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
-
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 -
Duplicate keywords in URL?
Is there such a thing as keyword stuffing URLs? Such as a domain name of turtlesforsale.com having a directory called turtles-for-sale that houses all the pages on the site. Every page would start out with turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/. Good or bad idea? The owner is hoping to capitalize on the keywords of turtles for sale being in the URL twice and ranking better for that reason.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Drop In Rankings Evaluation
My cousin asked me to look at his site, http://www.gaport.com/ and I'm wondering what his main website flaws are? I looked at his backlinks, and while I don't know enough to exclude penguin being the cause, I don't think it is. I think it has more to do with duplicate content and lack of keyword optimization. However, before I tell him that, I wanted to get the opinion of this forum, please. Thanks! Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Best method to target similar keywords??
Hi Guys, We have client that wants to target 3 similar terms (used, secondhand and pre-owned) variations. We have been having a discussion about the different methods to try but can't make a decision on the best route. The target page has a list of pre-owned products so whichever route was take these products still need to be visible without creating duplicate content issues.... 1 - Go all in on one page do our best at optimising a single page for all 3. - i don't like this route.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kal-SEO
2 - Stick with the current pre-owned url and create a url for used and secondhand with a 301 redirect back to the pre-owned url.
3 - Create three individual pages aimed at a keyword individually, keep the pre-owned as the original and add canonical links to used and secondhand I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Thanks in advanced0 -
Main keyword decline in SERPs ranking :-(
Hi Moz, My very humble attempts at SEO has been doing very well for over a year with the keyword phrase 'vintage chanel bags'. Recently, about 3-4 months ago I noticed it dropped from rank 1 to rank 5. I've slowly but steadily been building up more social marketing interaction (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram mostly), brand awareness in company is increasing more searches for 'Vintage Heirloom', great in-links from reputable companies & bloggers. What I'm confused about is that one of our competitors Rewindvintage now appears as no.1 for this keyword but tracking with Moz every metric we outperform them on, namely domain authority & Page Authority. I have noticed they have 4 anchor text links (dubious quality wordpress comments), with the anchor term vintage chanel bags and we have none despite ranking no. 1 for so long?? I'm trying to use the Moz science here, just a bit confused. Any help, insights, similar experience would be much appreciated. I engage only in white hat and look for slow & honest SEO growth (as far as I'm aware ! ). Thanks for looking Kevin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Highly competitive keywords ranking
Hi , I just start one page website ( website that give a user one service like backlinkswatch . com or prchecker ) This niche is so competitive and the first 5 results for keywords that I have selected for my website have a google pagerank > 4 I know that ranking for high competitive keywords take more times but what Can I do to make it fast without getting penalized , all what I hear now is guest post and guest post and guest post any other idea ??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | loumi0 -
Massive drop in Google traffic after upping pagecount 8-fold.
I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy. It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage". It's been online for 4+ years. Historically, it's been made up of: a single home page ~50 "category" pages, and ~425 "book list" pages. (That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.) On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight. If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805 ..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116 Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries. And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google. (Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...) Here's the problem: For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable. And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today. And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem... So: 1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight? 2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority). 3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors. What else? Thanks so much, help is very appreciated. Peter
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petestein1
Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉0 -
Keyword Rich Domains on Same IP
In addition to my main website, I want to create two new sites for the upcoming football and basketball seasons. By starting now, I'm thinking I have enough time to get them ranked decently. I have purchased www.collegefootballpredictions.net for the upcoming football seasons. The intent here is two fold. First, I'd like to rank in the top 3 for "College Football Predictions." Second, and this is why I'm thinking that Google won't hate me for the approach, is that someone looking for that search term is much more likely to convert on a landing page geared for them then on my main website. If the goal of a separate website is truly to compliment the main website, then is it considered white hat? I'm thinking that, as long as my intentions are pure, they should go on the same IP. Placing them on separate IPs could be a good way of letting the big G know that I'm trying to cheat the system and get away with it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PatrickGriffith0