Hit by Google updates; Some good advice needed

[xtopher66]

Hi,

Here`s my domain http://www.kent-website-designer.co.uk/. Registered in 2007.

We have took a big hit from the updates in the last 6 months and  its really affecting revenue.

I know when you look at the site you may well think WOW this is 2007 SEO and youre right it hasnt been updated in some time as of last year we ranked very highly and it gave us enough business to concentrate on. However up until last year many of my competitors were using same onpage and offpage strategies....and probably a few of you were too!

So now the inquiries and income is drying up. However, I provided myself with an income from my efforts, rather than be unemployed, so I want to get it back on track.

I visited the Google webmaster forums to query a couple of webmaster account queries and basically got beat up by the rude and arrogant google forum admins. Basically they said I was a spam site who shouldnt be in business. How very nice!

1. I have EMD - but domain age should mean something?

2. I lost a few links from https://www.getsafeonline.org/partners-and-supporters/ in the last year which hasnt helped when they reorganised their content. Same with other trusted sites we lost links. We are left with low quality links.

3. Some CMS sites have replicated our footer links on a large scale, which wasnt intentional but may look as link spam, plus they arent no followed as G prefers.

4. Google seems to have become intelligent? Apparently it can detect content which is negative in outdated seo advice. How, can it understand context and meaning so older seo advice isdetected as spam content?

5. No pages are de indexed just a rank drop to 30 - 60 positions.

6. Over optimised H1`s?

7. Is Pipe command in titles now negative?

So its sink or swim time I guess. The siteand domain is honest but neglected and probably should re align the business with what we can offer. We got away with that SEO but clearly things have changed. However with no grey or black hat at least we arent overly worried by removing links.

Also looking for an SEO company who we can outsource with a white label solution in order to offer SEO.

I dont need beating up, short and to the point critiques please. Pros and Cons

Many thanks.

[xtopher66]

Thanks Cyrus,

Well domain age is very important and the link clean up for up to 90% can be achieved by me.

There could be a correlation between the huge rise in footer links by the CMS`s and the period of the ranking fall, that just coincides with the Penguin update, then got noticed.

I really think that this could be the major cause of the problem. 13,000 footer links optimised for anchor texts in 6 months? Not a good sign. WMT is by far the most valuable tool for me as all is listed. Analytics show a 68% average drop in organic traffic...ouwch!

In meant time I can boost my adwords budget and hope.

Removing comment links? Just a case of contacting blog admins?

*Shall I keep the highest page authority links and make real effort on the blog comments and less quality domain authority first? I surely must be able to have anchor text links....I see lots of sites still ranking well from text link pages only and very thin content.

Cetainly no WMT messages from Google.

I just dont have the time to build thousands of manual links.....and if I do for SERPs its surely for trying to improve ranking. We all know that good SEO is really about improving ranking, else why do it. ....its a bit of a contradiction by Google.

NB. Have removed over 19,000 Links with unnatural anchor texts so thats a start!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Howdy,

Thanks for stopping in Q&A and letting us take a look at your site. Sorry to hear about the dip in traffic. It's blows when that happens.

Looking at your backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, it's pretty easy to see why you were hit. When I look at a backlink profile, usually the first report I go to is the anchor text report:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?page=1&site=kent-website-designer.co.uk&sort=domains_linking_page&source=phrase&target=domain

Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of link profile targeted by Penguin and other over-optimization updates by Google. Not going to beat you up... you admitted this was like SEO in 2007 - and these tactics worked then! So we're not here to lay any blame. Tens of 1000's of webmasters around the globe face similar issues.

Specifically, there's 2 things in your link profile that jump out at me:

1. Over-optimized anchor text - Variations of "Web Design Kent" seem to comprise 90% of the backlinks.
2. A high, high amount of comment links
3. Tons of exact match footer links, as you noted

All of these together is a recipe for trouble. But you likely already know that. So the real question is, how to fix it?

