How to re-rank an established website with new content
-
I can't help but feel this is a somewhat untapped resource with a distinct lack of information.
There is a massive amount of information around on how to rank a new website, or techniques in order to increase SEO effectiveness, but to rank a whole new set of pages or indeed to 're-build' a site that may have suffered an algorithmic penalty is a harder nut to crack in terms of information and resources.To start I'll provide my situation;
SuperTED is an entertainment directory SEO project.
It seems likely we may have suffered an algorithmic penalty at some point around Penguin 2.0 (May 22nd) as traffic dropped steadily since then, but wasn't too aggressive really. Then to coincide with the newest Panda 27 (According to Moz) in late September this year we decided it was time to re-assess tactics to keep in line with Google's guidelines over the two years. We've slowly built a natural link-profile over this time but it's likely thin content was also an issue. So beginning of September up to end of October we took these steps;- Contacted webmasters (and unfortunately there was some 'paid' link-building before I arrived) to remove links
- 'Disavowed' the rest of the unnatural links that we couldn't have removed manually.
- Worked on pagespeed as per Google guidelines until we received high-scores in the majority of 'speed testing' tools (e.g WebPageTest)
- Redesigned the entire site with speed, simplicity and accessibility in mind.
- Htaccessed 'fancy' URLs to remove file extensions and simplify the link structure.
- Completely removed two or three pages that were quite clearly just trying to 'trick' Google. Think a large page of links that simply said 'Entertainers in London', 'Entertainers in Scotland', etc. 404'ed, asked for URL removal via WMT, thinking of 410'ing?
- Added new content and pages that seem to follow Google's guidelines as far as I can tell, e.g;
Main Category Page Sub-category Pages - Started to build new links to our now 'content-driven' pages naturally by asking our members to link to us via their personal profiles. We offered a reward system internally for this so we've seen a fairly good turnout.
- Many other 'possible' ranking factors; such as adding Schema data, optimising for mobile devices as best we can, added a blog and began to blog original content, utilise and expand our social media reach, custom 404 pages, removed duplicate content, utilised Moz and much more. It's been a fairly exhaustive process but we were happy to do so to be within Google guidelines.
Unfortunately, some of those link-wheel pages mentioned previously were the only pages driving organic traffic, so once we were rid of these traffic has dropped to not even 10% of what it was previously. Equally with the changes (htaccess) to the link structure and the creation of brand new pages, we've lost many of the pages that previously held Page Authority.
We've 301'ed those pages that have been 'replaced' with much better content and a different URL structure - http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands to simply http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands, for example.Therefore, with the loss of the 'spammy' pages and the creation of brand new 'content-driven' pages, we've probably lost up to 75% of the old website, including those that were driving any traffic at all (even with potential thin-content algorithmic penalties). Because of the loss of entire pages, the changes of URLs and the rest discussed above, it's likely the site looks very new and probably very updated in a short period of time.
What I need to work out is a campaign to drive traffic to the 'new' site.
We're naturally building links through our own customerbase, so they will likely be seen as quality, natural link-building.
Perhaps the sudden occurrence of a large amount of 404's and 'lost' pages are affecting us?
Perhaps we're yet to really be indexed properly, but it has been almost a month since most of the changes are made and we'd often be re-indexed 3 or 4 times a week previous to the changes.
Our events page is the only one without the new design left to update, could this be affecting us? It potentially may look like two sites in one.
Perhaps we need to wait until the next Google 'link' update to feel the benefits of our link audit.
Perhaps simply getting rid of many of the 'spammy' links has done us no favours - I should point out we've never been issued with a manual penalty. Was I perhaps too hasty in following the rules?Would appreciate some professional opinion or from anyone who may have experience with a similar process before.
It does seem fairly odd that following guidelines and general white-hat SEO advice could cripple a domain, especially one with age (10 years+ the domain has been established) and relatively good domain authority within the industry.
Many, many thanks in advance.
Ryan.
