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
-
301 redirection help needed!
Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley3 -
301 redirect impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Copyright Theft and Google Rankings
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more. Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us. I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape. What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetBit0 -
Content question please help
Would content behind a drop down on this site Https://www.homeleisuredirect.com/pool_tables/english_pool_tables/ you have to click the - more about English pool tables text under the video Work just as well for SEO as content on the page like this site http://www.pooltablesonline.co.uk/uk-slate-bed-pool-tables.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Clean URL help!
Hi all, In short, i'm looking to redirect examplepage.html to examplepage .I've got rid of the .html, sitewide this morning. However I want to redirect Google & people who have bookmarked the old url structure. Currently if you have the extension on or not, it will show in your browser. I'm wanting /examplepage.html to 301 redirect to /examplepage I've gone the normal way I'd do it by adding in .htaccess: Redirect 301 /examplepage.html http://www.example.com/examplepage I'm assuming it isn't redirecting as the example.html page is no longer... what is the way around this? Thanks for any help! In firefox the error of the page is: The page isn't redirecting properly Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
URL Error or Penguin Penalty?
I am currently having a major panic as our website www.uksoccershop.com has been largely dropped from Google. We have not made any changes recently and I am not sure why this is happening, but having heard all sorts of horror stories of penguin update, I am fearing the worst. If you google "uksoccershop" you will see that the homepage does not rank. We previously ranked in the top 3 for "football shirts" but now we don't, although on page 2, 3 and 4 you will see one of our category pages ranking (this didn't used to happen). Some rankings are intact, but many have disappeared completely and in some cases been replaced by other pages on our site. I should point out our existing rankings have been consistently there for 5-6 years until today. I logged into webmaster tools and thankfully there is no warning message from Google about spam, etc, but what we do have is 35,000 URL errors for pages which are accessible. An example of this is: | URL: | http://www.uksoccershop.com/categories/5_295_327.html | | Error details In Sitemaps Linked from Last crawled: 6/20/12First detected: 6/15/12Googlebot couldn't access the contents of this URL because the server had an internal error when trying to process the request. These errors tend to be with the server itself, not with the request. Is it possible this is the cause of the issue (we are not currently sure why the URL's are being blocked) and if so, how severe is it and how recoverable?If that is unlikely to cause the issue, what would you recommend our next move is?All help is REALLY REALLY appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0 -
Ranking problems
Hi All My site is live for a year now. I;m getting tons of traffic (alexa 54k) and business are good. The only problem is that I have 0 page rank....I have checked again and again the site;s structure to see if there is anything wrong with the site but everything seems to be ok. Google just added search links to the site (megamoneygames) which looks very nice. For example, none of my competitors have search links but they all have page rank of 4 while I have 0. In addition, for some reason the site's age (days) shows 0 although it is live for a year now... Do you have any idea of what is going on? do I have errors in the site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pariplay0