Brand sections performing badly in SERP's but all SEO tools think we are great
-
I have had this problem for some time now and I've asked many many experts.
Search for Falke in Google.co.uk and this is what you get:
http://www.sockshop.co.uk/by_brand/falke/ 3rd Our competitor
http://www.mytights.com/gb/brand/falke.html 4th Our competitorhttp://www.uktights.com/section/73/falke 104th this is us ????? 9th for Falke tights with same section not our falke tights section?
All sites seem to link to their brand sections in the same way with links in the header and breadcrumbs, Opensite exporler only shows 2 or 3 internal links for our compertitors, 1600+ from us?
Many of our brand sections rank badly Pretty Polly and Charnos brands rank page 2 or 3 with a brand subsection with no links to them, main section dosn't rank?Great example is Kunert, a German brand no UK competition our section has been live for 8 years, the best we can do is 71st Google UK, 1st on Bing (as we should be).
I'm working on adding some quality links, but our comtetitors have a few low quality or no external links, only slightly better domain authority but rank 100+ positions better than us on some brands.
This to me would suggest there is something onpage / internal linking I'm doing wrong, but all tools say "well done, grade A" take a holiday.
Keyword denisty is similar to our competiors and I've tried reducing the number of products on the page. All pages really ranked well pre Penguin, and Bing still likes them.
This is driving me nuts and costing us money
Cheers
Jonathan
www.uktights.com -
Jonathan
First off, I would ignore the competitors to some degree. It's going to lead you in circles. It's not so simple that links relate directly to rankings. There are a ton of factors as to why competitors can be ranking better. I'd focus purely on cleaning up your site as best as possible.
You also do seem to have an issue with anchor text in your link profile - a lot the top anchors are commercial keywords ""hoisery online uk" "tights" etc. These need to be changed or cleaned up. This is going to give you a flag as being over-optimized.
I don't think number of internal linking pages would create a penalty.
How's your non-google traffic as a percentage? If it's anything less than 30% of overall traffic (and organic Google is 70% or more) I'd work on getting traffic from other sources - this will all feed back into your SEO.
-
Hi There
Bill Sebald offers a fantastic method for link cleanup, and then submitting a disavow here: http://www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/01/step-by-step-disavow-process/ - if you have never submitted a disavow, I would do that. It's in Bill's post, but generally the links in Webmaster Tools are a good place to start, and use Cognitive SEO to process them and review.
-Dan
-
Thanks Andy, great advice! Just to clarify for the asker, Penguin is purely algorithmic, not a manual penalty in any way.
-Dan
-
The main consensus and I agree, is that we have penalties from Google, but looking at our competitors link profiles we are only slightly worse, and getting better by the day.
Maybe Google has algorithmic penalties on some of our brand pages, but why, as they have few or no external links?
Is it possible the number of internal linking pages is creating some sort of penalty and if so how do I sort it out as we are a big ecommerce site?
Why does open site explorer show us having 1600+ internal links but our competitors show only 2 and 12 internal links when they link to their brands sections in the same way with a massive amount of links?
I still don't know how to fix this, do the brand pages need more content?
I have new quality links going to 2 of the brand pages from a UK university that is also trying to help.
Cheers
Jonathan
-
I like SEMrush thanks
Yes I know I have try and get the profile squeaky clean. Its hard to stop these links, due what we sell,
I see our main competitor is on http://www.freeadultwebsitesdirectory.com/stockings.html and http://www.sexualallsorts.co.uk/xxxSextoyShop/Stockings-and-Hosiery-Tights/default.aspx too who rank well for everything, so maybe a few more good links and remove some more bad links
What's the best way for tracking down bad links, I'll try and clean a few more.
I still think the internal links may be causing a problem but may be they are passing bad juice.
-
According to SEMrush, your website went from 600+ KW in top 20 for US in august 2012 to 150+ nowadays.
