Pages plummeting in ranking
-
Hi all,
I have a question, which i hope you can answer for me. I have a site www.betxpert.com (a danish betting site) and we have tried to do some SEO to improve conversions.
One of the steps we have taken was to link to all of our bookmaker reviews in our menu (a mega menu). All of our bookmakers have an img and text link in the menu. The menu is shown on every page of the site.
Since we have made this change we have been plumeting down the SERPs. For the search "betsafe" this page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe is no longer in the top 50.
We also added the "stars" so that the google result will show our over all review for the bookmaker, in order to stand out in the SERPs.
Can anyone explain to me what the problem might be? Over extensive internal linking or?
-
You can always private message me thru moz as well.
Best of luck. -
Okay. Thanks a lot for the effort and answer. I hope it helps me...lets see when the changes take effect. I will post back here in a couple of weeks if i see improvements.
I have removed the links from the menu, apart from on the frontpage. Also i have added nofollow to the links in the section which caused the "extreme linking" warning. This should stop the fall in ranking if this in fact is the issue.
I will try and reduce the number of links on the page. In general we have a lot of links on every page. But if that is a crime i will try to avoid it
-
Based on GWMT, the links still count toward the total. I am not sure, if it would reduce the likelihood of a penalty though or if it would negate a penalty in place. I did a quick in WMT and could not find an answer to that portion.
-
Will it help me in getting fewer links if i set "nofollow" for some of them? Will google regard this as fewer links?
-
Yes, absolutely, it can and likely does have something to do with the fall in rankings. The rel= "no follow" should help. What is happening, is that they are seeing way too many links and that is considered "spammy."
What I would suggest is to take off links where they are not really needed. This should assist you immediately. If you make a big enough dent in unlinking (I suggest no more than 100 internal links per page...but, not on every single page if you can avoid it.) you should then consider submitting for reconsideration. A question is: Are any of your pages showing up in search?
The other thing you should consider is backing up a step and looking at the overall mapping of the site: Does it make sense? (remember, I am in the US, speak passable Spanish and no Danish..sorry) Using Google translation, I think some of it could be streamlined to provide a better experience for your bettors. Take off the articles if they are not needed. (Do people spend time on them? Do they migrate to betting from them?) There is a lot to look at and that, even for a bettor, may be too much.
Hope it helps,
-
Hi,
Thanks for the fast answer.
One thing i did not mention, but could be of relevance. A year ago the site was rebuilt and therefore a lot of URLs were redirected with 301 redirection. However a lot of links in a section of the site did not redirect due to settings on the new server. This issue was fixed last month, so now all the old URLs are being processed by Google and the pages which they redirect to have a lot of links (it is a statistics section) and i have received a warning in webmaster tools about an extreme high amount of links in the web site. I have today set rel="nofollow" on the larger part of the links on these pages (since i really do not want them all indexed).
Can this warning have anything to do with the fall in ranking? I am thinking if we are punished by having pages with too many links - all with links to the bookmaker pages on them?
In general we have a lot of links on the site. Is this really a problem? Is it a known fact that Google punisheds for having too many links in pages?
Regards,
Rasmus
-
Rasmus,
First, not knowing when the changes were made and assuming the only changes made are described above, here are some possibilities:
If the change is in the last few weeks, it may be a temporary fluctuation in the rankings and you may need to wait 3 to 6 weeks to see if there is a bounce back.
If that is not the case, in my opinion with the number of links you have, you have two issues: First, from GWMT:
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
There are other issues beyond this, your H1 is picking up the articles in the middle of the page (makes it unclear). The load time is long (D or F in YSlow depending on which test version). etc.
However, I would look at it from the standpoint of what did you change given the site itself. Again, if the only change was the links you described, it would be easy enough to delink them and see if you come back.
I understand with a betting site you want to show all a person can bet on and that you are trying to get people to look at info on their favorite sport, but to me the site is way over busy and could use some simplification. I cannot tell you whether or not Google sees it as spammy. I do believe there are too many links. Without testing it and just looking at it cursorily, I came up with close to 200.
Hope this helps,
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
-
Titling Category Pages Like You Would a Blog Page?
So, with our 600 or so category pages, I was curious... on each of these category pages we show the top 12 products for that category. In trying to increase click through rate, I wonder if it would be prudent to use some of the strategies I see used for Blog posts with thee category pages. i.e. Instead of Category Name - Website Name How about: Top 12 Kitty Litters We Carry - View the Best and the Rest! Or something like that. And then in the description, I could put, "Number 8 made my jaw drop!!!" (Ok, kidding about that one...) But serious about the initial question... Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
What should I do about not found pages?
I took over a site that had been hacked. A bunch of pages were created that said domain.com/cms/viagra. The pages are gone but they still show in webmaster tools as not being found, which is what I want. However, should I do anything besides leaving them as 404?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Drastic increase of indexed pages correlated to rankings loss?
Our ecommerce website has had a drastic increase in indexed pages, and equal loss of Google organic traffic. After 10/1 the number of indexed pages jumped from 240k to 5.7 million by the end of the year, according to GWT. Coincidentally, the sitemap tops at 14,192 pages, with 13,324 indexed. Organic traffic on some top keyphrases began declining by half after 10/26 and ranking (previously placing in the top 5 spots) has dropped to the fifth page of results. This website does produce session id's (/c=) so we been blocking /c=/ in the robots.txt file. We also have a rel=canonical on all pages pointing at the correct url. With all of this in place, traffic hasn't recovered. Is there a correlation between this spike of indexed pages and the lost keyword ranking? Any advice to investigate and correct this further would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | marketing_zoovy.com0 -
On-Page Question
Im trying to increase value to specific pages by putting history, and additional images. Will copying snippets from other sites negatively affect me? Should the content be re-written completely?
Technical SEO | | Anest0 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0 -
Keywords Ranking Dropped from 1st Page to Above 5th Page
Hello, My site URL is http://bit.ly/161NeE and our site was ranked first page for over hundred keywords before March, 30. But all of a sudden, all the keywords on first page dropped to 5th or 6th page. When we search for our site name without ".com", the results appeared on first page are all from other sites. And our page can only be seen on 6th page. We think we have been penalized by Google. But we don't know the exact reason. Can anyone please help? Some extra info on our site: 1. We have been building links by posting blog, articles and PR. All the articles are unique, written by the writers we hire. It has been working fine all the time. We also varied the anchor text a lot. 2. We didn't make any change to the website. But one real problem with our site is that the server is very slow recently and when google crawl our website, many errors were found, mostly 503, 404 errors. And the total number of errors have reach to over 50,000. Do you think this might be a problem for Google not displaying us on first page? Our technicals are working hard to solve server problem. And if it is solved, shall our rankings be back? Please advise. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Milanoocom0 -
Duplicate titles OK if page don't need to rank well?
I know It is not a good idea to have duplicate titles across a website on pages as Google does not like this. Is it ok to have duplicate titles on pages that aren't being optimised with SERP's in mind? or could this have a negative effect on the pages that are being optimised?
Technical SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0