Website ranking went from page one to not in top 50 overnight. Help/suggestions?
-
One of our customer's websites initially ranked very well. For approximately 3 months it sat atop of Google for their optimized keywords. Suddenly, on November 17th, the ranking dropped and they were no longer in the top 50 for any keywords. We went through Google Webmaster tools and found no violations, so we emailed Google to see if we violated something and if they would reconsider. They responded "We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google." This is a site built on WordPress, so we turned off a majority of plugins in case one was somehow affecting the site.
They have an incredible amount of business partners that link their website from their partner's website menus, so they have about 15,000 links all with anchor text "insurance." (every page on partner site is seen as a different link). Think this is affecting it? Maybe Google sees it as artificial? (P.S. This has been set up this way for a while before they came on with us).
The site ranks on page one of Bing and Yahoo, but nowhere in top 50 for Google. Any suggestions?
Appreciate the help!
-
Thank you for the responses. Thought that might have been the issue, but with your responses, I will move forward to try to get the links to appear more natural. Again, really appreciate everyone's input!
-
I think you have got an algorithmic penguin penalty and therefore, it will do no good if you continue sending them reconsideration request. My suggestion, download all the backlinks of your website, try to figure out which links appear unnatural and get them removed. It is time consuming but you have to remove them to revoke the penalty.
-
Fifteen thousand links with "insurance" as the anchor text hit the homepage of this site. Other than that, nobody is linkin' to it.
So, you might have a Penguin problem. See article here... http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/penguin/
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
-
Suggestions Required to Improve Ranking
My website URL is: http://goo.gl/AiOgu1 Hello, Recently my websites revoked from manual link penalty, impressions in GWT increased from 3K to 9K within 2 months, but most of all keywords are ranking on the 3rd, 4th and 5th page. Please suggest me some onpage changes.
Technical SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
My website pages are not crawled, what to do?
Hi all. I have made some changes on the website so i like to crawled them by the search engines Google especially. I have made these changes around 2 weeks ago. I have submitted my website on good bookmarking websites. Also i used a tool available in Google webmasters "Fetch as Google", Resubmitted a sitemap.xml. Still my pages are not crawled your opinion please. Thanks
Technical SEO | | lucidsoftech0 -
How to handle outdated products/pages?
Hi, I wonder how I should handle pages with outdated products. Our market is changing rapidly unfortunately so products we offered in the past are no longer existent. So for example one of our product was called "PRODUCT 1" The URL for this product is still:
Technical SEO | | bastelele
www.mydomain.com/product-1/ with different subpages about the product like:
www.mydomain.com/product-1/about/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/howto/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/pricing/
www.mydomain.com/product-1/whatever/ Our new product is totally different from the first one. Is it still a good idea to set up 301 redirects or are there any other ideas? Thanks in advance
Bastian0 -
Website not ranking for noncompetitive terms
Hi, We've took over a website last July and no matter what we do we just can't get it ranking in Google, even for noncompetitive terms. here is the website in question: http://www.alignandsmile.co.uk Ideally the client would like to rank for Canary Wharf but that location is competitive, the site doesn't even rank for 'Dentist New Providence Wharf E14' despite it being included in the title tag on the home page and in the content throughout the website. Directories with Align and Smile's business information do rank however. I opened a case with google through Webmaster tools and they 'reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google.' So I'm a bit stuck. The site ranks top for the keyphrase in Bing and Yahoo...we are really struggling with Google! Any help would be much appreciated. many thanks Marcus
Technical SEO | | dentaldesign0 -
Fixing a wordpress 404 error for /feed and /comments/feed?
I have a wordpress site that does not have a blog currently. I'm getting a 404 for /feed and /comments/feed. Anyone know how I can fix?
Technical SEO | | DM50 -
/index.php/ page
I was wondering if my system creates this page www my domain com/index.php/ is it better to block with robot.txt or just canonize?
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Massive Rank Fluctuation in Bing/Yahoo
About two months ago we dealt with some issues that were causing weak rankings in Bing and Yahoo! since then, we've seen rankings rise and plummet dramatically with no changes to the site. On Bing and Yahoo! we've gone from 1st page to less than 50th and back again THREE times. This happens across all keywords, even branded ones that are an exact-match for the domain. Google rankings have continued to rise steadily. We benefited greatly from Penguin, which tanked a number of competitors. Bing webmaster tools aren't showing any server or other kinds of errors during the rank drops. Has anyone every experienced this before?
Technical SEO | | BedeFahey0
