Relevant site outranked by powerful un-relevant sites
-
One of my clients has a site in a niche market, and has been ranking well for years.
Since the Penguin algorithm changes his site dropped and 4-5 other sites came out of nowhere to take to top spots. These are very large sites, but they are not really reliant to the search terms. Sure, they sell one or two of the niche products, but our site is dedicated to those products.
The site has been updated since I took over on the site, and is well SEOed.
The site in question still ranks 1st for the keywords in every other search engine imaginable.
Has anyone else encountered this? If so, how did you combat it?
-
Sorry Doug, I should have said that there were two drops, one for Panda, and then one for Penguin, with one coming in Mid-Feb and one Mid-April. Panda was a large drop, then as the site was recovering slightly it got hit with the Penguin update.
The competitors are mainly Amazon and eBay. Both sell the products, but only sporadically and don't have them in any number.
The client has dropped on the 4 big keywords from 1st-2nd position, to 5th-7th. Not a massive drop by any means, but in a market so small it has had a huge effect.
The rest of the site’s rankings did drop, but they have recovered since then.
The backlinks are not overly impressive, but nothing too alarming. There have been no warnings in Webmaster Tools, nevertheless, I have been working on the link profile and trying to add variety.
After originally thinking this was the cause I have begun to reconsider, and in my digging found several faults on-page. I fixed most of these when I first got to work on the site, such as the internal linking and general optimization. There was also a spammy element to the internal linking which I got rid of.
Fixing the internal linking didn’t have the desired effect, so I have re-approached that and changed it further. I also found an issue with the CMS in which it was generating a series of duplicated page titles (that mirrored the index page due to an error in the CMS to the lower pages). This would fit with the Panda change and the aim to reduce duplicates. This month, I have eliminated these, cleaned up the internal linking further and looked to vary the link profile (I'm hoping this will fix the issue, I just need to wait until it gets indexed).
Also, as an experiment, I made a series of HTML pages (not in the CMS) to test the site. These ranked well within a month, and have continued to grow since then.
Another issue the site has is the site itself. The code is outdated and messy with inline CSS and Java (some of which seems redundant) that all make the code to content ration something to be desired. I’m wondering if this could be a cause. The CMS has a penchant for duplication and the ‘readable’ code is not very clean, dates, filled with redundant code and is old.
Thanks
-
I've encountered some very diverse serp results where niche terms are very niche and there isn't the search volume to out there and/or lots of alternative markets using the same terms to mean different things, but I guess it depends what you mean by not relevant to the search terms. If they're selling the niche products that's kinda relevant?
The first step to recovery must be to understand the problem.
Do you know why you got hit by Penguin? Are you sure it's Penguin that's caused the drop (when did it happen)? What does your back link profile look like? Have you had any warnings in Google Webmaster Tools?
How far has your client dropped? Are they in the index at all? Where are they ranking for other keywords - is it the same story?
Here's some penguin related SEOmoz blog posts:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recovering-from-the-penguin-update-a-true-story
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
So, first I'd confirm that it was Penguin and then try and see just how big a hole you're in! Good luck!
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
-
Meta Keywords is relevant in SEO yet ?
Hello, meta keywords is relevant to use in SEO yet? If yes, how many words is recommended to use? Regards, Leandro
Algorithm Updates | | lmoraes0 -
What happens when non-relevant topic is getting more visitors?
Hi all, So we have a sub-domain which has user generated content like forums. Mostly the content is all about our product. Few times some spammy threads get posted and we delete them regularly. I have noticed that a non-relevant thread has been posted which about a movie. But this page got hundreds of clicks. I just wonder will this hurts being off topic and movie torrent thread or helps being receiving hundreds of visitors? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?
We own a horoscope website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios. I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.
Algorithm Updates | | websitebuilder0 -
We recently transitioned a site to our server, but Google is still showing the old server's urls. Is there a way to stop Google from showing urls?
We recently transitioned a site to our server, but Google is still showing the old server's urls. Is there a way to stop Google from showing urls?
Algorithm Updates | | Stamats0 -
SEO for mobile sites?
Let's say I have an ecommerce site and it has a separate theme via device detection. So I may even have different content on the pages. So for example, on desktop, on mysite.com/flowers I have a video about flowers. But on mobile, I have 10 000 words of text. Will this page rank better for people searching via mobile? Will google give different search rankings, based on desktop vs. mobile? Or how is Google calculating this? Are there any good mobile SEO tips or a knowhow base?
Algorithm Updates | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Test site is live on Google but it duplicates existing site...
Hello - my developer has just put a test site up on Google which duplicates my existing site (main url is www.mydomain.com and he's put it up on www.mydomain.com/test/ "...I’ve added /test/ to the disallowed urls in robots.txt" is how he put it. So all the site URLs are content replicated and live on Google with /test/ added so he can block them in robots. In all other ways the test site duplicates all content, etc (until I get around to making some tweaks next week, that is). Is this a bad idea or should I be OK. Last thing I want is a duplicate content or some other Google penalty just because I'm tweaking an existing website! Thanks in advance, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
How on earth is a site with ONE LINK ranking so well for a competitive keyword?
Ok, so I'm sure you get the gist of what I'm asking about in my question. The query is 'diy kitchens' in Google UK and the website is kitchens4diy[dot]com - which is ranking in third from my viewing. The thing is, the site has just ONE BACKLINK and has done for a good while. Yet, it's ranking really well. What gives?
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve0 -
Are the latest Ranking Reports counting the new large format site links as positions?
Received my weekly ranking report this morning and noticed a specific keyword that I've been ranking in the 3rd or 4th spot has dropped a significant amount of positions. I tested the results myself and it appears the site links of the manufacturer are being counted as positions? My keyword has me in the 3rd position (although it is much lower on the physical page now because of the new format). I'm really wondering how this will affect organic listings going forward - this new format could be a game changer.
Algorithm Updates | | longbeachjamie2