Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why?
-
Hi,
We have had a Google action against us for over a year. After many "SEO Company's" we found someone who help us remove (December 2013) the action. Which was due to our bad back link profile.
We have 100% improved our content for our website, as Google has requested. We are active within social media, we add relevant content to our blog and we clean up our desk after we finish work
After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic, if anything its decreasing.
Is anyone else in the same position? or has anyone recovered from a similar situation?
Josh
-
I dont know if you think this would be a big factor, but iv noticed on moz that we have 'keyword stuffing' on quite a few pages. This is just a result of the category names on those pages etc.
would this be the cause?
-
Id say the main features that our main competitor has done better than ourselves are:
- get people to share category and product pages via social media
- Their homepage content changes more often because of the new products features
- their urls are shorter than ours
- They added content to the category pages a long time before us
But then they have negative things that i would say should harm their site, which are:
- The navigation has to many links which is bad practice for internal linking
- The footer has a spam page which just targets a particular keyword
- The footer also use keywords which would be classed as a site link. Spam again.
- They also have duplicated content in the products pages like ourselves
and im going to check to see if i can see any changes to their rankings
Also could you expand on your comment above about user engagement?
Thanks
-
Since you have updated your website, have your competitors done the same? It may not be tied directly to a Google update, or all of the changes you have made, but also if your competition has made updates and improvements. Use the moz tools to check for updates to your competitors ranking changes, and visually look at their sites to see if there is an area or particular area of their site that works better for users.
-
Hi, could you explain your thoughts on this some more. Thanks
-
We recently changed the descriptions to the bottom as we didn't want all the text to distract from people seeing the products
-
Thank you all for answering my question.
Im going to try and answer all your queries as best as I can. Iv scanned through our analytics's
- Last year we jumped by 40% after Google lifted the ban in December
- Then this year our organic has dropped from January to May by 50%. There has been no report from Google saying we have had ban etc...
So our thoughts are that its to do with a Google update, but all our main pages have new unique relevant content etc
Yes we are/have removed many of our back links which which understand would effect our rankings, but like the Silkstream says, we are ranking for important keywords. In fact our main keyword beads has jumped from page 3 back to page1 (we used to be no1 for this keyword) So there has been a massive important, but our rankings are still falling.
This would then mean that a lot of our long tail keywords that only get 1 - 10 session have completely dropped off the map. Maybe this is problem?
In one comparison from March this year to 3years ago. there is a
- 40% higher bounce rate
- 35% high conversion rate
- 30% Higher sessions
Its difficult to check everything because we have changed website since then, which was in March 2012 and that is about the same time Google gave us our ban.
I can see that a the main pages that we got our traffic from are still in the top 10, just less volume.
As Mark Ainsworth says, we need to build up our link profile again, agree this is something that we will be looking at and treating with more care. But its confusing when things are looking to be moving forward with our traffic to be improving, but then to drop off again.
Let me know all your thoughts?
-
"After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic"
It was an assumption of what he meant, as multiple items are mentioned. I think you know as well as I do that the questions are sometimes not clear on here
From another member in this thread:
"I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.
"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9"Seems his ranking is doing ok. What we really need to see would be the before and after rankings, which is why I stated he should look at his analytics, and compare time periods. Keywords, entry paths, exit pages, referring sites, root domains, ranking position, all that can be found there, and used to make an assessment of where they went wrong.
-
The title is "Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why" So I would take that their rankings are not well
When they said looking at "Moz tools we have great results" I took that to mean PA/DA, Domain trust etc.
-
He stated that they are ranking well, but traffic is lower. I'm thinking that links are not his issue, but rather some other factor ie lack of engagement, listings not standing out, products not marked up, etc.
-
I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.
"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9Seeing the usual ebay, amazon big brand domain clusters for these queries so I'd say your doing OK. You might want to consider moving your category descriptions above the fold to improve further rather than below your products on the landing page.
-
You need to think about why the website was performing well before the penalty. If it was spammy artificial links that were boosting your site, then removing the penalty means that they no longer help you. Therefore, your website is receiving considerably less link juice than before.
You may need to face facts that your link building efforts will probably need to start again from scratch.
-
Generally the reason is it was the bad links is what was making you rank so well in the first place, now they are removed you don't get the benefit they where giving you.
