -
How on Earth are These Sites Outranking Us?
Hello all, My colleague and I have been doing a lot of work to optimise our companies site (www.allseasonshire.eu/). The project is still massively work in progress. While we've been analysing the SERPs for KW's we're trying to rank for we've noticed two sites that are outranking us and we can't work out why. The sites in question are www(dot)nationwide-boilerhire(dot)co(dot)uk & and www(dot)nationwideboilerhire(dot)com. They're both very small sites, with hardly any content and basically zero external links pointing to them. When we compare the root domains in OSE our site comes out on top on every single competitive metric as well, most of them by a long shot. I'm just wondering if anyone can help shed some light on why these two sites would be appearing so high in SERPs and why they would be outranking us? Any input anyone has is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ryan Edit: Keyword in question is 'boiler hire'. Thanks for your answer Nishadha, would that alone really be enough though?
Competitive Research | | allseasonshire0 -
Open Site Explorer is not showing dmT. Where do I go to get this metric.
Just trying to understand the video I watched on Link Building w/ Open Site Explorer. I'm not seeing the dmT metric in the live version. Has it been replaced by something else. Or is there someplace else I need to look for it?
Competitive Research | | AhmadS0 -
Should I move my brand under our corporate domain to boost Domain Authority?
Dear Community, I am seeking your expert advice on this situation: We have these assets as a starting point: a long-existing and well-linked Corporate Website (CW) with good metrics, a Brand Website (BW) with low/medium metrics, and some Brand Competitor (BC) websites with very similar metrics to BW. We will launch a new version of BW very soon with a well SEOd structure and copy (the old one was not SEOd at all) which I hope itself will bring SERP advantages. My dilemma emerged after checking the domain level values of our Corporate Website: CW / BW / BCs Domain Authority: 48 / 28 / 24-27 Domain mozRank: 4.79 / 3.15 / 2.6-3.25 Domain mozTrust: 4.73 / 2.79 / 2.47-3.06 My understanding is that based on seoMoz consensus domain level values give about 1/4th of the total pie. Based on these what do you think I should to win over competitors rankings? Should I keep running the service under BW (in an neighborhood with nearly identically valued competitors) Should I redirect BW to a sub-folder of the Corporate Website? (e.g.www.corporate.com/brand) with 301 redirects and enjoy the advantages of the much better domain values Alternatively, I could also build valuable and keyword-optimized content under our CW linking back to our BW. My understanding is that Option 1 has the least advantages among the three. Option 2 and 3 compete with the following advantages: Option 2: We could quickly rank higher as domain values elevate us from the mediocre BW and BC values (offsetting a little loss on 301 redirects) Option 3 would allow us to occuppy more positions for the important keywords on SERPs thus attract more "deep-browsing" visitors (and possibly BW could also get some advantages by receiving links from CW) Which direction would you proceed from here? Cheers, Andrew
Competitive Research | | andrew12120 -
Why do you think this site can't reach a better ranking?
Hello, My name is Pablo Lagos. We have a hosting company in Chile since 2006. All the time we have been ranked in the first page for the keyword "hosting" in google.cl. Some years ago, we used to be on the first 3 results. Since the last year our site went down to 7 and higher places no matter we do. When I run the link analysis, we have the highest punctuation in all items. I would really appreciate your comments. The site is in spanish: www.ilihost.cl Thanks.
Competitive Research | | pabloandres0 -
Site in top 3 with a 1-day old domain and no backlinks
Hi everyone, I'm trying to understand some searchresults, when searching in the netherlands for 'online casino':
Competitive Research | | iwebdevnl
http://www.google.nl/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=online+casino&pws=0 You'll see as position 3 result this website: http://bit.ly/qhRsUT, it's obviously that this site is there because of blackhat. But how did it come there such high for a keyword with high competition? I don't see anything wrong in the website? It's not like Google did something wrong, because it happened already a few times for this keyword with different domains from that owner. Regards, Yannick0 -
Google Places - Top Listing & Strange Analytics
Hello, we have been working with this customer for a few years, doing their PPC, organic marketing, and we had established one google places listing for them as well. I guess the owner got sold on having someone else work with us to do google places for an additional office location they recently set up, and for whatever reason, they bypassed having us do it. This company never gained FTP access to the website. And despite heavy competition (apparantly), they have that new location listed in the #1 - A spot, without making any changes to the website. And, to top it off, when you review the Google places performance, there is a weird result I had never before seen labeled as "* loc:". You can see what I'm talking in both screen shots. Is there any guidance you can offer, first as to what that listing label means, and second, do you have any ideas how to 'reverse engineer' how they were able to get top listing so quickly for our customer like that? local_results.jpg local_analytics.jpg
Competitive Research | | JerDoggMckoy0