Rankings gone, no WMT errors, help!
-
Hi,
Client Google rankings have been seriously hit. We have done everything we know of to see why this is the case, and there is no obvious explanation. The client dominated search terms, and are no down on page 7/8 for these search terms. There are no errors in WMT, so we can not resubmit for reconsideration. This is a genuine client and their business has been seriously affected. Can anybody offer help?
Thanks in advance!
-
Hello Roadjan,
The site has very low domain authority without many external links. Some of those external links appeared to be paid advertisements, or links on network sites owned by the company, such as the ones in the sidebar of Restful Cottage Holidays with the picture of the moving truck that links to the site. This should be a nofollowed link. Otherwise, the links look fine - you just need more of them, which you might get by promoting your existing content with content amplification Services like Outbrain or on native ad platforms like Facebook. Or you may have to produce featured content that is worth sharing and linking to, such as moving calculators to estimate the size of the van you might need based on the square footage of your home and how much "stuff" is in it (minimal, moderate, cramped...) that needs to be moved to the new location. I'm sure you have all kinds of ideas about content, but the important thing is not to just publish it on your site and let it sit there because nobody is going to find it. You have to create stellar content and then go out and promote it.
I don't think you should be disallowing your disclaimer, cookie policy, accessibility and privacy policy pages. Google likes to see these to know you area legitimate business. However, you could block your /thank_you page.
Your /get-a-quote/ pages are fairly thin. I would either beef up the content on those pages or block them from being indexed using a robots noindex, follow meta tag on those pages.
/moving-to-cyprus-1 Should be a testimonial not a news item or blog post.
moving-with-work-to-europe Seems like it's more about external elevator usage than the title of the article. I just don't think someone arriving from search engines after searching for "Moving with work to Europe" is going to be happy with the content they find on that page. I don't see the purpose of this type of content other than to target keywords or fill out the news section.
The same goes for many of the other pages in the news section. They aren't "news" so much as either quick blog posts about a job, or information that would work better on one of the other pages, like the "Moving Overseas" section.
If Whois info is correct and this site was created in 2007 and updated again in 2012 your issue may have to do mostly with domain authority due to very few high quality backlinks. I would create tools for the the moving industry, and related industries, to use on your site. Also consider partnering with various government organizations, such as the Tourism board for your area, to publish unique information about the area and entice people to move there. This could result in some nice links from the partner and local news if done well.
I don't think you have a "penalty". You just need better content and some earned, high-quality links. Good luck!
-
Hi, current status is still unanswered, some good and helpful advice, but seeking more help.
Many thanks
-
Send me the URL if someone else hasn't already gotten back to you via PM. I can have a look for you. Either way, please let us know the current status of this question.
-
If there is no message in WMT then you can bet it was an algorithm penalty. Start with Panda for content and Penguin for links. You may have accidentally triggered something.
-
Got it. I've sent u a reply.
Cheers.
-
Hey roadjan!
If you'd like, shoot me the URL in a PM also and I'll take a look for you.
-
Hi, sent you a PM with it.
-
Can you share the URL ?
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
-
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
IO Error - what does this mean?
I did a quick check on https://validator.w3.org I got this error IO Error - java.security.cert.CertificateException: Certificates do not conform to algorithm constraints What does this mean?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Language Tunnel - Help!
Hi, First post here. A few months back (before they were my client), my client updated their site to include a language tunnel. It looks like some other updates were made as well to "prettify" the site's URLs. Unfortunately, after this update, lots of well-ranking landing pages are now completely gone with no redirects in place. Normally, I would just give them a list of these old pages and say "301 Redirect" to X page. However, as part of this site update, they added country code into the mix. So now, instead of just 6 or 7 languages, we are looking at 30-40 permutations of language and country (with some countries having multiple languages). The functionality of the new site is fine, but all of the old 404s are not being kind to the search engine traffic. My question is: what's the best way to resolve this problem? These old pages usually specify a language code (but no country code). So, for example, I am thinking of redirecting all of the Spanish 404 urls to a Spanish "country tunnel". However, this is obviously not the same as what we had before, where the actual pages were indexed. Since my old pages no longer exist and I've got this country problem now (to stand in the way of a straightforward redirect), is there any way to appease the SEO gods on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navdm0 -
No Google Ranking..yet
I have een working on my site for soem time. Trying to take the right steps to achieve good ranking in the long run and present the information we need to showcase to prospective clients. After several months I still see no ranking at all and I'm wondering if its becasue the front page is using a design similar to a one page website design? If anyone can provide some insight I would appreciate it. Even the smallest nudge i nthe right direction. We are also developing some new content for a blog and expanded written content for our services page. http://thatworksdesign.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bvrettski0 -
Ranking on google search
Hello Mozzers Moz On page grader shows A grade for the particular URL,but my page was not ranking on top 100 Google search. Any help is appreciated ,Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sobanadevi0 -
VisitSweden indexing error
Hi all Just got a new site up about weekend travel for VisitSweden, the official tourism office of Sweden. Everything went just fine except som issues with indexing. The site can be found here at weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ For some weird reason the "frontpage" of the site does not get indexed. What I have done myself to find the issue: Added sitemaps.xml Configured and added site to webmaster tools Checked 301s so they are not faulty By doing a simple site:weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ you can see that the frontpage is simple not in the index. Also by doing a cache:weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ I see that Google tries to index the page without the trailing /no/ for some reason. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ Any smart ideas to get this fixed or where to start looking? All help greatly appreciated Kind regards Fredrik
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resultify0 -
Wrong page getting ranked
Hi all, we have product category pages on our ecommerce web site and we also produce blog content (such as buyers guides, setup guides etc) to help with ranking and give our site some good quality, unique content. However we are sometimes finding that the buyers guide / blog content gets ranked by Google over our product category page. I'm hoping, if I give an example or two, some one smart out there may be able to point me in the right direction as to how we can avoid this and get the product category page ranked instead? You will see from my examples we are linking internally using the keywords from the buyers guides to the product category pages in order to show the most important page to Google for these keywords and are trying to structure the product category pages as well as possible to make it the most optimized page for the term. Example: Keyword "twin dvd player"... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/ ... blog page actually getting ranked for this keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/dual-screen-and-twin-dvd-player-explained/ Keyword "site radio".... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/audio/radio/site-radio/ .... blog buyer guide page actually getting ranked for keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/Site-radio-buying-guide/ Any help / pointers appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasef0 -
Keyword Ranking Question
I have recently hired a SEO company to help with our keyword. My question is what are the best tools to use to verify what that are reporting. I can do an unpersonalized search, but I am likely still getting the my local results. I have been using the SEOmoz rank tracker in the past but for some reason it is not able to retrieve results over the past day or so. Are there any other good tools to check ranking for an exact url at the for non-localized, non personalized results? Thanks for the suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0