In my mind, links like http://www.freeadultwebsitesdirectory.com/stockings.html
http://kupilandia.ru/individual-order/
http://www.sexualallsorts.co.uk/xxxSextoyShop/Stockings-and-Hosiery-Tights/default.aspx
are not helping to stay out of algo penalty.
-
Hi Andy
Its not quite as clean as my competitors, using a natural linking tool we have 21% unnatural links they have around 17%. We have a few too many directory links so constantly trying to remove them as we build in more quality, we have many links from Google as we are an AdWords success story, plus they filmed us for their YouTube channel, many links from Wikipedia, plus a nice link from the BBC news site.
I'm wondering if we have too many instances of the brand keyword on the page, as if you lengthen the keyword to include tights, i.e "falke tights" the page ranks fine.
Also according to MOZ we have 1600+ links to the brand page with falke as the anchor text, This may explain why our sub sections rank for some keywords Charnos or pretty polly as these only have 2 or 3 links to them. They are not linked to from the header or breadcrumbs.
I'm really stuck on this, as I don't know how to hide the links from the header / breadcrumbs, if Google thinks 1600+ internal falke links looks spammy. Plus how do my competitors get away with it?
Jonathan
-
Hi Jonathan,
Sorry, I misread that bit.
What does your actual backlink profile look like?
-Andy
-
Hi Andy thanks for your help
But all our links and 99% of our competitors links are all internal, our home page ranks 8th for our main keyword: tights, we have no manual action warnings.
Some brands are not bad, Pierre Mantoux, Trasparenze, Glamory.
Cheers
Jonathan
-
Hi Jonathan,
These sorts of problems can be many different things. With what you are saying, I would be leaning towards thinking that you had a penalty from Google - that would be where I would start looking.
You mention a lot more links back to you than your competitors have - perhaps it is Penguin that has performed a manual / algorithmic action on the site? When was the last time you were ranking well, or has this always been the case that the site has never ranked too well? Who built the current links to the site and how long ago was this done?
It could be so many other problems that it could be impossible to go through them all here, but the correlation between Bing and Google is something I have seen many times with penalties. Rank well in Bing, but bad in Google.
Sorry it's a little open ended, but like I said, it could be so many other things.
-Andy
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
-
How important is the user experience for SEO in google's eyes?
So far I've gathered that backlinks are really king, however you can't get good backlinks without well written content that serves a purpose. As well you can't do a great job with that content and not keep a good user experience, since why would anyone want to backlink to content that can be helpful if you squint an eye and suffer a few scrolling cramps. So how would you rank user experience in the everlasting war of SEO for Google? With this in mind, why would using bootstrap resources pose a problem? I've seen it could add issue to pageload times, however seems minifying could easily solve that. I personally enjoy the use of Bootstrap since it's very easy on the eyes and can have real positive effects when a user looks at content on such a framework.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Could this be seen as duplicate content in Google's eyes?
Hi I'm an in-house SEO and we've recently seen Panda related traffic loss along with some of our main keywords slipping down the SERPs. Looking for possible Panda related issues I was wondering if the following could be seen as duplicate content. We've got some very similar holidays (travel company) on our website. While they are different I'm concerned it may be seen as creating content that is too similar: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/the-wildlife-and-beaches-of-kenya.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/ultimate-kenya-wildlife-and-beaches.aspx http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays/wildlife-and-beach-family-safari.aspx They do all have unique text but as you can see from the titles, they are very similar (note from an SEO point of view the tabbed content is all within the same page at source level). At the top level of the holiday pages we have a filtered search:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/kenya/suggested-holidays.aspx These pages have a unique introduction but the content snippets being pulled into the boxes is drawn from each of the individual holiday pages. I'm just concerned that these could be introducing some duplicating issues. Any thoughts?0 -
Any issue? Redirect 100's of domains into one website's internal pages
Hi all, Imagine if you will I was the owner of many domains, say 100 demographically rich kwd domains & my plan was to redirect these into one website - each into a different relevant subfolder. e.g. www.dewsburytilers..com > www.brandname.com/dewsbury/tilers.html www.hammersmith-tilers.com > www.brandname.com/hammersmith/tilers.html www.tilers-horsforth.com > www.brandname.com/horsforth/tilers.html another hundred or so 301 redirects...the backlinks to these domains were slim but relevant (the majority of the domains do not have any backlinks at all - can anyone see a problem with this practice? If so, what would your recommendations be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fergclaw0 -
Is Q&A on a website good or bad for SEO?