You realistically have two choices: Ditch the site and start over, or do a thorough link cleanup and file a reconsideration request.

You probably want to try to save the site. I'd start by doing a complete site audit for low quality links. Our friend Paddy Moogan wrote a great post about this: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/

The big question is if you need to file a reconsideration request. Did you receive any messages in Google Webmaster Tools? If not, you may want to file a request just to see Google's response. Often they will verify this way if a site has received a manual penalty or not.

Also a good post by Ryan Kent on identifying penalties: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

Understand that Google's reconsideration process can be a several month process. It's best to try to remove as many links as you can - (and show a serious effort to do so) and use the disavow tool as a measure of last resort.

Finally, and I can't stress this enough, the number one thing that helps after you've cleaned up bad links, is building good links.

Keep us up to date on your progress. With some work and due diligence, your site may come out of this fine.

[xtopher66]

Thank you Brian and Highway5.

Well on analysis I havent got any messages from G in webmasters account for my site or any of my clients.

Looking at Rands flowchart...site pages arent de indexed which I knew,  ranks #1 for domain name and relative unique title pages are still ranking page 1, 2 or 3 . So in the words of sherlock holmes, after deduction the only left remaining factor must be the truth! So it must be an algo based change. Which lets face it, is the nicest option!

There must be some kind of memory effect with google because we had a high trust link to one page which we asked to be moved and link to my index page but the former page ranked highly for quite some time (years) although it only had the internal site links to it after.

Plan of action

1. Webmaster tools show 13000 footer links from various clients ecommerce websites as they have made a huge push in products......its a cms tech issue I can deal with immediately. These are ALL anchor text. I can edit all my sites for url based link rather than anchor text and add nofollow.

2. Ive put my money into the business this year with a series of pr web releases ($4000) and those releases have a mixture of url, main keywords and subpage keywords. This is a trusted site, so i am thinking that these pages are worthy enough and dont need amending. If im going to keep any keyword anchor texts it might as well be on those sites.

3. There has to be a point of where i still need concise anchor text over url or non keyword inbound links. Lets assume I find a 450 highly relevent sites, 250 non relevant sites and 150 directories to link from, is there a ratio of mixing these up?

4. OSE doesnt show all my links, only around 1800. I can remove about 18,000 links in a very short period.I think they class as over optimised spam links.

5. Not sure weather i should just ask for removal of links from the less relevant sites rather than adjust anchor text. If they are no value, why have links there anyway?

6. Again not sure when just to use the short anchor text or the anchor text in much longer sentances / paragraphs

7. Rewrite / remove of some content, ammend the H1`s to simplified version of the title.

8. Im battling with analytics (god thats is awfully difficult to use now)  to find the traffic drop or ranking drop. I recall I lost web design in kent middle of last year but im sure even in November i still ranked 1 or 2 for website designers kent.

It could tie in with a certain algo update but i think we have identified enough reasons to start with and be getting on with.

9. Thank god for Adwords! Which is just about keeping me going.

NB. Looking at the analytics, its difficult to pin down exactly . Year on year there is a big dip in April 24 2012 onwards (and to date) which coincides the Penguin. I cant measure from October and backwards in WMT but the rankings are blown by then. My pageviews arent easy to use a guidesas my PR releases for this year skew the averages. Graph on graph is down April 12 onwards. Enquiries I got were probably Adwords so didnt notice rankings drop.

[highwayfive]

Hi Chris,

Can you time the drops in traffic and rankings? There are a number of places you can check the dates of the major Google updates. SEOmoz have a cool page here with the dates in by year although nothing yet for 2013

http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

As Brian mentioned if its done to an algorithmic change then clean up your links (anchor key is key) and then wait for the refresh.

If is an unnatural link warning then you need to clean up your links and then ask Google nicely to remove the penalty.

There are lots of guides about reinclusion requests.

There is flow chart

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate

Hope it helps