Sudden drop in rakings for a keyword.
-
Hi,
A few weeks ago my homepage - http://www.linearsky.com dropped out of the rankings completely for a keyword I was promoting (web design staffordshire).
I was thinking that one of the reasons could be a sudden link spike. The reason being is that I have been doing some development work (for a client) on one of my sub-domains.
Now this is a Magento site with thousands of products, with my keyword rich link in the footer. From looking at the Google webmaster tools, it seams that alot of these pages got indexed accidently.
Could this sudden link spike be enough to be penalised by Google?
Apart from that the only borderline black hat stuff I have been doing is some reciprocal link swapping with a few websites in my niche - http://www.linearsky.com/misc/links.html
I also bought a paid link on http://www.iwebtool.com/browser_details, (that I have now asked to be withdrawn) to see what kind of boost it would give me. I know this is unethical, but a number of page one competitors were also using this said link. Also it was only indexed for a few weeks.
Could Google really pick this up so quickly?
Any ideas of how to resolve this?
Many Thanks
Marcus
-
Thanks for all your input.
I have noindex, nofollowed all of the suspect stuff and asked for my paid link to be removed.
Hopefully this will resurrect things.
Regards,
Marcus
-
Google picks up my Magento test sites FAST! That's why I immediately noindex nofollow them.
-
Site wide footer links are border line. They work.... But they dint look very natural. You need more than just those.
-
I thought most of my links have been natural. Apart from some garbage reciprocals that have barely been indexed; one bought link; and my silly dev url.
I tend to only get natural links from the sites i build. Which go straight into the footer. Is this a bad idea then?
Thanks for the input
Marcus
-
I think you should probably just correct the links and try to get a bunch of natural going on. You might find that is enough without a request. And unless you were de-indexed completely you generally can fix filters but correcting whatever is keeping you in the filter.
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for replying.
I guess I knew deep down that I had over optimised too quickly. Although many of my competitors were doing the same. No excuse I know.
How easy is it to get rankings back after being penalised? Do I admit to google that I have sinned? An SEO confession so to speak
Many Thanks,
Marcus
-
Thanks for replying
I began promoting in about April time, its a domain i purchased a few years ago. It was PR3, but now is back to 0.Although some of the inner pages have kept their PR: http://www.linearsky.com/portfolio.
With regards to the site wide links; I tend to put a keyword rich link back to me in the footer of most of the sites i build. The paid link I bought also had keyword rich text back to me. I find it hard to believe that Google figured it out and penalised me though after a few weeks?
I didn't host my clients site there. It was a site in development for a client, on my own sub-domain. I noticed that it indexed lots of pages from there, that linked back to my root domain with keywords. So I thought this might be a contributing factor,
Many Thanks,
Marcus
-
Yeah, I would say all of the above could have played into factor. Your best bet is cleaning up the sub URL (might not be the main cause) the reciprocal links are really easy to pick up on so get rid of those and depending on how the link was bought, it there is anything that makes it obvious then drop it.
If you have a new domain without much link history throwing a bagillion gray/black tactics at it will generally put it on googles radar for filtering. I see that we occasional new sites that we put a bit to much promotion into. Focus on content for the first bit, get some national brand links, then if you want you can get a bit more aggressive. Just stay away from things that are easily identifiable and focus on guest posting, etc for good links.
-
How long ago did you begin link building for this domain. Its strange that its registered in 2007 and you have no pagerank. Looking at your back links, it looks like you have lots of sitewide links, not necessarily a natural looking link method. The paid linking site you bought from is not good, was your link actually on that page or you just used their service?
How would hosting your clients site on your server create thousands of external links? If it was on a sub domain, i highly doubt working on client dev site would cause any issues. Though to play it safe I would use another domain for client dev sites.
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 on "Canvas Prints" keyword in google.co.uk
Hello Moz We are struggling for "canvas prints" ranking in google.co.uk since last 2 years. every time in SERP my webpage has been changed. i want to rank this URL on this particular keyword - "canvas prints" Can you tell me why my page has been fluctuate every time in SERP's. mtwpvf
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CommercePundit1 -
Is a recent hack or the disavow tool causing my alarming dropping in rankings!
My business site has been very successful organically for many years. Just recently we got hit with a spam hack and it was resolved within 3 days. However now my rankings are plummeting and I am so stressed out! So here is some timeline information any info would help: Sept. 4th hack first detected on Google Sept. 7th site completely clean, reconsideration accepted, spam content and links removed. Manual actions cleared. Rankings at this time have not been affected. Sept. 11th disavowed a few incoming links that were completely spam. (In hindsight I know this could have been the beginning of the end using this tool) Sept. 21st start to notice first significant drop in rankings and I went into GWT and downloaded latest 1000 links, I realized ALL of these were either hacked sites as well with spam content linking to our now delete spam content or inappropriate adult content. Sept. 22 Disavowed the 1000 domains (there are still probably 1000-2000 more) As of today rankings have SIGNIFICANTLY dropped, I have resubmitted sitemaps, image sitemaps, fetch and rendered as google. I'm stressing out incredibly and feel like I have made an error and that my site will never recover. I've worked using ALL white hat seo and the site used to rank very well top of page one for almost all my keywords. I feel lost and don't know what else I can do - and I know many say wait but it feels like forever. Is it possible that I didn't make a mistake using the disavow and that Google just took a while to penalize for the hack? Please any advice or experiences I would love to hear and appreciate so much anyone who takes the time to respond.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seounicorn0 -
Dfferent domains on same ip address ranking for the same keywords, is it possible?
