Is it my back link profile that is affecting my rankings ?
-
my website www.funktiongolf.co.uk had been ranking well until January and i'm nearly sure its due to low quality links and poor back-link profile i.e over-optimized money keywords
can someone guide me?
thanks for anyone that replies. I really do appreciate the
help. -
What I'm seeing is the overwhelming primacy of relevance. I've seen sites with links from a mere 10-12 websites get top 4/5 positions (beating sites with 50 times as many links) -- because those few links are deemed highly relevant.
A key metric appears (from what I've seen) the referring sites/pages having part or all of the referring keyword (or a variation of it) in their url.
-
Your rankings may have dropped because of the Panda update in January.
Did you start to lose traffic around the 17th January?
The Panda update is based on page content so your backlinks may not be the problem.
-
I think you're right - your link profile is definitely not up to where you'd like to see it.
The thing is, you own control of almost all your links. They are directory submissions, minisites, etc. You aren't getting a lot of natural links, social linking or anyone talking about you. You need to generate that "word of mouse" that will get links to you that are out of your control.
-
Do you have Google Webmaster Tools installed? Generally you will receive a warning from Google before your site is penalized, unless you are talking about just specific keywords. If you can pinpoint the exact dates of the drops, you should be able to see if they coincide with Penguin updates or not.
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
-
A Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking but why?
Hi, I wondered if anyone has ever experienced anything like this before, one of our customers has a website JDB Events (http://www.jdb-events.com/). When he first came to us he was using Fast Hosts and he was experiencing down time pretty much every day in periods of up to an hour. The first step before carrying out any SEO was to place the website on our VPS so that the downtime issue was resolved. It did resolve the issue and the speed of the website was also increased. My next issue was to address the length of the Title on the home page because it was 157 characters, I usually keep these to 70 characters. This is the old Meta Title: JDB Events Limited - Event, Production & AV Hire Specialists | The West Midlands Dance Floor Hire, LED Furniture, DJ, Disco Hire & Event Services Specialists Here is the my new Meta Title: JDB Events | LED Furniture Hire for Parties and Corporate Events I have attached a screenshot of the drop that I have experienced, would anyone recommend that it's ok to keep the title longer so that I can cram more search terms into it, I use Woo Rank as a bench mark and this recommends shortening the title but I would be interested in hearing anyone's views. Other steps that I have taken: Shortened the home page description WWW Resolve Added Robots.txt Crawled all of the pages for 404 errors etc The next step I'm thinking of taking is replacing the amended meta title and description for the old one and monitoring that, other than that I can't see why I have taken such a hit. Thanks NewServerSpeedTest.png OldServerSpeedTest.png Rankings.png
Search Behavior | | chrissmithps0 -
Personalised Geo-targeted results - How does Google pass link juice?
Hello, Many websites now serve specific home page offers based on the location of the customer, my question is, how does link juice flow around a site when the links (this case from the homepage) are served up based on a visitors location? Internal links from your homepage are valuable for ranking that product well in the SERPs so how does Google deal with this? So, for example, a car hire website based in the UK. If you arrive on the care hire website sat in Manchester (Northern UK city), on the homepage the website serves offers of car hire deals in Manchester, Leeds, London and international destinations. If you arrived on this website from London (Southern UK City), you would not see the Manchester link at all but London, and other cities in the South. In this case, when Google crawls the car hire website, it will see internal links but a)which version and b) is there any way of sharing this link value around? Basically, we want to understand if Manchester in this case will get the benefit of an internal homepage link from Google even though we only show Manchester to people FROM Manchester, OR, do Google only give juice based on one version of the website, a generic UK version? Or to put it another way, is there any way of cashing in on both geo-targetting the customer based on their location AND getting link juice from those geo-specific home page links? Perhaps there is some code or way of telling Google that people from Manchester (a certain % of our visitors) will see a homepage internal link for Manchester that will pass some small % link value?
Search Behavior | | xoffie0 -
Google PageRank and google keyword ranks
Hi, I manage around 13 Clients for SEO and this last two weeks i have been having problems with google keyword ranking some of my clients went down almost 40 positions for some keywords other 15 other stayed the same and some just went down 1 or 5 positions. Somebody know what is happening with google? is it shuffling around positions of people? Any advice or how you do your SEO I'm willing to work together and share experiences and tactics on SEO to people that also share with me in order to build more strategies on this amazing market. Thanks.
