Site rankings down
-
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases.
Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now.
Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board.
We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this?
Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms.
In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly.
Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com
Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now!
Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice.
Best Regards,
Stephen
-
Our rankings on the two main keywords have recovered slightly. We've gone from page 5 to page 3 on 'nuts and bolts', and are page 2 on 'bolts and nuts'.
I think what's happened is that, rather than us being penalised directly, sites that link to us have been penalised, resulting in a knock on effect. Does this sound reasonable? I don't think we'd be page 2 on such a competitive term if we had been penalised.
I've been slowly building relevant links with prospective customers (ie a few classic car sites have linked to us, our old imperial bolts are very useful for them) and kept up a very basic social media profile - just the odd blog post and sharing on Facebook and Twitter.
Regarding links, looking through my link profile
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a>
we do have links from directories that don't look fantastic, more are shown in Webmaster Tools than are listed here. Some of the directories no longer seem to exist, I take it I don't need to do anything and Google will catch up in those cases. For the others, should I attempt to remove (or disavow) all links with names like best-directory etc? Are most directories bad these days? Or should I just concentrate on building better links?
Again, any advice is greatly appreciated.
Best Regards,
Stephen
-
Hi Jesse, thanks for your response.
Your advice is sensible, and I will keep building links with relevant sites. I've read a bit about disavowing now and I'm not sure that's the answer either.
What confuses me though is sites have leapfrogged us who have very few links and little on-page optimisation. I've optimised for 'nuts and bolts' - title, h1 tags, body text - hopefully without going overboard. Some of the sites above us are simply not relevant / have no links. So is linkbuilding still the answer?
Would you get rid of the dropdown navigation? With that, every page has 107 internal links. Ditching the dropdown would mean 2 clicks to get to the item you want rather than 1, but I don't think that's too bad. For example, it'd be 'Bolts and Setscrews > BSF Bolts'. I even had static pages rather than dynamic to help with SEO, and that's some major upkeep when I want to make changes! I think I'm going to move to a responsive design, I've been experimenting with other sites.
Best Regards,
Stephen
-
I'm still thinking about this.. I'd continue building links myself and see what happens.
The one thing I definitely wouldn't do is start disavowing. Make an attempt to remove the links yourself by contacting webmasters before doing this. And then still be sure you actually have been penalized before using the disavow tool. That thing makes me nervous...
-
Thanks for your response, much appreciated. I have thought along those lines, now I'm a little unsure.
I'd be happy if it wasn't a penalty, but I'm not sure. I downloaded the list from Google Webmaster Tools and there are quite a lot of directories there - most I don't remember building which is odd but possible over the years.
I've deleted a videogame forum profile I'm a member of I had which linked to my site, I'm looking at things like that.
I did think similar about other sites gaining links, but so many at once is odd. And there are now sites above us with zero links and hardly any on-page SEO, and hastily cobbled together pages with exact match domains - one of which if you do a Google search for 'nuts and bolts' is called 'bolts-nuts-washers', I won't link to them fully. That gives a good example, complete with flashing text(!). Very frustrating!
Google and SEOMOZ tell me I have 12 pages with duplicate titles and 80 with duplicate meta descriptions. I'll remove those also, other than that I'm not sure whether to start disavowing links.
Any ideas where I go from here? Any help appreciated!
Best Regards,
Stephen
-
Hmmm... glancing briefly at your link profile I'm not sure I could classify this as a Penguin Penalty. Especially with the SERPs dropping back in April. I understand it got worse post-penguin but still... Your link profile isn't too deep and you don't have thousands of weird bizarro-links coming in. Relevant blog commenting and social media will definitely not affect your site negatively.
There's a chance you just need to pick up your SEO efforts. Maybe the algo updates bumped up other sites that have been gaining more links than you recently or something of the sort. I'm not sure but I feel like you just need to get back on top of your link building efforts in a truly white-hat fashion and see what happens.
Sorry I'm not sure I'm being very helpful here.
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
-
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Regional and Global Site
We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Why does this site rank above us?
We own www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk and over the last 8 months have built some decent guest post, charity and customer links but still we seem to be beaten on good words such as banners, banner, vinyl banner, pvc banner etc by this website www-signfirm.com we just cannot figure out how this is happening and would be very grateful if someone with great wisdom could give us an in-site into why this is happening and we would be very grateful..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Hey guys, quick question I didn't find an answer to online. Scenario: 1. Site A links to Site B. It's a natural, regular, follow-link 2. Site A joins Site B's affiliate program, and adds an affiliate link Question: Does the first, regular follow link get devalued by the second affiliate link? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Djdealeyo0 -
Network Of Sites...
Hi Guys, Just wondering if anyone can help me out... We have recently been hit by the Google penguin update and I'm currently working though all the bad / spammy backlinks that previous SEO companies have built for us. I have come across 1 particular domain www.justgoodcars.com they seem to have a lot of different domain names: <colgroup><col width="390"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
| http://www.justpulsarcars.com/nissan-pulsar-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html |
| http://www.justpumacars.com/ford-puma-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html |
| http://www.justpuntocars.com/dutch-site/fiat-punto-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html?selectcountry1=United_Kingdom |
| http://www.justpuntocars.com/fiat-punto-warranties/1/United_Kingdom/all.html?selectcountry1=United_Kingdom | Now all of theses domains names have exactly the same IP Address?? Above is just a few I would say there are 100s of them. Do you think this could have an affect on us? Thanks, Scott0 -
How to increase the page rank for keyword for entire site
sorry for my bad english is there any way to increase the ranking for a keyword for the entire site .i know that seo is done per page basis .my site contains 1000ds of posts and i cant get back links for each and every post .so i picked 4 keywords which are mostly used while searching my products , is there any method i can increase my ranking for those keywords like increasing domain authority EXAMPLE :like if i want to increase my ranking for "buy laptop" .if any user searches In google with buy laptop i want my site or any of related pages that match the user search query must show up in front
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | prakash.moturu0