Don't reach to make our site back in rankings
-
My URL is: http://tinyurl.com/nslu78
Hi, I really hope someone can help because my site seems to be penalized since last year now.
Because we were not SEO experts but doctors and wanted to do things in a white hat way so we have given our SEO strategy (on-site and off-site) to the best US SEO agencies and now we are penalized.
We was ranking on the 1st page with 15 keywords and now we don't even are in the first 10 pages.
I know that our sector is suspicious but we are a real laboratory and our site is 100% transparent. I understand that a lot of people can think that we are all the same but this is not true, we are not a virtual company that don't even show their name or address, we show name, address, phone number, fax, email, chat service, VAT number everything so please help us.
We have spent 3 months analysing every paragraph of google guidelines to see if we were violating some rule such as hidden text, link schemes, redirections, keyword stuffing, maleware, duplicate content etc.. and found nothing except little things but maybe we are not good enough to find the problem.
In 3 months we have passed from 85 toxic links to 24 and from 750 suspicious links to 300. we have emailed, and call all the webmasters of each site several times to try to delete as many links as possible.We have sent to google a big excel with all our results and attempts to delete those badlinks.
We have then sent a reconsideration request explaining all the things that we have verified on-site and off-site but it seems that it didn't worked because we are still penalized.
I really hope someone can see where the problem is.
thank you -
This is probably the extent of the answer I can give you in Q&A. I would look at when your traffic dropped, and attempt to line that up the Algorithm History. If the date of your traffic drop lines up with a Penguin or Panda date, that's a pretty clear sign. There are some great resources linked to on that same algorithm history to help you.
If you HAVE been hit by Penguin (for the links), it sounds like you're doing all the right things. The process is usually disavow then reconsider, but where you haven't received a message that's probably not necessary. Just keep cleaning and keep working on gaining more legitimate visibility. Do have a look, though, and make sure it's not Panda.
-
Hi again
We have never bougth links and never done link exhange.
Yes we also seel our own products. That's why i have told you that we have always been ranked better than our own distributors.
During 2010, 2011 and until nov 2012 we have been working with the biggest SEO companies in the US. They were "supposed" to do all white hat seo but I figured out that they did for examples blog posts but on their own blogs. I thought that they were searching blogs related to our niche but they had created blogs and put posts in the same blog for all their customers including me. So the same blog could talked about cars, penis extenders or insurrance etc... It was like 1 or 2 posts per month.
I have cheched the links with a link detox and they can be suspicious someones but none of the toxic ones have been made by them. All the toxic ones are pages that i don't even know, I have never asked them to add a link to my site. I have found as toxic links few forums introduced in discussions between the member but they don't come from us.
They did also article submissions but like 1 article every month and with no more than 1 anchor text and posted 1 one press release website only to not generate duplicate content on the net. So I don't think this can be the problem.
I am not an expert but I have started to become one trying to figure out all what they did. I also think that many bad links have been made by the compentence. Our sector is also hard.
If it is panda I should try to put refresh the content?
thank you
-
Are you sure it's the links that got you in trouble and not Google Panda?
The more I hear, the more it sounds like you might not be losing rankings based on links at all. Did you actually build/buy the links yourself, or were these natural links that webmasters added on their own? If the links are natural, there's probably no reason to be asking for removal despite what some tool tells you about their toxicity.
It's up to Google to decide which result is the best when it comes to duplicate content. If their signals indicate that your distributor's pages are better for users, they will be more likely to show the distributor. By the way, it's fairly common for sellers to out-rank manufacturers. Unless you sell direct to the consumer, there's no reason you should out-rank the seller for product keywords.
Those manufacturers that do sell direct to consumers often create a product description for themselves, and another that they provide to distributors. I wouldn't expect any success in asking a seller to make their own descriptions.
I'm not sure what you mean by "can Google confuse our sites?" but the answer is probably "no." Being first to publish is one factor, but it's certainly not the only one.
-
Hi
I have never received a message from Google on WMT neither for the reconsideration request sent at the end of january nor for the disavow file sent at the begining of january after 3 months of work . The file indicated all our huge effort trying to ask for the bad links to be removed. For each link I have sent them the emails sent to the webmasters, their reponse or no reponse.
We have never received a message of unatural backlinks.
(I have received one but it was that another page of another domain was not accessible).
Can it be an issue about similar sites? i tell you that because we have worked a lot asking to our affiliates and distributors to delete the duplicate content that they had copied from our site but despite of this job that we did las autumn maybe google thinks that they are too much sites and he doens't know which is the original one. I am really not sure about this issue because we are the manufaturer so our site is the oldest one (8 or 9 years).
