I think I have a penalty on my domain...
-
my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead. I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these.
Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9. This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site.
Any feedback would be gratefully received.
-
Alertra is sharing the text / html load time. It is not loading images, videos, javascript, etc. which can take substantially longer to load. Alertra is an excellent, free tool which can help you understand if page speed issues are related to your server or your web design.
Also understand Alertra is a snapshot of how your site is performing at any individual moment. Site speeds vary greatly throughout the day. If you press the button once/minute, you will likely notice different results.
If your GA shows 4 seconds whereas Alertra shows 1 second, either there are optimization opportunities on your site, or your site offers a lot of images, or the discrepancy is due to random sampling. I have used the tool quite a lot and find it to be useful.
-
Google Analytics says that one of my client's load time is 4 seconds. Alertra says it is 1 second in the USA. I don't think Alertra is accurate.
-
Have you verified your site with Google Webmaster Tools and looked recently for any alerts about your site? Google will often tell you there if it has found something wrong, and you can get some more clues about what is happening to your site.
-
Regarding the site speed, I use Alertra to check site speed from various points throughout the world. Your server responds in about 2.5 seconds in London. The page loads slowly because the site design is horrible. Your PageSpeed score is 20 which is the lowest I have ever seen or even heard of for a live site.
You do not presently rank in the top 50 for "bright tights" in Google.co.uk. Assuming you did not geographically target your site to another country, this would indicate a penalty.
Your home page has 64 validation errors, you have blocked Google from almost all the links on your home page, your page load speed is really bad, etc. There are many issues which need to be addressed in order for this site to rank properly.
-
Sorry, related to the above...does the site seem slow to other users? I have moved it from a Netherland dedicated server to a UK VPS to try and see if that would help with the rankings in Google UK but all it seems to have done is slow the site down
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
-
Blogging on multiple domains
We have three different domains for geotargeting (za,uk and .com). Each site at at the moment has the same content with only country specific details changed like currency etc. What is the best way to get maximum SEO benefit when posting new content.When we post new content should we repost to all three domains (the same content) or will Google only index the url on the domain which is crawled first. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
What should I consider before setting up a sub domain?
Morning all! We've just been approached by IT. They've been asked to develop an online 'portal' where clients can upload and download materials. IT will be developing a portal that sits on the company network perimeter (hosted on our internal servers). The concept is that 3<sup>rd</sup> parties can get and update information in regards to progressing cases, the first use will be for agencies who will retrieve records via the portal and then post reports after a consultation. however I would like to have an automatic link to forward to the portal from the web address: oursite.com/dave We will look to create robot.txt and anything else to prevent from listings/indexes. Does any of the above mess with your SEO? The Directors have asked if they can have this on a sub-domain of our site. Is this wise? And, are there any major SEO considerations for my team to worry about? Better still, have any of you had to deal with this before? If so, what happened? All the best, John
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
SEO for sub domains
I've recently started to work on a website that has been previously targeting sub domain pages on its site for its SEO and has some ok rankings. To better explain, let me give an example...A site is called domainname.com. And has subdomains that they are targeted for seo (i.e. pageone.domainname.com, pagetwo.domainname.com, pagethree.domianname.com). The site is going through a site re-development and can reorganise its pages to another URL. What would be best way to approach this situation for SEO? Ideally, I'm tempted to recommend that new targeted pages be created - domainname.com/pageone, domainname.com/pagetwo, domainname.com/pagethree, etc - and to perform a 301 redirect from the old pages. Does a subdomain page structure (e.g. pageone.domainname.com) have any negative effects on SEO? Also, is there a good way to track rankings? I find that a lot of rank checkers don't pick up subdomains. Any tips on the best approach to take here would be appreciated. Hope I've made sense!
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Is it panda, pengiun, ad penalty?
I'm trying to figure out why my google traffic is going down... I see that back in Feb and then March 2011 it started to drop, which I assume was pengiun. I saw a gradual comeback in traffic until March 2012, which I assume the second drop was another pengiun update. The decline continued gradually until I saw a big drop in October 2012 which is completely dropping off in the past month today. I recreated my website on wordpress, improving content and removing google ads. Relaunched a few weeks ago and still see a big drop. Any idea what happened? I only got a message from google about a large traffic drop in march 2012 and a 404 error increase recently when I launched the new site which I fixed with 301 and removing media attachment pages that were indexed that gave a 404. Once concern is I have no idea if I have a problem with pengiun. Could I have a problem with too many links coming from my blog or soicial network? What's acceptable number of back links to not be spam? If you add pages in the blogroll is this thought of as spam with pengiun? website: http://www.dashinfashion.com Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | dashinfashion0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0 -
.us domains vs .com - What does Google Think?
Suppose I had 2 domains, carloans.us & carloans.com with exactly the same links profiles, and content (not duplicate but you know what I mean). Would Google favour the .com domain? In my experience, yes. But I might be wrong?
Technical SEO | | Tom-R
Same with other not so standard domains like .biz etc. Am I right to believe that Google can prefer the more common domain extensions?0 -
Registering a domain for multiple years
Does registering or renewing a domain name for more than a year improve search as a result of a more trusted site and company that will seem to be around for longer than just a year?
Technical SEO | | Motava0