Why is my site going from bad to worse in the SERPS?
-
I've been having issues ranking for the key word kayak fishing. At one point a few months ago I managed to get my site www.yakangler.com to page 2 but have since fallen back to page 20+. I thought it was because of keyword stuffing or over optimization so I made some tweaks to my home page and started to see a small daily rise but stopped at page 19. I have since slipped back to the top of page 24... What am I doing wrong? I don't employ any blackhat linking, I know I have some W3C validation errors on my home page "many caused by the facebook like button". Any ideas on how to improve my SERPS would be greatly appreciated.
The most frustrating thing is comparing my site to the top Google searches for that key word... I should be doing fine definitely not page 24!
Much gratitude in advance for any help you can offer!
-
It takes at least a month in my experience to see changes showing in search results. I also see a lot of fluctuation in client accounts, so definitely look at average ranking trends over a longer period of time.
Also, there are few external links to your website for the term "kayak fishing" http://awesomescreenshot.com/03112whz3f
It's true the other domains all have kayak fishing in their urls, but you also have links with that term in your URLs too site:yakangler.com/kayak-fishing
I would recommend trying to get links from quality domains using anchor text Kayak fishing and other phrases incorporating Kayak Fishing ("submit kayak fishing stories" for example), and linking back to the relevant pages on your website plus a few links to the home page.
Just don't overdo it and keep it natural. You may even want to check in with a few Chamber of Commerce websites or local city/town websites, as they may be looking for content or resources for people who want to kayak in their area.
Best of luck to you!
-
Thanks for your input, The top 5 domains all have "Kayak Fishing" in their URL so they all have many links tagged with that key word, where as we do not because it wouldn't be natural. I could understand why this would cause us to not be on the first page but page 23?
Here is the top result in site explorer: http://awesomescreenshot.com/02b12w4n5c
Here is us: http://awesomescreenshot.com/02112w4fdd
Grrr, and may of the top links are what I would consider spammy, directories or article submissions sites.
Will we never be able to beat them because they get the key word in their anchor texts because of the site name?
Non of the top 5 listings have a larger social media presence then us, in fact many don't do any social media.
I updated the links menu at the bottom to say "helpful sites"
Also how long should I wait between SEO changes to see if there were any positive or negative movement. My site has been fluctuating from page 19 on Monday to page 23 today...
-
Hi Mark,
What are you doing to get external links to your website? Check out some of the page 1 competitor listings for your targeted keyword using Open Site Explorer. The people ahead of you may have a longer list of quality links, older domain age, more social shares, etc.
Check out what your competitors are doing, and if it's white hat and great for users on your website, try to replicated it on your own.
Also, you have a lot of great content and sections on your website. I really enjoyed finding the kayak fishing reports--though at first I was confused because I was expecting to see regional weather reports for kayakers in those designated areas (probably because I'm not a kayak fisher).
Regardless, these reports are really fun to read and I think you should leverage them more in your SEO. We all know that thoughtfully created user content is beneficial, and you seem to have a lot of that. I would optimize this page http://www.yakangler.com/submit-content with more content about "Submit your kayak fishing stories" and text about how to do so on your site, examples of what you're looking for, etc. Currently the page says it will auto-close in 5 seconds but doesn't.
Also consider changing the anchor text in your footer link for "Links"
Though you link that anchor text to legitimate links, Google bots may not be able to understand that, and may think you are in fact trying out some blackhat when you're not, as you said. Try changing it to "helpful resources" or something similar.Hope some of these suggestions help.
-
James thanks for the help! I checked WMT and the only messages I had were 2 server outages I had one last month and the other on the 18. The outage was only for a couple of hours. The SERP rankings have fallen way before these messages. There are not other warnings other then some 500 errors and 404's etc.
-
Have you checked Google Webmaster tools to make sure you didn't get hit with a penalty. Although you may not be engaged in any black hat SEO that doesn't mean you couldn't have been a victim of negative SEO by a competitor or even that some SEO tactics you previously employed have now been devalued or penalized.
I would check to see if you have any warnings in WMT and report back here and I can help you more from that point.
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
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Site hacked in Jan. Redeveloped new site. Still not ranking. Should we change domain?
Our top ranking site in the UK was hacked at the end of 2014. http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/ The site was the subject of a manual spam action from Google. After several unsuccessful attempts to clean it up, using Securi.net and reinstating old versions of the site, changing passwords etc. we took the decision to redevelop the site. We also changed hosting provider as we had received absolutely no support from them whatsoever in resolving the issue. So far we have: Removed the old website files off the server Developed a new website having implemented 301's for all the old URL's (except the spam ones) Submitted a reconsideration request for the manual spam action, which was accepted. Disavowed all the spammy inbound links through Webmaster Tools Implemented custom URL parameters through Google to not index the SPAM URLs ( which were using parameters) Our organic traffic is down by 63% compared to last year, and we are not ranking for most of our target keywords any longer. Is there anything that I am missing in the actions I have taken so far? We were advised that at this stage changing domain and starting again might be the way to go. However the current domain has been used by us since 2007, so it would be a big call. Any advice is appreciated, thanks. Sue - http://www.ultimatefloorsanding.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | galwaygirl0 -
Block bad crawlers
Hi! how are you? I've been working on some of my sites, and noticed that i'm getting lots of crawls by search engines that i'm not intereted in ranking well. My question is the following: do you have a list of 'bad behaved' search engines that take lots of bandwidth and don´t send much/good traffic? If so, do you know how to block them using robots.txt? Thanks for the help! Best wishes, Ariel
Technical SEO | | arielbortz0 -
Site verification in WMT
Hello all, I have a site and I want to set a preferred domain but when I do it says I need to verify my site but it gives me no ideas how to do that. I know that normally you have to do it when you set the account up but I had an analytics account for this domain first then just logged on with those details and I was in with no verification process. Cheers
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Have my SERP listings been hacked?
When you Google my site the organic search results look normal. The preview site images even display my actual site when you roll over the results. However, when you click a result you are directed to various Spam pages, not my website. How is this possible? This only happens when you click through from search engines. If you type the URL directly in your browser, you are not redirected to a spam site. the site: funeralhomeoptions.com Have any of you seen or experienced this before?
Technical SEO | | emmyjo0 -
Asking to remove links from other sites
How hard is it to get people to take off links that point to your site that are on theirs? I have about 4 sites that I would like my link OFF of their blogroll because I think I was hit by the penguin update because of that. Do you know if there is anything you can do if they DON'T take it off?
Technical SEO | | SeaC0 -
Redirect from old wordpress site to new php site? Best approach
Hi I have two websites one legacy site done in wordpress the other in php. However I would like to merge the two together and remove the wordpress site. However it has a good link profile and the pages rank well. What is the best approach to do a 301 redirect from the old site with all its pages pointing to the homepage of the new site? If so what's the best way to do this in wordpress? Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Redirecting a old aged site to a new exact match site?
Hi All, I have a question. I have 2 sites with me in the same sector and want some help. site 1 is a old site started back in 2003 and has some amount of links to it and has a pr 3 with some good links to it but doesn't rank much for any keywords for the timing. site 2 is a aged domain but newly developed with unique content and has a good amount of exact match with a .com version. so will there be any benefit by redirecting site 1 to site 2 to get the seo benefits and a start for link bulding? or is it best to develop and work on each site? the sector is health insurance. Thanks
Technical SEO | | macky71