Rankings Issues

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

website:  trophycentral.com

Back in February of this year, we took a huge rankings hit on Google.  We thought it might be Panda related, but realized it was before the big change.  We also thought it could be related to our Mobile rollout and a wholesale system we put in place, but were not sure.

Most pages were fine, but our home page was hit hard and taken off line, included for branded terms (although the branded terms came back in a couple of weeks). There were no manual actions against us.

We made a ton of changes with the mobile site, crawl issues, reducing links, reviewing and removing potentially bad outside links, etc.  After a few months (long time!) almost all of our keywords came back except one, trophies.  We used to rank in the top few positions and now are not in the top 500.  We believe we are being penalized, but have no idea why this one keyword is being impacted.  It is obviously a huge one for us and we want to get it back.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why Trophies is not ranking on our home page.  We are grateful that we have many other words and phrases in the top 5 positions (not pages) of google, yahoo and bing, but on Google, we cant seem to get trophies to even show up!  Please help!!!  Thanks!!!

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Kate, this is Very Helpful - thank you for your thoughtful ideas!! I will get right on it!

[katemorris]

Friendly associate here.

Keri is right, changing all the links you have now is a bad idea. You are going to want to do a few guest posts, maybe a marketing campaign around your trophies and get links that way. You are going to want to do this as naturally as possible.

Idea 1: Guest posts about trophies. Maybe target soccer moms and small businesses or schools with pieces about the best trophies. Any insider knowledge about ordering trophies will be appreciated.

Idea 2: Infographic on trophies. There are tons on specific trophies, but not overall. Any interesting data you can gather about trophies (how many are given away a year, how many are 1st, 2nd, 3rd) will be great.

Idea 3: Contest or giveaway to a non-profit that needs trophies for their upcoming fundraiser. Make them write a post about why they need trophies, etc. And make sure they link with a badge or specific link.

Hope this helps!

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

OK, thanks Nik...

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Hi, I understand.  I updated 3 by hand yesterday and will hold off on any others.  Also, I noticed when entering trophycentral into opensiteexplorer there were only 4 anchors texts with trophies.  However, I theh noticed that trophycentral.com was redirectling to www.trophycentral.com (or something like that) and that there were tons more links with anchor text.  So I am wondering if the redirect is somehow an issue, too.  Thanks!

[nyanainc]

Hi, Kery have right. I think is better if you don't update the existent links. I think is better if you build slowly slowly new ones, I don't know what can happen if you update them. From moment that you are happy keep them, and start a new link building campaign. But don't outsource in any freelance site. Anyway waiting To see the opinion of the Kery"s assossiate. I'm shure he is more experienced from me. Regards

[KeriMorgret]

I would hold off just a bit on updating the links. If you have hundreds of links, and you can update them, and update them all at once to some keyword-rich anchor text, that's going to look awfully fishy to any search engine.

I've asked another associate to also come in and give there opinion on this, but do wait before doing anything drastic.

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Nik, wow - this is very helpful, thank you!  I looked through the data and see that we do not have much in the anchor text at all. I always thought it was the words around the link and did not realize it was actually the words that were part of the link!  I will see how many I can now update, since we have hundreds of good links!  Thank you!!!

[nyanainc]

Hi TrophyCentral

Look, I will put everything in Line.

1. Anchor text is the word trophies coming from other sites. (the external) but is valuable also the internal. But much more the external.Here is a seomoz post about it http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/anchor-text

The best to way to use it is inside a contextual editorial link. Example you submit a guest post, a press release etc. After my suggestion is to backlink also this pages from the other sites. This will increase the authority of your link , and maybe with 100 this kind of links you outrank him. You have to check what "recipe" of backlinks he have and then build a better one.

2)Here in http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ is various tablets/buttons. When you put your site in and you scan it ,or any other site is one button which writes anchor text. There you can see how many links have your site, on which pages, how strong are the links etc. Dedicate some time to learn how to use this tool effective and you will love it. If I can help in any way please tell me.

Regards Nik

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Nik, thanks so much for your response!  I think I understand, but:

1. By anchor text, do you mean text with the word "trophies" coming from sites other than trophycentral or from within?

2. Can you tell me how you found the 4 and the 965 for trophystore.com.uk?

Thanks so much!

[nyanainc]

Hi

I a 5 minute check, I found out, that your site is just fine, but, the keyword is highly competitive and you just have 4 anchor text who contain that keyword in. I dont think so that you can rank with 4 anchor text for that keyword.

This site www.trophystore.co.uk/ which is ranking 1 (at least how I see it) have 965 anchor text "trophies"

I hope that his help you.

Regards Nik