-
Many, for pure backlinks check the most comprehensive are ahrefs.com and https://majestic.com
-
Something does seem wrong, that's what I thought.
The 20,000 links was from our development site, it should never have been indexed. It was taken down (the site) the same week so we should hope any penalty shouldn't stay for long.
8th September seems fishy also, we've certainly not done that ourselves. Is there any way to check these links? Any tool?
Thanks in advance.
-
I think you need an in deep analysis.
There's something definitely very wrong. I can see only 13 keywords, with a backlink profile of more than 500 linking root domains. Your traffic seems to have been in constant decline for a while but in May something happen which sort of killed it completely.
Also looks like you gained around 15/20 thousands links between Oct 9 and 15, that's smelling.
On the 8th of Sep you got 150 root linking domain in one day, wow, that's smelling even more.
-
Hi Max,
Thanks for the response.
There was no manual penalty at any point, and there still aren't any showing in WMT.
We're probably only ranking for perhaps 5-10 keywords, and most of them have no competition or are branded. There are a few local long-tail keywords we get traffic from still, such as 'Children's Entertainer in Wembley' and others similar.
This is why I thought of coming to the experts at Moz, it seems fairly strange that BEFORE the algorithm penalty (if indeed there was one) we were ranking fairly well for our industry keywords (think Children's Entertainers, Dancers, Clowns, etc etc) and were probably ranking for over 100 keywords easily.
Since disavowing, link auditing, and removing clearly spammy content + **then **adding new rich content, we're still only ranking for pretty much no keywords after about a month.
As far as I can guess, we've either not been indexed/ranked yet (which seems odd as we used to be indexed fairly regularly) or there's something else going on.
Thanks again for the response.
-
Is google WMT showing any manual penalty? And as far as I can see from a quick look you seem to be indexed for a very very limited number of keywords, how many keywords are originating traffic if you look at WMT?
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
-
High Rank and Traffic of low DA and Backlinks
Hi guys, is a pleasure being a part of this community, hope in learning a lot with you guys, i just started a year learning about SEO and it been a big journey. I was looking at some competition of some websites that i been optmizing, and i found a website that called my attention and i cant figure out whats going on, it haves huge traffic but in terms of technicall SEO is really week, and not just this but also in terms of DA and backlinks (most of them spammy - 20 backlinks), the domain in question is bhnews.com.br I notice that doesnt have any social media, not analytics, etc. The only thing that i notice is that there is a website or a company called "BH news" (televesion), but its not related with it, since the type of information that bhnews.com.br presents is "lottery" results. So this kind of situation confuses me a lot, because is a lot of hard work in optmizing a website to rank in google, and than i come a across with this type of website with 20 backlinks (most of anchor or name of domain), and than haves like 2M visits per month and ranks for keywords related with the this type of sites of lottery. Can someone tell me if there is some kind of black seo, or something that is making this rank so high? regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jogobicho0 -
My Website is getting too many DMCA Hits
My Website has been getting too many DMCA Hits since last december then my rankings dropped i would like to know if getting a new domain would be advisable ... and would it be good to redirect my website that is getting DMCA hits to the new domain i want to get it is advisable to build links for it the new domain or would it pass link juice to it (it has some spammy links tho)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | emmycircle0 -
Would this be duplicate content or bad SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content. The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words. Here are the questions: Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief? Could this be beneficial as far as SEO? If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links? For example: For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries: <summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on. TIA</summary>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche1 -
Help finding website content scraping
Hi, I need a tool to help me review sites that are plagiarising / directly copying content from my site. But tools that I'm aware, such as Copyscape, appear to work with individual URLs and not a root domain. That's great if you have a particular post or page you want to check. But in this case, some sites are scraping 1000s of product pages. So I need to submit the root domain rather than an individual URL. In some cases, other sites are being listed in SERPs above or even instead of our site for product search terms. But so far I have stumbled across this, rather than proactively researched offending sites. So I want to insert my root domain & then for the tool to review all my internal site pages before providing information on other domains where an individual page has a certain amount of duplicated copy. Working in the same way as Moz crawls the site for internal duplicate pages - I need a list of duplicate content by domain & URL, externally that I can then contact the offending sites to request they remove the content and send to Google as evidence, if they don't. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Terry
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
HELP: What happened to my rankings? No warning from google how to know if i was penalised?
