Where do I start, trying to work out whats going on...

[ScottBaxterWW]

Ok guys where do I start...

Lets go back 12months, so were in April 2011 and ranking 6th for our main keyword 'car warranty' things were going well, we didn't really move up or down the SERP and for our other keywords we were ranking well.

We decided to use an SEO agency to try and boost our rankings as we were getting ready to launch a national TV advert. It started off really well, we were moving up the rankings nicely and within 9 months we were 3rd for 'car warranty' we were happy!!

On the 7th of Jan 2012 we dropped to 10th in the SERP for our main keyword and we were gutted we contacted the agency straight away trying to find out what had happened - we got news back that a site that they were using for links (around 20) had crashed for the Christmas break and the links had been deindexed by Google, we were told give it 2 weeks and we should see them again... 2 months later we were still at 10th and they had changed there mind and decided it was a 60day filter.

We waited again until the filter had been removed and we still didn't move anywhere, with this in mind we have now left the agency and moved back to in-house.

So back to today - we are now shifting between 10th and 11th on the SERPS which Is causing us some pain.

I'm trying to work out what the hell has happened to our site, have we been penalized? Have we over optimized or is it just purely down to our link profile...

Here are some stats:

Domain Authority: 49
Homepage Authority: 59
MozTrust: 4.43
MozRank:  4.51

So looking at our campaign within SEOMoz our site does seem to be OK - we have a few little issues but nothing that is causing a problem to our SEO. Our hompage and landing pages all of a report card of A so I can't see it being an over optimization penalty.

Looking at our external links our anchor text is spread quite nicely between some of our keywords and our brand name.

I don't personally think we have been penalized and we don't have any messages within Google Webmaster tools, i wish we did that way I would know where to star!! haha I personally think its just our link profile - looking at our links through OSE they don't look too bad, yes there are some low quality link directories but there are only a few.

I think if we improve this and get some strong links back we should see an improvement but Its driving me mad at the moment and I just can't seem to put my finger on it, if anyone has got any ideas or could shed any light on our issue it would be great.

Sorry for the long message but I just had to explain our past and where we are up to...

Thanks!

[ScottBaxterWW]

Thanks for the reply mate - yep that's what I think it is! The strange thing is our biggest competitor WD have got amazing links from high authority domains but still can't get top!

[SeattleOrganicSEO]

From the looks of it, the links that do have the anchor text "car warranty" aren't the best.  I didn't go through all of them, but you'll want definitely more links that are coming from better sites.

At the same time, do be careful...you joke that you would rather see the warning, but if you do get it, you'll be regretting you asked for it.  Frankly, it's not something you want...if you think ranking 10 or 11 is bad, the warning/penalization will get you much worse.

My other advice would be focusing on more than just one term.  We have a client who does get excited (and rightfully so b/c it has 110,000 mo exact searches) when they go up for one phrase, but we were also able to balance it out with 9 other great terms that frankly kept the same amount of traffic coming in that were related.

Also, I was reading recently someone thought it was bad they overoptimized by having the same exact anchor in the title, h1 and all the main on page tags (like you guys do).  So, maybe you can experiment with that, but frankly, I suspect that whatever links got you to #3 were potentially helping because they were coming from a great site.

You might consider finding other routes/methods in hopefully garnering more natural links from better websites though - for the long term.

[ScottBaxterWW]

Thanks for your response.

Looking at the copyscape there are a few copies of our homepage out on the internet, we have alot of car dealers that will just pinch content off our site and re-use it.

At the moment looking at linkscape there are around 3 copies.

[MassivePrime]

Hi, as you may know Google change their algorithm multiple times each year so here's a few things you should go over first:

• Solve internal duplicate content issues (very big deal after the Panda update)
• Find out if anyone has plagiarized your content using Copyscape (file DMCAs if you need to)
• Can the content on your homepage can be accessed via these URLs?:

www . yoursite . com/index.html
yoursite . com/index.html
www . yoursite . com/
yoursite . com/

Use 301 redirect and canonical link element to solve this issue if it exists.

• Consider using external style sheets
• Make sure your site is coded using the latest approved coding standards (old web sites usually suffer from this problem)
• Site loading time is now part of their algorithm, how long does your site take to load up a page?

From what you are describing your site doesn't seem to have been penalized but, instead the more logical things that have happened are that you have lost a few positions due to small oversights or due to matters outside of your control

a) Your competitors have made a strong push to out-rank you

b) You have lost a few valuable backlinks either because they have been removed or they have lost value for reasons outside your control.

Hope this helps, let me know if you need more help

[ScottBaxterWW]

Thanks for the reply.

Yep  I agree, but the annoying thing is - running and OSE on some of our competitors shows that they don't really have any better links if anything they are worse...

Our page rank hasn't dropped its still at 4.

[brandonjschwartz]

It sounds like your link portfolio needs to be built up again.

If this were a penalty, I would expect you to have been pushed further down than you were. One other indicator you might check is the PageRank of the page. If the page suddenly has a 0 rank or a gray bar when it had a rank previously, but the mozRank is still intact, you might be suffering a penalty.