From page 3 to page 75 on Google. Is my site really so bad?
-
So, a couple of weeks ago I started my first CPA website, just as an experiment and to see how well I could do out of it. My rankings were getting better every day, and I’ve been producing constant unique content for the site to improve my rankings even more.
2 days ago my rankings went straight to the last page of Google for the keyword “acne scar treatment” but Google has not banned me or given my domain a minus penalty. I’m still ranking number 1 for my domain, and they have not dropped the PR as my keyword is still in the main index.
I’m not even sure what has happened? Am I not allowed to have a CPA website in the search results?
The best information I could find on this is: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76465
But I’ve been adding new pages with unique content.
My site is www.acne-scar-treatment.co
Any advice would be appreciated.
-
I would have thought G wouldn't be keen on that sort of thing anyway, just based on what's acceptable in Ads for Adwords, they don't like stuff like !!! there so they're bound to see it as spammy in a title too.
The site is hardly what you'd expect for a professional corporation or anything but I've seen far, far worse in terms of spam with good rankings lol... mind you, that was before Panda, maybe it's more stringent on that front now.
-
Thank you guys, that actually takes away a lot of worry as i thought google had put me there on purpose.
-
Ya, saw it in a brief search. For Timur, this brings up a point about guessing what Google considers spam, their Adwords guidelines will give you a pretty good starting point: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide_toc.cs&path=policy
-
If this is a new site like you mention I've found it very common for the search ranking to bounce around. As both the content and any inbound links stabilize it will probably settle into it's normal ranking location. I've read and experienced that any changes made to a site don't really show up with the search engines for 1-3 months. If your site is only a couple weeks old it will remain pretty volatile for at minimum another few weeks in search results. Best of luck to you!
-
"The title tag itself is kind of spammy with 3 exclamation points"
Oh, didn't notice that... tabbed browser windows and laziness to look at source code lol.
-
Well, the on-page isn't that heavy on ads and it certainly doesn't come across as that spammy... maybe a little but only to others who know what affiliate sites look like. You said it was new, so my bet would be the same as what other have been posting on here with new sites lately... that you had a honeymoon period where G put you up as a fresh new site (maybe to see if you get a lot of usage, links, bookmarks, etc...) then chucked you back to where it deems is right in terms of trust and authority. I could be wrong there but... that's my best guess.
Also, most of your incoming links look a little spammy (though relevant spammy at least). I'd get some more, from a more diverse set of places, with diverse anchor text.
Maybe
-
With your site being so new, you were probably getting a fresh content boost and now that it is gone your site is ranking where it most likely stacks up against the competition. Here are few problems right off the bat though:
1: A large % of pages' title tags are duplicated - | Get Your FREE Trial NOW!!! | Shiva23
2: The title tag itself is kind of spammy with 3 exclamation points
3: Your content is all highly similar to "acne scar removal" so as you add more content, you're getting too dense around that phrase.
4: Your text is almost the same color as your background. Old school, but still a spam penalty to have "hidden text". It's best to stay away from styles that could cause this.Many websites rank well that are using a CPA model. Use the tools here and else where to see how you really measure up to your competition and you'll have a lot more insight into what you need to change.
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
-
Its posible to use Google Authorship in an online shop?
Today I installed Google Authorship in my Wordpress Blog and I would like to know if its posible to implement it in my Opencart online shop. I am not interested in rich snippets because I have 9k of products and the 90% of them dont have sells nor reviews
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mozismoz0 -
Ajax Pagination on Ecommerce category pages - Good or Bad?
We have an ecommerce site. We installed an AJAX feature that when you scroll down to say, the end of 6 rows of products, it loads another page below the seam. Question is, is this good or bad for SEO? Any tests you can suggest? Thanks Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
How to gain links to this site
Hello, How would you suggest I gain backlinks for bobweikel.com in light of all present and future Google updates? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Rank drop ecommerce site
Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth. With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Competitors Building Bad Back Links
Hi there, I recently checked the back links for my site using Open Site Explorer, and I noticed a huge number of bad back links which I believe a competitor might be building to help lower my ranking for a number of highly competitive keywords. Besides spending time disavowing these links, what else can be done? Has anyone else been faced with the same problem? Any help would be appreciated. cXT0lvd.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bamcreative0 -
What has been updated on part of Google Penguin 2.0?
I am looking for more details of Google Penguin 2.0 update. Is any information from SEO experts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gbavadiya1 -
Is this website being punished by Google?
Hi, I just took over the SEO for a friend of mine's website. Is this website being punished by Google? It has a strong link score, the homepage needs work as far as Key wording goes but it does not appear in Google's top 100 for any keyword. I am not sure that the last SEO company did some harm. Can anyone give me some tips on getting my friend back into the mix? www.wallybuysell.com
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CKerr0 -
If Google Authorship is used for every page of your website, will it be penalized?
Hey all, I've noticed a lot of companies will implement Google Authorship on all pages of their website, ie landing pages, home pages, sub pages. I'm wondering if this will be penalized as it isn't a typical authored piece of content, like blogs, articles, press releases etc. I'm curious as I'm going to setup Google Authorship and I don't want it to be setup incorrectly for the future. Is it okay to tie each page (home page, sub pages) and not just actual authored content (blogs, articles, press releases) or will it get penalized if that occurs? Thanks and much appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280