Rankings Issues
-
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!!!
-
Kate, this is Very Helpful - thank you for your thoughtful ideas!! I will get right on it!
-
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!
-
OK, thanks Nik...
-
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!
-
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
-
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.
-
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!!!
-
Hi TrophyCentral
Look, I will put everything in Line.
- 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
-
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!
-
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
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
-
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Redirect and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
We need a bit of help from someone to fix the following issues causing speed issues on our website.
Hi We need a bit of help from someone to fix the following issues causing speed issues on our website.Does anyone know of someone that can help? Reduce server response time Optimize images Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content Avoid landing page redirects Leverage browser caching Minify CSS Minify JavaScript Minify HTML
Technical SEO | | Bev.Aquaspresso0 -
Added Schema and Rankings Went Down
Hello - We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?
Technical SEO | | Erin_IAN0 -
Issues with Magento layered navigation
Hi, We use Magento v.1.7 for our store. We have recently had an SEO audit and we have uncovered 2 major issues which can be pinpointed to our layered navigation. We use the MANAdev layered navigation module. There are numerous options available to help with SEO. All our filtered urls seem to be fine ie. https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/colour/natural-finish-with-letters/letters/lowercase have canonical url correctly setup and the meta tags as noindex, follow but Magento is churning out tons of 404 error pages like this https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/show/12/l/colour:24-4-9/letters:6-7 which google is indexing I'm at lost at how to solve this any help would be great. Thank you **This is from our SEO audit report ** The faceted navigation isn’t handled correctly and causes two major issues:● One of the faceted navigation filters causes 404 error. This means that the error isappended each sequence of the navigation options, multiplying the faulty URLs.● The pages created by the faceted nav are all accessible to the search engines. Thismeans that there are hundreds of duplicated category pages created by one of theparameters. The duplication issues can seriously hinder the organic visibility.The amount of 404 errors and the duplicated pages created by faceted navigation makes italmost impossible for a search engine crawler to finish the crawl. This means that the sitemight not be fully indexed and the newly introduced product pages or content won’t bediscovered for a very long time.
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Bing rankings question
Hi, We just wrapped up a website redesign about a month ago. The content stayed primarily the same. Once we launched the new site all of our rankings in Google stayed the same but we lost rank for all competitive keywords on Bing. I looked in Bing Webmaster tools and it doesn't show any penalties but it does show that we have too many H1 tags. I don't think the H1 tag thing is the issue but maybe. Do you know what could be causing this?
Technical SEO | | BT20090 -
Should I update old well-ranked posts?
I have a Wordpress site and I think I have "split content" problem. We use to publish preview info, i.e. "leaked images of iphone 5". Some weeks later, official release with official images. And some weeks later, our own review with quality content and pictures. Sometimes the first post are well ranked, but the best content is in our review. How should I manage that? I tried to make a page of each product and link it, but posts stills rank better than pages. And now I have several pages for the same keyword, ie: mysite.com/2011/08/11/leaked-images-of-iphone-5 mysite.com/2011/09/15/iphone-5-official mysite.com/2011/10/15/iphone-5-mysite-review and all linked in mysite.com/phones/iphone5 ... and mysite.com/tag/iphone5 What do you think is best approach to this kind of site? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | DSG0 -
Pages not ranking - Linkbuilding Question
It has been about 3 months since we made some new pages, with new, unique copy, but alot of pages (even though they have been indexed) are not ranking in the SERPS I tested it by taking a long snippet of the unique copy form the page and searching for it on Google. Also I checked the ranking using http://arizonawebdevelopment.com/google-page-rank
Technical SEO | | Impact-201555
Which may no be accurate, I know, but would give some indication. The interesting thing was that for the unique copy snippets, sometimes a different page of our site, many times the home page, shows up in the SERP'sSo my questions are: Is there some issue / penalty / sandbox deal with the pages that are not indexed? How can we check that? Or has it just not been enough time? Could there be any duplicate copy issue going on? Shouldn't be, as they are all well written, completely unique copy. How can we check that? Flickr image details - Some of the pages display the same set of images from flickr. The details (filenames, alt info, titles) are getting pulled form flickr and can be seen on the source code. Its a pretty large block of words, which is the same on multiple pages, and uses alot of keywords. Could this be an issue considered duplication or keyword stuffing, causing this. If you think so , we will remove it right away. And then when do we do to improve re-indexing? The reason I started this was because we have a few good opportunities right now for links, and I was wondering what pages we should link to and try to build rankings for. I was thinking about pointing one to /cast-bronze-plaques, but the page is not ranking. The home page, obviously is the oldest page, and ranked the best. The cast bronze plaques page is very new. Would linking to pages that are not ranking well be a good idea? Would it help them to get indexed / ranking? Or would it be better to link to the pages that are already indexed / ranking? If you link to a page that does not seem to be indexed, will it help the domains link profile? Will the link juice still flow through the site0