Search Behavior | | computernc0 -
Gathering Data on Link Removal and Disavow Tool
Hi, There is so much opinion out there about Link Removal and Google's Disavow Tool, but it's really hard to get hold of reliable data about what people are actually doing in this area. Through my involvement in rmoov, I've become really interested in participation and cleanup rates when it comes to Link Removal campaigns. So, I've put together a quick survey aimed at getting a real indication of what is happening out there. The survey is here The recent introduction of Google's Disavow Tool has opened up another area I'd really like to understand more, so there is a question on this included. I'd love to pull together a blog post with a decent snapshot of participation, success or failure for those trying to remove links and hope Moz Members might help out by answering this quick survey. Sha P.S. I'll update this post once results are available for those that are interested.
Search Behavior | | ShaMenz1 -
Irratic page rank results - why?
Hi, Hi- I've changed the title and reposted this question as I didn't get any insight. I really am going around in circles for this; so any help that can be given would be really appreciated.I know that you guys have the knowledge so really hoping you can share it! Thanks - background: I run two sites: www.ragsmetals.com and www.yourgoldfund.com: They offer similar products but to different markets: one is predominently trade, one predominently customer focused. They vie for the same keywords.e.g. Buy Gold My Issue: I have been trying to build www.yourgoldfund.com up from an SEO point of view; it is FALLING in the rankings; I am doing NOTHING with www.ragsmetals.com and it is rising in the rankings. I checked webmaster to see if there were any warnings as a result of penguin (found out how to do this on here - thanks for that!) there are none. I have optimized the pages a lot. I have put time into getting in bound traffic, and even more excitingly some experts (from reputable domains) have just linked to our site because they like our content! So to me things should be improving . NOTE: My OSE listed inbound links are incredibly diferent from google Webmaster. What can I do. I am a scientific person so I love the fact that I have 2 sites to compare...interested to hear your thoughts. Many thanks in advance
Search Behavior | | girlie0 -
How do I get my report to show ranking for a location such as pittsburgh or columbus?
I am not interested in US ranking only Pittsburgh and Columbus as that's where my client's offices are located. Are there settings to help me view our rank on our areas? Thank you!!
Search Behavior | | IEInteractiveServices0 -
Interesting keyword ranking issue
Hello Everybody, Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Without further ado, I'll jump straight to it: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk is the web site of a UK based data recovery company. Historically the site has always ranked well for popular data recovery keywords in the UK, with page 1 rankings for most things data recovery related. However, lately things seem to have changed for our most important phrase "data recovery". We noticed several months ago that Google had started to favour the page http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm instead of http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ when a search for "data recovery" (and similar) was performed. This didn't concern us that much as our rankings remained good. However now, neither of these pages seems to be ranking well when a search for "data recovery" is performed (I gave up at Page 5 - who looks past there when searching?). I would appreciate your input on this please - especially about the following points: 1. Why have these two pages now seemingly disappeared from SERPS when a search for "data recovery" is performed ? 2. Why has Google chosen http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm rather than http://www.dataclinic.co.uk ? 3. Is this just something to do with UK results ? 4. Other sites I would expect NOT to see in the top results have started appearing - despite their link profiles etc remaining poor - perhaps Google is doing a bit of reorganisation with SERPS related to data recovery at the moment ? 5. And perhaps, most importantly - do you think we need to do anything about our current lack of visibility ?? As I mentioned, we've always ranked well, so these results are puzzling... Should search results revert "back to normal" in a day or so, or am I missing something and need to take action ?? Thanks for any input on this - we would be very grateful indeed for you help ! Kind Regards, Sue
Search Behavior | | 3Amigos0 -
Ranking multiple domains in the SERPS for same keywords?
Curious if anyone has had success ranking multiple sites with same whois and server info? We have a client who has purchased multiple businesses over the years in the same industry. Each site has a solid amount of link popularity already and good respected Brand. But I'm wondering with the whois info being the same and the same servers, if ranking for multiple domains will be worth attempting.
Search Behavior | | iAnalyst.com0