Google Penalty for strong industry link?
-
I work as the SEO manager for a company and we recently launched a new site. Along with this I've been doing some intensive SEO over the past 30 days in getting partners to add or change links and had a big impact on our main keyword, document management software. For the past 2 weeks we've been at position 6 but today I noticed that we dropped down to 11th. I'm wondering if I'm getting penalized for too many exact anchor matches because we recently have been featured on an industry site, cmsreport.com with good anchor text and suddenly we have dropped. Is Google penalizing me for this? If so it seems odd that with legitimate PR and posts I get penalized.
-
My rankings dropped as well, although we got a relevant link from bbc (linked with only the url)... I didn't see any positive impact on that yet.
-
I can't offer a direct explanation for your recent ranking drop. I would not suspect a penalty. It is a common practice for articles to be published or PR announcements to occur, then for this content to be picked up and duplicated. I disagree with the idea of changing your latest release to adjust for a penalty that may not exist.
You shared you have been recently performing a lot of SEO work. The changes you made kick up a lot of dust with respect to Google. They index the web in chunks so it may take a bit of time for the dust to settle. If the changes you made were improvements I would expect your ranking to be restored without any further action. I hate to offer a "wait and see" response but often that is the best approach.
Whenever someone asks "why did my rankings drop" I look at their site and the first thing I ask myself is "does this site deserve to be on the first page of Google results for a competitive term?" It's a lion fight. If you want to be the best then all stops need to be pulled out and an intense focus is required on every last component of the site. This is my approach and others may disagree.
I noticed opportunities for improvement on your site. Below are a few I noticed immediately but there are probably others.
-
your image names should be changed to include more accurate descriptions that perhaps include keywords. For example one image is named "Homepage42.jpg". It seems most images follow this naming convention.
-
some images are missing alt text, such as the one mentioned above. The couple images I did see with alt text show "document management software". I would suggest caution here. Using that phrase in alt text once should be fine but make sure the alt tag describes the image and gently includes keywords otherwise it may appear as stuffing.
-
The current page title is "Document Management Software for a Paperless Office | Docstar". Possibly consider shortening it to "Document Management Software | Docstar". This is a judgment call but it would give more weight to your primary keyword phrase and you can include additional details in your meta description.
-
The site uses 7 H1 tags. For most sites I would say this is too many. Your site looks very nice and makes it work with the header images rotating. I would suggest changing the tags outside the header to H2 tags out of concern that Google may not like that many H1 tags. A side suggestion would be to slow down the header image rotation. It is so fast that a reader cannot possibly even read the header, not to mention the other text. I realize the rotation can be stopped by selecting the appropriate tab in the menu bar but users may not understand how that works.
-
A couple non-SEO suggestions. Add a favicon. Your gold star would work well. Also remove the "Page optimized by WP Minify plugin" footer. These changes will slightly add to the professional appearance of your page in my opinion.
-
-
I absolutely agree with you as far in that some of the best sites have few to no exact anchor matches, I'm just surprised that with a featured press release on a very related site that Google dropped my ranking. Given your advice I switched my latest release and will see if the Google oracle likes me again
-
Nobody can say for sure... but if I look at the anchor text of the links for sites that are powerful but do zero linkbuilding they have almost no matching anchor text and a ton of links with domain.com as anchor.
I am not disputing the value of keyword anchor text... but just saying that domain.com anchor text might be better than you think with the words in nearby sentences delivering the goods. .
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
-
Linking between properties
I own 3 domains. One is my blog, one is my photography business site, and one is my graphic/web design site. They are all hosted on the same VPS account. I link between each site. Also, since the links are either in the nav, footer or sidebar, all pages from one page link to the homepage of each other. Is this an issue for SEO? Should I not be doing this? Would it be beneficial to use a no follow link instead if I'm to keep them?
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
Penalty? NoFollowed Link Profile
Could an abnormal ratio of nofollow links cause a drop in rankings? Our "Followed Linking Root Domains vs. NoFollowed Linking Root Domains" is 50/50... while our competitors have an average ratio of 90/10. The reason for our abnormal ratio is that: A) We're a relatively new site, with a small link profile so far. B) We have a WordPress plugin that allows other publishers to add our content to their site (which has a nofollow backlink included). And, as a followup question... if we removed the nofollow backlink completely, but still left the branded text there... could we potentially still benefit from it (our brand name being near targeted keywords that appear in the plugin content)?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Google webmaster tools Who links the most updates?
Has anyone ever seen in the section in GWT "Who links the most" actually update. I have sites listed in there that had me on a blogroll so I had 93,000 links to me and they removed those links months ago but GWT still shows that number of links. Does anyone else actually see those numbers go down as links are removed?
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
Internal Linking - 100 plus links
Hi Everyone, I have a question of how the on-page links are being counted. Say you have a page with a warning of having too many on page links (100+). How are all of these links counted? Let's say there are only 5 links on that page. Do the links on each of those pages count too and so on and so forth? I just want to make sure I have wrapped my head around this correctly. Thanks!
Link Building | | dirigodev0 -
Different Link Titles Linking to the same page
So I'm doing a lot of link building but my question is how do search engines treat different link titles to the same page. For example, my main page is www.musillawfirm.com If I have 20 links from 20 sites linking to it as Melbourne FL DUI Lawyer and 20 more linking as Melbourne FL immigration Lawyer and More linking as Cocoa FL DUI lawyer etc... what happens? Do the search engines just rank me higher for all the terms or would it be better to always just link to separate landing pages? Thanks in advance
Link Building | | musillawfirm0 -
Do-Follow link from Linkedin/Facebook/Twitter/About/Google Profile, how to:
Tell us, a technician method of building do-follow link on high quality social websites. Thanks
Link Building | | leadsprofi0