For example there is this site that belongs to one of our distributors: http://tinyurl.com/bu6m769
He started to be well ranked when we have started to go down in SERPs.
Can google confuses our sites?
bye
-
Hi,
What was Google's response to your reconsideration request? Did you hear back in WMT? Did you use the disavow tool on links you'd tried to have removed?
Sometimes it can take time to get back in the rankings, even when no longer penalized, because your prior rankings were based on bad links.
-
Thank you for your answer james.
I agree that we can continue to build a good link building strategy and maybe add fresh content to the site but the problem is that If I am not able to find what I am doing wrong I may stay penalized like this forever.
As i said before, we have taken and read one by one all the google guidelines paragraphs to see if we were violating something but I am sure that we are doing things exactly as Google wants so I suppose that the problem is outside the site but can't find where.
-
It seems like you have done what you can for damage control. Now focus your efforts on publishing high quality content and building links. You need to marginalize the effects of the bad SEO with proactive link building.
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
-
My company bought another company. How long do I keep the purchased company's site live?
How long do I wait before redirecting the purchased company's webpages to the equivalent pages on our site? Do I need to keep some sort of announcement about the merger live on their website for a while first?
Technical SEO | | movingbusinessestothecloud0 -
Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?
About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )
Technical SEO | | DanWrightson0 -
Google ranking my site abroad, how to stop?
Hi Mozzers, I have a UK based ecommerce site, that sells only to the UK. Over the last month Google has started ranking my site on foreign flavours of Google, so I keep getting traffic coming to my site from Europe, America and the far east that we could never sell to, and as a result bounce is going up and engagement is going down. They are definitely coming to the site from google searches that relate to my product type, but in regions I do not service. Is there a way to stop google doing this? I have the target set to UK in WMT, but is there anything else I can do? I worried about my UK ranking being damaged by an increasing overall bounce rate. Thanks
Technical SEO | | FDFPres0 -
Google using descriptions from other websites instead of site's own meta description
In the last month or so, Google has started displaying a description under links to my home page in its search results that doesn't actually come from my site. I have a meta description tag in place and for a very limited set of keywords, that description is displayed, but for the majority of results, it's displaying a description that appears on Alexa.com and a handful of other sites that seem to have copied Alexa's listing, e.g. similarsites.com. The problem is, the description from these other sites isn't particularly descriptive and mentions a service that we no longer provide. So my questions are: Why is Google doing this? Surely that's broken behaviour. How do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | antdesign0 -
Walking into a site I didn't build, easy way to fix this # indexing problem?
I recently joined a team with a site without a) Great content b) Not much of any search traffic I looked and all their url's are built in this way: Normal looking link -> not actually a new page but # like: /#content-title And it has no h1 tag. Page doesn't refresh. My initial thought is to gut the site and build it in wordpress, but first have to ask, is there a way to make a site with /#/ content loading friendly to search engines?
Technical SEO | | andrewhyde0 -
Would duplicate listings effect a client's ranking if they used same address?
Lots of duplication on directory listings using similar or same address, just different company names... like so-and-so carpet cleaning; and another listing with so-and-so janitorial services. Now my client went from a rank around 3 - 4 to not even in the top 50 within a week. -- -- -- Would duplication cause this sudden drop? Not a lot of competition for a client using keyword (janitorial services nh); -- -- -- would a competitor that recently optimized a site cause this sudden drop? Client does need to optimize for this keyword, and they do need to clean up this duplication. (Unfortunately this drop happened first of March -- I provided the audit, recommendations/implementation and still awaiting the thumbs up to continue with implementation). --- --- --- Did Google make a change and possibly find these discrepancies within listings and suddenly drop this client's ranking? And they there's Google Places:
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar
Client usually ranks #1 for Google Places with up to 12 excellent reviews, so they are still getting a good spot on the first page. The very odd thing though is that Google is still saying that need to re-verify their Google places. I really would like to know for my how this knowledge how a Google Places account could still need verification and yet still rank so well within Google places on page results? because of great reviews? --- Any ideas here, too? _Cindy0 -
I have a WordPress site with 30 + categories and about 2k tags. I'd like to bring that number down for each taxonomy. What is the proper practice to do that?
I want to bring my categories down to about 8 or so and the tags... They're just a mess and I'd really like to bring that figure down significantly and setup a standard for usage. My thought was to remove the un-needed tags and categories and setup 301 redirects for the ones that I'm removing. Is that even necessary? Are there tools that can assist with this? What are the "gotchas" I should be aware of? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digisavvy1 -
Should I have a 'more' button for links?
I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it. I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear. However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0