Hello, I want to ask if two domains which r hosted on the same server and have the same ip ( usually happens with shared hosts ) tries to rank for the same keywords in google, does the same ip affects them or not.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RizwanAkbar0 -
Can anyone suggest good keywords for this
hello everyone, can you please suggest Good Keywords for my client domain www.amojobs.com. Any one can help please ?? my client Need it urgent.. Thanx in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | poojathakar0 -
Why a drop in certain keyword but not others?
Hi. I am looking into a potential clients SEO issues and reasons why their rankings for specific keywords that they ranked for have dropped but others stayed the same or sometimes have improved. They received a manual spam action that was revoked after some disavow and so on. In May of this year they noticed a huge drop in more generic terms. The main keyword that was ranked 6th, dropped to 35th yet other keywords rose slightly. I have noticed this issue for another potential client as well. They ranked 1st for their brand name, then received a spam action that was revoked. Now they do not rank for their brand name but do for other long tail keywords? Any ideas the best way to investigate this or root out the issue and build to improve rank for more generic keywords? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YNWA0 -
Is this traffic drop do to cutting backlinks or Penguin 2.0 (Graphs attached)
I've attached both graphs of the traffic drop. Our website rankings have been steadily declining since May of 2013. We have mostly return customers or our drop would have been much more severe. There's never been any warnings in GWT We cut a bunch (but not all) of our paid links in May of 2013. We didn't have a manual penalty or anything, we just wanted to see what happened if we moved towards being white hat. When our rankings plumited, we quit cutting links. We currently have about 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was May 22, 2013 In looking at these graphs, was it our cutting links that caused the traffic drop, or was it Penguin 2.0? I'm looking for people who have experience in diagnosing a "Unique Visits" Google analytics graph for Penguin and have experience with what happens when you cut links. It looks like, in viewing the graphs, that May 23 was more the day that the big drop happened, but you guys have more experience with this than me. Thank you. ga.png ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
From keyword rankings to ......... what KPI?
Hi Folks, I have a customer whos keyword rankings for Google have fluctuated rather widly over the past two months which has caused some consternation on their part dispite our reassurance. This is caused in large part due to their lack of understanding of SEO, little effort on their part in implementing changes for SEO and what I belive to be unrealistic expectations (having done no SEO work on their site wanting to see first page ranking for competitive keywords like 'heart attack' within 4-8 weeks). At the moment we are using just keyword rankings as a KPI and I wish to reframe them by using additional or alternative KPIs so that as rankings fluctuate with future Google seach algorithm tweaks and changes that the customer isn't solely focused on them. I am still in the process of formulating this list but so far I have decided to include the KPIs listed below. Month-on-Month / Quarter-On-Quarter Organic search traffic volume (should be rising) Top landing pages excluding branding keywords and homepage (should corelate to content created to target specific keywords) Number of landing pages on the client site that rank List of landing pages and bounce rates (are the 'gateway pages' holding visitors due to meeting their search requirements?) Average number of keywords per landing page (possibly integrated with the landig page reports above as a dimension to demonstrate correlation of # of keywords to landing pages) Some visibility on top keyword search terms (provided from Adwords where possible and GWT also) Top organic keywords (from adwords and GWT) Conversions from organic search (will vary from client to client for their own needs but will primarily be implemented using Google Tag Manager event tracking for things like enquiry forms etc) Referral traffic Delta/Ranking trends over large set of datapoints (will depend on how often you poll/track rankings but for example if you track rankings weekly then assess the trend of the rankings over 3-6months to smooth out the fluctuations) Your thoughts and feedback on this would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu1 -
Sure, but what about non-keyword rich anchor text links?
Could spammy non-keyword rich anchor text liks help your website rank? Of course, there's been a lot of discussion around Google's update of its link scheme. Specifically, they target press releases with do-follow links on keyword-rich anchor text and "Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links". Well, that leaves the question unanswered, what if you're doing these spammy linking techniques, but on non-keyword rich anchor text, such as "click here", "find information", and "click here". Will you still get smacked down by Google then? Given that links on non-keyword anchor text can still help increase domain authority, it seems like Google left a door open here for large scale publication of a certain class of spammy links that can still assist rank, no? Also, in answering, please distinguish between best practice, and effective. For instance, purchasing links isn't a good practice, but it can still be an effective technique. While spammy links on non-keyword rich anchor text is certainly not a good practice, is it nonetheless effective?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ExploreConsulting0