Trying to escape from Google algorithm ranking drop
-
in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates).
- since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings.
- We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages.
- we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80).
- we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions.
- we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content.
- we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords.
- We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower.
1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at.
2. we are even considering going to a new domain and 301'ing all pages to this domain in an attempt to shake off the algorithm filter (penalties). has anyone done this? how long can we expect to get at least the same ranking for the new domain if 301 all urls to it? do you think its worth it? we know the risk of doing this, and so wanted to seek some advice.
3. we have on the other hand considered the fact that we have disavowed so many links (70%) that this could be a cause of the page two problem, however we are link building according to moz metric standards and majestic standards with no benefit.. do you think we should increase link building?
Advice is appreciated!
-
Hey There!
Sounds like you're doing a lot of things by-the-books and "right" "on paper" but it's really tough to know if you're on the right track for sure without seeing the site or an example of some of the links being build, or content, etc.
I say this because "40 links a month" for example sounds like a nice number, but also sounds suspect because that's a pretty sizable amount of links, which makes me wonder about the quality of them.
What I'd be curious about is - what are the things outside of SEO or SEO tactics/fixes have been done? I'm thinking in regards to social, audience building, brand building, design upgrades, content, adding value etc? Also, what type of site is this and how big is it?
The other thing that's tough to know is how well the technical things were implemented. For example, switching to https among other things can create a lot of redirect chains. I would try to undo redirect chains and only do page->page redirects (instead of having chains of page->page->page->page etc).
And right, it's tough to know if your disavow is helping or hurting without knowing a lot of the specifics.
If it was me, I'd make sure you're focusing enough on others things besides just directly on SEO. That doesn't mean you'd ignore SEO when doing social, content, audience building etc - just that you're taking a more holistic view. I think Google definitely favors recovering sites that prove they are building something people want.
-
This has been a long struggle which has caused a massive traffic drop. Do you think we should switch to a new domain with 301 redirects?
-
If you ask me you are doing everything right and you have to keep doing it. I remember when I was doing the same for one of my client, the rankings did improve but didn’t really hit the first page for many of the real money making keywords.
I think when your website went through Google penalty it took more than usual to gain the trust of Google. If I would be at your place, I would have looked in to the past data and see how every penguin and panda update affect my traffic and rankings.
If the ranking and traffic went positive (significantly) then you should continue what you are doing and wait for the penguin and panda update to release. This way they will look in to your efforts again and give you back the rankings that you deserve.
Also, my advice is to get a link from highest authority websites (if possible) that Google really trust, this should also help big time.
Adding my two cents!
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
-
Script must not be placed outside HTML tag? If not, how Google treats the page?
Hi, We have recently received the "deceptive content" warning from Google about some of our website pages. We couldn't able to find the exact reason behind this. However, we placed some script outside the HTML tag in some pages (Not in the same pages with the above warning). We wonder whether this caused an issue to Google to flag our pages. Please help. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Homepage not ranking for branded searches after Google penalty removal
Hi all, A site I work on was hit with a manual action penalty some time ago for spammy links built by a former SEO agency. It was a partial match penalty so only affected some pages - most likely the homepage. We carried out a lot of work cleaning up links and disavowed suspicious links which we couldn't get removed. Again, most of these were to the homepage. The disavow file was uploaded to Google last Friday and our penalty was lifted this Tuesday. Since uploading the disavow file, our homepage does not show up at all for branded searches. I've carried out the obvious checks - robots.txt, making sure we're not accidentally noindexing the page or doing anything funky with canonicals etc and it's all good. Have any of you guys had a similar experience? I'm thinking Google simply needs time to catch up due to all the links we've disavowed and sitting tight is the best option but could do with some reassurance! Any past experiences or advice on what I might be missing would be great. Thanks in advance, Brendan.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Brendan-Jackson1 -
Keywords Ranking Fluctuate
Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a client’s website for about a year now. They were hit with the original Panda/ Penguin update because of some spammy links. We have analysed and disavow sapmmy links edit anchor tag and landing pages. We've made a decent climb back while working on it keywords ranking was improved some of them are from out of 500 to top 30, but not a full recovery. There are some weird things happening that I would love some insight into. 1. Ranking for keywords are again dropping and traffic is gone: I notice keyword ranking is dropping and some of the keywords which are on 2 and 3 page, now on 9<sup>th</sup> page. And also traffic is down. Any help would be appreciated! Regards, S
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShaunPhilips0 -
Why Link Spamming Website Coming on First Page Google?
As we all already know about link spamming. As per Google Guidelines Link building, Exact Keywords Anchor Link Building is dead now but i am looking most of the website coming on first page in Google doing same exact keywords linking. I think directory, article, social bookmarking, press release and other link building activity is also dead now. Matt always saying content is more important but if we will not put any keywords link in content part then how website rank in first page in Google. Can anybody explain why is website coming on first page because when i am doing same activity for quality links with higher domain authority website then we are affected in Google update.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
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
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JoshuaKersh0 -
Will implementing 301's on an existing domain impact massively on rankings?
Hi Guys,I have a new SEO client who only has the non-www domain setup for GWT and I am wondering if implementing a 301 for www will have a massive negative impact on rankings. I know a percentage of link juice and PageRank will be affected. So my question is: If I implement the 301 should I brace myself for a fall in rankings. Should I use a 301 instead to maintain link juice and PageRank? Is it good practice to forward to www? Or could I leave the non www in place and have the www redirect to it to maintain the data? Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu0 -
Google Sitemaps & punishment for bad URLS?
Hoping y'all have some input here. This is along story, but I'll boil it down: Site X bought the url of Site Y. 301 redirects were added to direct traffic (and help transfer linkjuice) from urls in Site X to relevant urls in Site Y, but 2 days before a "change of address" notice was submitted in Google Webmaster Tools, an auto-generating sitemap somehow applied urls from Site Y to the sitemap of Site X, so essentially the sitemap contained urls that were not the url of Site X. Is there any documentation out there that Google would punish Site X for having essentially unrelated urls in its sitemap by downgrading organic search rankings because it may view that mistake as black hat (or otherwise evil) tactics? I suspect this because the site continues to rank well organically in Yahoo & Bing, yet is nonexistent on Google suddenly. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RUNNERagency0 -
Is Google stupid?
Why does buying links still work? I don't mean approaching an individual webmaster and cutting a deal, that seems to be nearly impossible to detect. But the huge link brokers, like Text Link Ads, Build my Rank or Linkvine, Google has to be aware of them, right? Can't they just create accounts to see the whole network, and ban the sites? Why wouldn't they just do that?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | menachemp0