I had a quick look at you backlink profile with OSE, and I can see some good links there (channel 4), but also aload of junk directories. OSE just does not consider the quality of the back link so in the stats you may have better PA and DA but when you look at the backlinks your competitors might have better qualty links (not spam)
also there is a chance that the "seo company" you used might have disavowed some good links by mistake, but if they are any good they would not have done that.
-
Have you done a comparison month to month, or year over year since you received the penalty and after it was lifted?
Analytics can tell you where your visitors are leaving. Even if the content was revised, or changed completely, that doesn't mean it's connecting with your visitors. Check your exit pages, and on page time comparison with the following period to see if there are any negative changes that were made. I would look at your impressions as well.
Also, look at your competitors ranking closer, not just using tools. Tools only show a portion of data. If your competitors are using rich snippet markup, even if you outrank them, chances are their listing could stand out more and be getting more clicks.
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
-
Penalty
Hi, I wonder if a subdomain gets penalty from Google. Is there any risk that the domain gets penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rob_I1 -
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH0 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Low quality websites with spammy EMDs still ranking higher than genuine websites?
Hey guys, I've just been doing some searching and couldn't quite contemplate how heavily low-quality and spammy EMDs are still running some Google searches. Just take "cheap kitchens", for instance. Here are a list of URLs that appeared; http://kitchenunitsdoors.co.uk/ http://www.kitchenunits9.co.uk/ http://www.aboutkitchenunits.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchenunits1.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchensonline.com/ http://www.buycheapkitchens.com/ http://www.cheapkitchenscheapkitchen.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchensforsale1.co.uk/ http://cheapkitchensaberdeen.co.uk/ http://www.kitchensderby1.co.uk/ http://www.cheapcheapkitchens.co.uk/ http://kitchen-cheap.co.uk/ http://www.cheapestkitchensinbritain.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchenss.co.uk/ http://www.cheaperthanmfi.com/ http://cheapkitchenuk.co.uk/ As you can see, none of them appear to be genuine retailers and are setup purely to influence Google rankings. I'm amazed that Google is still giving so much weight to these types of sites - especially considering how search is meant to be better than it ever was before! Any insights into why this is?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Highly competitive keywords ranking
Hi , I just start one page website ( website that give a user one service like backlinkswatch . com or prchecker ) This niche is so competitive and the first 5 results for keywords that I have selected for my website have a google pagerank > 4 I know that ranking for high competitive keywords take more times but what Can I do to make it fast without getting penalized , all what I hear now is guest post and guest post and guest post any other idea ??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | loumi0 -
Penguin Maybe? Ranking low for main term: Trying to find cause and correct
Hello, For nlpca(dot)com one of our main keywords is the term "NLP" We are ranking 25th for that term.Possible causes: 1. keyword stuffing on home page, though we need to use the term over and over again to describe ourselves. Also, competitors like nlpco(dot)com and nlpu(dot)com also mention "NLP" a lot 2. Backlink profile: see this spreadsheet. We have a lot of sites from other countries and many sitewides but all natural and almost all branded. Ou company names are NLP Institute of California, NLP California, and NLP and Coaching Institute. 3. nlpcacoach(dot)org is a sitewide footer link. So is iepdoc.nl. We're going to ask the first site to take our link down. 4. No "What is NLP" article. I think that might help. 5. Most of our 60 articles are posted on other sites. We author about 30 of them. I'm working on authorship via rel="author" and rel="me" links. There's usually 2 authors 6. Most of the title tags used to be 4 keywords separated by pipes -"|" I changed them all after the updates took the keyword "NLP" down. That's about all I can think of. What do we do or clean up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How Fast Can You Rank a New Domain?
How long would it take to get a 1 page ranking for a new site after Penguin? Thinking about starting fresh. New site would have fresh content and keyword in the domain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | veed230 -
Why is this ranking first in Google Places for this term....?
"Best Bar In Chicago" - http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar+in+chicago They have only 5 Google reviews, and their local directory reviews are suspect. One of them goes to rateclubs.com and it's not even a page for their business, while one of them doesn't have user reviews, it's just an editorial review. The other one at superpages.com doesn't even link back to their site, it links to their restaurants.com profile. What is going on here? I've been trying to figure this out for a while as their first place ranking has been solidified for quite some time now. I can also tell you that a few of the bars listed below them have a MUCH higher profile and are better known. You can see that just by the reviews.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0