Website No Longer Ranking In Google:
-
My website was on first page google couple of months ago, now nothing. Shows up in Bing page one. Some queries/pages still showing OK, but some not at all. Example "residential elevators illinois" found nowhere. http://www.accesselevator.net is the website. Have found 900 poor quality links and used disavow tool. Any further suggestions? Their Page Rank also went from a 3 to a 2. Implemented nofollow on all outgoing links. Need advice.
-
Thanks Alan, Wigas and Tommy for your in-depth responses. Really appreciate the insight!
Alan - no notifications on Webmaster Tools. Feel like I'm between a rock and hard place with the spammy links. Google does say if you upload another file it will completely override the first disavow file, so perhaps I should consider uploading a new file with only a couple of bad links, thereby negating the original file with over 800 spammy links.
Wigas - Crawled through Moz showing over 100 critical fixes including configuring attachments as no follow/no index with redirect to main site. Need to work on improving the backlinking!
Tommy - Disavow is just a mystery. Bottom line probably is if you don't have any warning notice in Webmaster Tools, don't disavow, just improve. Will revisit title-tags and image weights for sure to improve response time.
Certainly have a big mess to clean up!
Thanks again!
-
Hi Joanne,
Another possible reason is that some of the so-called poor quality backlinks are actually the reason why you were ranked on the first page. However, after Disavowing these links could have caused you to drop in ranking. For that reason, many people don't recommend using Disavow tool outright but try to remove the links manually first.
In addition to the above suggestions, maybe try the following:
- Add separators in the title tag to separate keywords
- Image Weight - you can either use Google's Tool or WebPageTest to check out the speed of your site and what needs to improve
-
Hey Joanne,
Your website could be victim of Penguin 2.1 (launched on 4th Oct, 2013) Lets analyze possible issues with your back-links
Back-links Analysis
- Money Anchors: This is the biggest issue of all. More than 50% of anchors are money: http://screencast.com/t/jC8wtH6Ijwj. This is not a desirable situation
- No Social Shares: Hardly any social shares: http://screencast.com/t/IUSEORZ69o
- Most of links From Directories and Social Book-marks: This is not an ideal situation. good to be divers. Few Guest Posts, Few Press Releases, Few Local Directories, Few Business Directories.
Starting with disavowing is good but disavow could further lower rankings and you are going to lose link juice. So, buid quality links to make amends for it.
Additionally few On Page Tweaks can help
- Title Tags are over-optimized. More than 70 characters
- Try to crawl your website through Moz and find other SEO Issues regarding Meta, Content, Semantic, Images etc
- Product Categories making things duplicate (Agree with Alan)
- Loading Speed needs some work
- Making your website responsive will be another good thing
- Hardly any internal linking. Need to improve it
I hope that will help
Regards
-
There could be many reasons the site has lost rankings.
Does Google Webmaster Tools report that the site has been manually penalized for bad links? (check both the "site messages" section and the "Search Traffic / Manual Actions" section in GWT).
What about other factors like on-site problems such as topical dilution? When I view the Residential Elevators page there's a lot of content that has nothing to do with "residential elevators", let alone that the company has experience installing residential elevators in Wisconsin or Illinois. For example all the "Recent News" sidebar content, and all the "Our Product Categories" content on the lower portion of the page severely dilutes the unique content of the page. As a result, there's likely not enough depth for the primary focus of the page.
This is made worse by the fact that that sidebar and lower portion content is duplicated across the site. The end result for just this one factor is that important pages are likely being considered "thin" overall.
Another major problem that could be contributing to the loss of rankings is site page processing speed. My test of the home page showed fourteen seconds - Google has the ideal page processing speed for an individual page at between one and three seconds. Such slow processing harms overall trust and quality.
There could be a dozen other issues impacting the site's rankings as well, such as , however those were the first few I found that all need addressing.
