Emergency Help...
-
Hello All,
I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher" i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position.
Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog.
He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file.
He also installed the following plugins:
Link Juice Keeper
NoFollow Free
The SEO Rich Snippets
Udinra All Image Sitemap
WP Robots Txt
WP-PageNavi
Add Meta Tags
These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help.
My blog link is : http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/
I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located.
Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.
-
I agree with everything inhouseseo says above. Sound advice.
I've recently been looking at the wedding niche with a view to finding guest post opportunities, one thing that came to light is there's a ton of blogs out there that love publishing series of photos from weddings.
I'm not sure where you stand with ownership of the photos and whether you have the right to publish without the consent of the 'models'. Theres a great opportunity to assemble 10-15 shots write some commentary and then create a series of posts using 6/7 different shots from the collection and differing comments and post them around various wedding.
Myblogguest.com is great place to start. I think this could be the cheapest/quickest way to get the links your looking for.
Best of luck and I sincerely hope you get your old positions back.
Regards
Aran
Ps.(oh and in the mean time you might wanna hit facebook/twitter/pinterest and post some photos, connect with your target audience, it could drive some valuable traffic in! and it just might help you rank)
-
You don't have a lot of backlinks, and the ones you do have don't seem spammy- no overuse of keywords or spammy sites. I didn't go through the all the top sites, but the very first result (used to be ONLY 2 spots above you) is much better optimized. They have a much higher domain authority + plus they have more than 10 times as many links (again I didn't spend much time on the links, but the anchor text didn't seem spammy).
It seems that there were just some fluctuations in ranking factors, and your site doesn't deserve the ranking it once had in Google's opinion. You likely did not set off any sort of spam filter.
At this point, invest in some good content and try to make the site more useful.
BTW, when I searched for "boston wedding photographer" I didn't see any sponsored results. You might be able to drive some traffic without breaking the bank via PPC.
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 it helpful for seo to have helpful links at the footer?
HI, suppose my homepage has good content but no external links to other sites for more info. and no helpful internal links in the footer to learn more. and my competition has 9 internal links in the footer which links to other pages on the site who has more SEO boost? I know the answer , does it really makes a difference or its minute?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL1 -
PLEASE HELP - Old query string URL causing problems
For a long time, we were ranking 1st/2nd for the term "Manual handling training". That was until about 5 days ago when I realised that Google had started to index not only a query stringed URL, but also an old version of the URL. What was even weirder was that when you clicked on the result it 301 redirected to the page that it was meant to display... The wrong URL that Google had started to index was: www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling?channel=retail The correct URL that it should have been indexing is: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling-training I can't get my head around why it has done this as a 301 was in place already and we use rel canonical tags which point to the main parent pages. Anyway, we slapped a noindex tag in our robots.txt file to stop that page from being indexed, which worked but now I can't get the correct page to be indexed, even after a Google fetch. After inspecting the correct URL in the new search console I discovered that Google has ignored the rel canonical on the page (Which points to itself) and has selected the wrong, query stringed URL as the canonical. Why? and how do I rectify this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iHasco1 -
Help Dealing with Sustained Negative SEO Attack
Hello, I am hoping that someone is able to help with a problem that is destroying both my business and my health. We are an ecommerce site who have been trading since 2004 and who have always had strong rankings in Google. Unfortunately, over the past couple of months, these have significantly decreased (I would estimate around 40% drop in organic traffic). We have not had a manual penalty and still have decent rankings for a lot of competitive keywords, so we think it is more likely to be an algorithmic penalty.The most likely culprit is due to a huge scale negative SEO attack that has been going on for around 18 months. Last September, we suffered a major drop in rankings as a result of the 302 hijack scheme, but after submitting a disavow file (of around 500 domains) on 12th November, we recovered on 26th November (although we now don't know whether this was due to disavow file or the Phantom III update on 19th November).After suffering another major drop at the end of June, we submitted a disavow file of 1100 domains (this the scale of the problem!). This tempoarily halted the slide, however it is getting worse again. I have attached a file from Majestic which shows the increase in the backlinks (however we are not building these).We are at a loss and desperately need help. We have contacting all the sites to try and get links removed but they are happening faster than we can contact them. We have also done a full technical audit and added around 50,000 words of unique, handwritten content, as well as continuing to work through all technical fixes and improvements.At the moment, the only thing we can think of doing is submitting a weekly disavow for all the new spammy domains that come up. The questions I have are: Is there anything we can do to stop the attack? Is this increase in backlinks likely to be the culprit for the drops (both the big drops and the subsequent weekly 10% drop)? If so, would weekly disavows solve the problem? Is this likely to take months (years?) to recover from or can it be done quicker? Can you give me any ray of light to help me sleep at night? 😞 Really appreciate any and all help. I wouldn't wish ths on anyone.Thanks,Simon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Google Indexed Old Backups Help!
I have the bad habit of renaming a html page sitting on my server, before uploading a new version. I usually do this after a major change. So after the upload, on my server would be "product.html" as well as "product050714".html. I just stumbled on the fact G has been indexing these backups. Can I just delete them and produce a 404?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Need help for improving SEO App?
Please refer our guru99 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vector.guru99&hl=en We have tons of free materials related to SAP in the app. The problem we are facing is we do not rank for terms like SAP or SAP tutorial and discovery is an issue I have searched over the internet and found no concrete solution. Can you experts help ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chirag7530 -
Please help me with your advice
Hi all, Couple years ago I started to build my business based on EMD domain. The intention was to create the source with the rich unique content. After a year of hard work the site achieved top 10 in Google and started to generate good amount of leads. Then Google announced the EMD Update and site lost the 90% of traffic (after Pandas updates our SERP was steady ) “ a new filter that tries to ensure that low-quality sites don’t rise high in Google’s search results simply because they have search terms in their domain names. ” But I don’t consider my site low-quality site, every page, every post is 100% unique and has been created only to share the knowledge with others… The site has EXCELLENT content from industry point of view.... Since the “ EMD Update “ I read hundreds , hundreds of different articles and opinions related to EMD update and finally I am confused and lost. What should I do… • Kill the site and start new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
• Get more links, but what type of links and how I should get them
• Keep hoping and pray....
• Or do something else Please help me with your advice0 -
Help - .ie vs .co.uk in google uk
We have a website that for years has attracted a high level of organic searches and had a very high level of links. It has the .ie extension (Ireland) and did very well when competing in the niche market it is in on google.co.uk. We have the same domain name but in .co.uk format and basically redirected traffic to it when people typed in .co.uk instead. Since the latest panda update, we have noticed that the number of visits organically has dropped to a quarter of what it was and this is continuing to go down. We have also noticed that the .ie version is no longer listed in google and has been replaced by .co.uk. As we've never exchanged or submitted links for the .co.uk domain this means there are only links indexed in google. Is there any way I can get google to re-index the site using the .ie domain rather than the .co.uk domain? I am hemorrhaging sales now and becoming a much more withdrawn person by the day!!! PS - the .co.uk domain is set up as a domain alias in plesk with both .ie and .co.uk domain dns pointing to the the same IP address. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rufo
Steve0 -
Whats Next, noobie needs some help :)
Hey Everyone, I have been a member of SEOMOZ for about 4 months and love it, it really has helped me out. my first website I am trying to get well ranked in the new zealand market is www.shopezy.co.nz I have chosen: sell online free ecommerce website ecommerce website builder Are paid links the way forward for me? should I aim for more keywords? should I pay for help? Just looking for a lttle direction, if someone could help. thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bonmaklad0