Hi Guys I have just completely a site re-design, I have 3 top level domains. I have no idea whats causing the drop in ranking. I have changed the title tags and meta tags to improve them and make them better, as the last ones weren't really doing us justice. But I see now it has actually dropped our main keyword. I read somewhere that i had to completed **site search **to check and I don't see our home page showing. I was ranking for the keyword: "online psychics" for over 4months at #6 and now is not showing anywhere in the top 50 keywords. I'm also affraid I can not find our other keyword "online psychic readings" which we were ranked #11 seems to have dropped to #44 I have no idea why this would be the case. Our new home page shows a better user experience and also added more content, unqiue content at that - our last design was content thin so I have no idea why we have dropped so much in rankings. The site is also new about 6months new. I have checked WMT and have not received any warnings of any penalties as such, unless it is still coming? Does anyone have any suggestions here? Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Competitor is interlinking between his websites
I have a competitor who ranks in the first page for all his keywords and i found out in open site explorer that he has been interlinking between websites and it is obvious because he owns the same domain but different countries. for example, www.example.id (indonesia) www.example.my (malaysia) www.example.sg (singapore) (asian countries domain) my question here is this even consider "white hat"? I read one of the blog post from moz and here is the quote "#7 - Uniqueness of Source + Target The engines have a number of ways to judge and predict ownership and relationships between websites. These can include (but are certainly not limited to): A large number of shared, reciprocated links
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon
Domain registration data
Shared hosting IP address or IP address C-blocks
Public acquisition/relationship information
Publicized marketing agreements that can be machine-read and interpreted If the engines determine that a pre-existing relationship of some kind could inhibit the "editorial" quality of a link passing between two sites, they may choose to discount or even ignore these. Anecdotal evidence that links shared between "networks" of websites pass little value (particularly the classic SEO strategy of "sitewide" links) is one point many in the organic search field point to on this topic." will interlinking between your sites will be ignored by google in the future? is this a time bomb method or it is fine doing so? Because as far as concern my competitor is actually ranking on the first page for quite some time.1 -
Are multiple domains spammy if they're similar but different
A client currently has a domain of johnsmith.com (not actual site name, of course). I’m considering splitting this site into multiple domains, which will include brand name plus keyword, such as: Johnsmithlandclearing.com Johnsmithdirtwork.com Johnsmithdemolition.com Johnsmithtimercompany.com Johnsmithhydroseeding.com johnsmithtreeservice.com Each business is unique enough and will cross-link to the other. My questions are: 1) will Google consider cross-linking spammy? 2) what happens to johnsmith.com? Should it redirect to new site with the largest market share, or should it become an umbrella for all? 3) Any pitfalls foreseen? I've done a fair amount of due diligence and feel these separate domains are legit, but am paranoid that Google will not see it that way, or may change direction in the future.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SteveMauldin0 -
Website Spam Backlinks Solution
I have been doing some back-link checking and found that 25% of the total back-links to my PR5 site are Spam and generated over the past 8 weeks. There are 189 links in total from 38 different domains and the anchor text is a combination of 'ugg boots for women' from TLDs in China, Russia and North Korea. The PR of these sites is 15 are n/a, 12 are 0 and the other 11 range between 1 - 6. More interestingly, all the links point to 1 single page on the domain. I have taken down that page now and wondering if I should 'disavow' the offending links in Google and Bing? Clearly with such a high % of my total links now being Spam, I want to be proactive so this does not hurt my rankings in search. If a Spambot is behind it then the issue is going to get worse moving forward. Any advice is welcome...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ubique0