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
-
Staging website got indexed by google
Our staging website got indexed by google and now MOZ is showing all inbound links from staging site, how should i remove those links and make it no index. Note- we already added Meta NOINDEX in head tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asmi-Ta0 -
Website not ranking
Firstly, apologies for the long winded question. I'm 'newish' to SEO We have a website built on Magento , www.excelclothing.com We have been online for 5 years and had reasonable success. Having used a few SEO companies in the past we found ourselves under a 'partial manual penalty' early last year. By July we were out of penalty. We have been gradually working our way through getting rid of 'spammy' links. Currently the website ranks for a handful of non competitive keywords looking at the domain on SEM RUSH. This has dropped drastically over the last 2 years. Our organic traffic over the last 2-3 years has seen no 'falling off a cliff' and has maintained a similar pattern. I've been told so many lies by SEO companies trying to get into my wallet I'm not sure who to believe. We have started to add content onto all our Category pages to make more unique although most of our Meta Descriptions are a 'boiler plate' template. I'm wondering.... Am I still suffering from Penquin ? Am I trapped by Panda and if so how can I know that? Do I need more links removed? How can I start to rank for more keywords I have a competitor online with the same DA, PA and virtually same number of links but they rank for 3500 keywords in the top 20. Would welcome any feedback. Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wgilliland1 -
Website using search term as URL brand name to cheat Google
Google has come a long way over the past 5 years, the quality updates have really helped bring top quality content to the top that is relevant for users search terms, although there is one really ANNOYING thing that still has not been fixed. Websites using brand name as service search term to manipulate Google I have got a real example but I wouldn't like to use it in case the brand mentions flags up in their tools and they spot this post, but take this search for example "Service+Location" You will get 'service+location.com' rank #1 Why? Heaven knows. They have less than 100 backlinks which are of a very low, spammy quality from directories. The content is poor compared to the competition and the competitors have amazing link profiles, great social engagement, much better website user experience and the data does not prove anything. All the competitors are targeting the same search term but yet the worst site is ranking the highest. Why on earth is Google not fixing this issue. This page we are seeing rank #1 do not even deserve to be ranking on the first 5 pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Site experiencing drop in Google rankings and organic traffic after redesign.
Hello, The company that I work for recently implemented a complete redesign for our company website. The former site was old, cumbersome and in desperate need of an update. We streamlined the site structure and made sure to redirect as many pages as we could find to new thematically related pages with 301 redirects. After the launch of our new site we saw a large upswing in "soft" 404 errors despite the fact that most of these pages do redirect upon inspection. So in relation to the soft 404s, for example, is it merely a matter of labeling them as fixed if they redirect properly, or could their be an underling issue with the site itself? Also, a majority or the urls labeled "not found" in webmaster tools are properly redirected. Do these merely need to be marked as fixed, or is there something else that needs to be fixed like the sitemap structure? I appreciate any and all input. Beyond Indigo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeyondIndigo1 -
Did Reviews still have the same value in Google places ranking?
I have two questions relating to Reviews. 1. Reviews still add value to Google places ranking. 2. I have a page and two clients posted reviews for me.They all get removed after 3,4 days.What is wrong with Google?Did they consider them fake?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csfarnsworth0 -
How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Hi SEO Gurus, I have a question. How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
Positive , negative or neutral impact? I will appreciate if you will provide detailed answer Thank you for your time webdeal0 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
One Website - Local + National Ranking
If a client (e.g. a winery) wants to rank both nationally and locally, what are some best practices for doing this on one Website? So the goal is to: Rank nationally for their wines, wine varietals, etc.so they're found by restaurants, distributors, customers (could include national directories, content creation ,etc.) Rank locally for their tasting room and wines for people looking locally or looking at that specific region (this could also include include Google places, local directories, etc.). I'm wondering if the site would need to be subdivided (or "siloed") where one section is heavily focused on national and another is on regional? Also, for the home page, which focus would be most important (maybe national because it's harder)? Thanks a for any ideas! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DirectionSEO0