Hit hard on Google last October.

[Vuly]

Hi all,

I'm just wondering if anyone is able to help me with why my website lost practically all its ranking last October (2012). My website is here: http://bit.ly/nAOfNj

Since early 2010, we have been ranking in the top 3 for our keyword when searched all around the country. Between end September, and end October 2012, we started dropping (from 2nd to 8th, then in December, 13th, January, 18th place... and then March back up to 13th, now ~10th).

The main problem seems to be that Google has changed how websites rank for our keyword (trampoline). In Brisbane, Australia (where we are based), we only rank in the local organic searches. We don't have a separate listing there anymore (with the meta description), even though we had a normal organic listing (and local listing) for the last 2 years! When searching from other states/suburbs further away, we dropped way off the first page. Our product is sold by resellers in 400 stores around Australia, so its not like we're just in Brisbane.

Has anyone experienced Google changing how they return results for a specific keyword like this? Did they do it a lot towards the end of last year?

We have a place page for Brisbane, but for some reason I have little to no control over it (Places/Local+ stuff up means I can't manage the page on Local+, can't add pictures/videos etc). My boss suggested we even try deleting the maps page or our local+ page to get out of there. We don't get anywhere near as much traffic through the local listing than a normal listing... I'm not sure if that's best though?

From what I can tell, the only Google algorithm updates that may have affected us at the time (October 9th) were the page layout updates that penalised(?) sites that have a lot of "ads" above the fold. Our website is designed to have splash banners on the top of every page to either promote our own product, competitions or the athletes we sponsor. Up until last week, the banners were always 500px high on larger screen desktops and 300px high on smaller desktops, laptops, ipad etc. I have recently changed them to all be 300px high to test, but I imagine i'll have to wait a while? Is this the kind of content that Google means by "ads above the fold"?

I've spent the last 4 weeks working on our SEO, from HTML validation, to rich snippets, content optimisation, a lot more internal linking, setting up some location-based content, doing a lot of keyword research, and now starting to work on cleaning up our Blog and creating some real sharable content that we'll share on our Facebook.

I really just wish I knew where the problem was so I could tackle that Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated!!

[Vuly]

Hi Mario,

Thanks for your reply! Hmm... the thing is we honestly haven't paid for any links at all ever. The listing on linksjuice.com was premium because we put a reciprocal link in an old blog post. Are these types of big directory listings things that Penguin targeted? Because a number of our competitors (who weren't affected last year), are also listed in similar directories. A number of the directories we are in now are only recent additions (a month or so ago, in response to our big drop in traffic 8 months ago).

Did you find our most common anchor text from open site explorer's 'anchor text' listing? The anchor text you mentioned is only used 5 times according to OSE. There's 'trampoline australia vuly trampolines' as img text, did you mean that one? That's just one website who has a badge on each page of their website.

We started a campaign in April for our authorised resellers to have a badge linking back to our website, not for our primary keyword, but to our trading name and company name. We aren't paying or forcing them to put it on or anything, we have some very loyal resellers who love our products, and there are also some that are fake (which is also one of the reasons we started this) and pretend to sell our products but ship other low quality models.

We have a SEO company that also does work for us on link building sometimes as well. Thing is, I never know what they do or what links they build for us. We have left it totally up to them and never done any of our own link building until a few months ago to try and get back up.

So do you think it could still be a bad back-link thing? If someone were to link to our website's homepage, and we want to rank for 'trampoline', should the anchor text always be trampoline? That's something Google has been trying to fix up with Penguin isn't it? Noticing when its all the same anchor text and ignoring some of the links because of it?

If you look at linking root domains, you'll see stuff like stackoverflow, css-tricks etc (these are all from when I've posted and used my website's URL in the website field). Could this have diluted our ranking at all? Google should be smart enough to recognise that?

[mario33]

If you're traffic started dropping last October, its most likely that you have a Penguin issue. After looking at some of your links, this is most likely the case. A quick look at your link profile shows that your top anchor text is "vuly trampolines australia", which doesn't seem like a natural way that people would link to you, especially when links show up on pages like this: http://www.linksjuice.com/7/Sports

I would recommend that you compile a list of your inbound links, and work to identify and manually remove any links which you paid to have placed or were part of an exchange. Document what you are doing and then upload a disavow file in webmaster tools and make a reconsideration request. Then focus on building some great content and EARNING real links.

From what I've read, it will take some time for the site to recover, but this is the correct way to address the problem. Good luck.