I am considering adding a Q&A section to my website and I have a few questions for you PROs!: is it a good thing for SEO? Or a potential pitfall for SEO? If it is used often and users post relevant topics related to the website content, will it help the overall DA and websites SERP performance? Are there inherent risks for website security when using a Q&A? Are there any other questions I should be asking? I am using Joomla! 3.0 with Stackideas Easy discuss/easy social. Thanks for any advice! BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text attract Penguin’s wrath?
I'm working on a site for a serviced apartment site http://www.alcove.co.in/ which offers apartments in 9 cities in India. Site was ranking in 1st page of Google for “serviced apartment + city” for 7 cities until sometime in Jan 2013. However organic traffic has been gradually falling since sometime in September 2012 (40% fall this month over same period last year). There’s been no sudden fall in traffic which we may link with any Penguin update. There have been no warning messages in Google WMT. Even today the site ranks in 1st page for 3 cities; however ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’ which was the biggest revenue earner, is not ranked in first 5 pages. My questions are whether will aggressive use of branded keywords in anchor text will attract Penguin’s wrath, does Google makes allowance for case when company's name includes keywords. In our case, company name is Alcove Service apartments, could there be some other reason for fall in ranking/traffic? The distribution of anchors (external links, multiple links from same domain are counted) is : percent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anand53
Keywords 34%
brand+keywords 43%
Natural 4%
only brand 11%
URL 7% For the above, Brand = ‘Alcove Service apartments’ or ‘Alcove Serviced apartments’ brand+keywords = various combinations of ‘alcove’ + [‘guest houses’ or ‘hotels’ or ‘accommodation’] + city1 + city2… Intriguingly, Open Site Explorer analysis of domain metrics (Domain Authority, Followed Linking Root Domains, etc) ranks Alcove higher than all but one site appearing in 1st page of Google for ‘Serviced apartments bangalore’. Most of alcove’s links are from article directories (no spun articles were used), directories and link exchanges with relevant sites. Any suggestions and guidance on what we could do to remedy the situation would be greatly appreciated! Thanks0 -
What's your daily SEO checklist?
First thing every morning I login to Google Webmaster tools looking for any errors, review data, sites linking to us, etc. I then login to Google Analytics and SEOMOz to check traffic to our terms to see if there have been any changes that need to be addressed. What's your daily checklist?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics1 -
Understanding Google's keyword tool...
When I type in Google a keyword like : boot camp I get results that show Bootcamp (one word) traffic in the tens of thousands. I see many words combined. Does this mean that tens of thousands of people every month are misspelling that keyword? How should I interpret this in terms of anchor texting? I would hate to deliberately misspell it on my website just to get traffic. For those interested, my website is: http://ultimatebasictraining.com/admin/ (currently revaming my http://ultimatebasictraining.com website)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
To subnav or NOT to subnav... that's my question.... :)
We are working on a new website that is golf related and wondering about whether or not we should set up a subnavigation dropdown menu from the main menu. For example: GOLF PACKAGES
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
>> 2 Round Packages
>> 3 Round Packages
>> 4 Round Packages
>> 5 Round Packages GOLF COURSES
>> North End Courses
>> Central Courses
>> South End Courses This would actually be very beneficial to our users from a usability standpoint, BUT what about from an SEO standpoint? Is diverting all the link juice to these inner pages from the main site navigation harmful? Should we just create a page for GOLF PACKAGES and break it down on that page?0