Help needed for a domain
-
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM.
We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping.
In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace.
I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections.
When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation!
To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually.
My conclusions are:
-
Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what!
-
The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO.
-
We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time.
My actions are:
a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request.
b) I'm working on the site:
- Improving internal link building for relevant keywords
- Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO.
- Also, I did some redirections that were missing.
c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site.
d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate!
I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people!
Thanks a lot,
-
-
Your new hosting company provided you a shared IP address which is not a big problem, unless there are some funny business going on with other website on the same IP.
According to this test, 71000+ websites have the same IP as your site
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
-
Need Help - Lost 75% Of Traffic Since May 2018
Sorry to go in-depth here, but want to give all available information. We went live late April 2018 with our two websites in Shopify (moved from Magento, same admin, different storeviews...which we find later to cause some issues). Both of these websites sell close to the same products (we purchased a competitor about 5 years ago, which is why we have two). The nice thing is that they do almost identical amounts in sales. They have done very well for years, especially in the last two years. Well, the core algo update around May 22nd-24th 2018 happened and wiped out about 65% of our Google traffic for one website (MySupplementStore.com). And this latest update, wiped out another 20%. I couldn't figure out why this would have happened, because we were very cautious about keeping things separate, unique descriptions etc. So I did some digging and this is what I found: The reviews we migrated over from Magento somehow were combined and added to both websites. This is something I didn't notice. I had this resolved a month ago so that each site's reviews are now only on that website. Our blog section was duplicated across both websites during the migration. Again, something I didn't notice, as we have close to over 1,000 blog posts per site. This was resolved two weeks ago. As I was looking more, I found that the last 6 months, a person working for us (for 3 years), started writing descriptions and pasting them on both websites, instead of making them unique to each website. I trusted her for years, but I think she just got lazy. She quit about a month before the migration as well. We are currently working on this, but its been taking awhile because we have over 5,000 products on each site and have no idea which ones are duplicates. I did also notice: Site very slow when checking site speed tools. Working on that this week. When I take snippets of text or do searches, many times it shows up in omitted results. No messages in Google Webmaster Tools So the question is... Do you think it is the duplicate content issues that caused the drop? Our other site is Best Price Nutrition, which didn't see a big drop at all during that update. If not, any other ideas why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Duplicate content across domains?
Does anyone have suggestions for managing duplicate product/solution website content across domains? (specifically parent/child company domains) Is it advisable to do this? Will it hurt either domain? Any best practices when going down this path?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pilgrimquality0 -
Backlinks from old domain
Hi, We have gone through a change of company brand name including a new domain name.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agguk
We followed google recommendations at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en and it seems to have worked really well, the new domain has replaced the old in the google search results. My question: Still most of our backlinks, both anchor text and links use the old brand name and domain and it´s a slow process trying to update all references. Although they get redirected fine to the new domain (also following google recommendations), I wonder if the current scenario is doing any harm, SEO wise (other than the missed visual exposure of the new brand name) ? ...since the old brand name is not present at the new site I´m thinking of including "New brand name - previously old brand name" somewhere just to provide some sort of connection to all old backlinks, would that be unnecessary? I should mention that the old brand name actually includes our most important keyword but the new brand name does not. Thanks!0 -
Help in Internal Links
Which link attribute should be given to internal links of website? Do follow or No follow and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Please help with creation of slideshare
Just wondering how I would go about creating something like this http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap?from_search=1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Domain advice needed, please
Could i get a little domain advice please. Launching a new website project and want to put it on a domain we already own (both domains are in the same niche as the larger project). The new project will be aimed at the UK market. The choice is: .co.uk we own with a good name, however it's Domain Authority rank is 7 and it's only about 8 months old. .com domain which is 6 years old, has a Domain Authority rank of 33 but is not as good a domain name. The Competitive Link Analysis tells me that the rivals for the keywords we would be targeting are between 24 and 42. Which domain would people go with? All things equal it would be a fair guess that the older, higher Domain Authority ranked .com will require less work to rank in the engines, however it's not as good brand wise. Thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Social Signals...I Need More
Hi, Having used the Open Site Explorer (page specific metrics) tool I've realized I'm lacking in the Social Signals area...I have only 1 tweet and ZERO for everything else (Facebook shares, Likes, Google +1 etc). So I have 2 quesitons: How can I get more social signals (is there a service I can use to do it)? How long will the new social signals take to appear in the Open Site Explorer information? I've just paid someone on Fiverr.com to share my website link on his Facebook account, to tweet it, and also to use PingFM... Any other ideas would be GREAT - I can see this is a real weakness for my websites... Thanks, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James10 -
Consolidating 3 regional domains
We recently took the decision to consolidate 3 domains for .com.au, .eu and .us. This decision was made before I arrived here and I'm not sure it's the right call. The proposal is to use a brand new .co (not .com isn't available) domain. The main reason is in terms of trying to build domain strength towards one domain instead or trying to grow 3 domains. We re-sell stock simlar to hotel rooms (different industry) and our site is heavily search based. So duplicate content is an issue that we hope improve on with this approach. One driver was we found for example that our Autralian site was outranking out european site in european searches. We don't want to only hold certain inventory on certain sites either because this doesn't work with our business rules. Anyway if we are to go about this, what would be the best practise in terms of going about this. Should we suddenly just close one of the domain and to a * 301 redirect or should we redirect each page individually? Someone has proposed using robots text to use a phased approach, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with robots.txt, thought a phased individual page 301 using htaccess may be possible? In terms of SEO is 1 domain generally better that 3? Is this a good strategy? What's the best 301 approach? Any other advice? Thanks J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solas0