Rankings Drop Penguin 2.0

[Fergus_Macdonald]

Hey guys,

Suffering a horrible rankings drop after penguin 2.0. We have 4 popular sites and have seen a steady decline in rankings and traffic after 22nd May.

I've looked into it a little bit and am wondering if WordPress blog sidebar links might be hurting us. Specifically my brother and I both have sidebar links on our personal blogs which are getting indexed on every page, and I'm wondering if it's distorting our link profiles.

Specifically, I read something about links coming from sites which aren't relevant to your niche and overly optimised anchor text. Both sites have very simple single keyword anchor texts on the links.

We're pretty white hat in terms of SEO, we've never done that much link building, and when we do, it's usually with worthwhile directories or with sites we have relationships with. Therefore we don't have that many links.

Any ideas on how best to investigate this?

Thanks.

[Fergus_Macdonald]

Thanks for the comprehensive reply.

We actually used to work like that under our company name. One of the main reasons for splitting at the time to separate sites was that Google stopped allowing different display URLs for AdWords - we would advertise buyahipflask.com but redirect to macdonald-sporrans.com. We got significantly better click-through rates for the individually branded domains.

We also felt that it was easier to develop good relevant content and social strategies around individual niches, rather than a single brand. IE I feel it would be hard to make our single site which might have 10,000 products on it, rank well for 'quaichs' which is only about 200 of those products.

However, I fully agree with your points about our current setup. Perhaps my ideal would be to have single sites with better names/brands!?

[RobMay]

If you want to know how I would approach this in a new light and strategy. It would take some time, planning and work to develop, but the rewards down the line would be much greater! It looks like the way you have things setup now, look like a potential link wheel of sites playing off each other with specific 'KW anchor text rich links internally.

Here's a detailed plan I would put in place. Granted this is a rough outlook without having all access and full disclosure on the sites.

1. Look to develop your Brand! Build a brand name that you can expand on product wise. Develop out 1 site which encompasses all the products you sell. Perhaps later you want to add more? Is there any reason why you could not assimilate all these sites into 1 Brand site?

2. Plan to move all products under one shell site, and plan to redirect all your traffic to the new BRAND site Work with one domain you can build on for clients, products, social, content and link building.

3. Register a new BRAND domain once you have decided on one. Make sure to remove any <keywords>from your URL and build a brand people can relate too in it's product niche. Keyword rich domains have been hurt in various niche's from the last few updates. Build something that people want to share is your best bet.</keywords>

4. Migrate all your content, products, and pages to the new domain/brand site.

5. Plan out detailed 301 redirect from all your old sites, domains and internal pages to the new MASTER BRAND site where it will hold all your products for sale, keeping some of your link value.

6. Run detailed back link profiles in OSE on the old sites, to weed out the weak one's and the make to be very thorough. Remove any back-links you don't want (many methods), and clean up the link profile until it looks very clean

7. Plan and prepare a social media strategy around your products and brand. Get the clear one's setup and build out from there as needed (specific), to aid in reinforcing the brand and site.

8. Plan a content development strategy around your products. Develop out information, product details, where they can get them, why it' better. Find linking partners through sharing information and content. Build links to external sources that relate to product in your niche. Get people talking about you and what you offer

9. This way, when you tie in the social media strategy with content development, you can handle working with one domain, and drive all your efforts to one site/domain and location.

The way you have it setup now (4 sites and 1 blog), your are turning your efforts into more work!!?? Running multiple domains, social media and content development and link building. Why would you cause yourself so much work???

Ultimately, building a brand site is the best bet. This will also help you with the link building and content development to support the domain and site.

It's a rough sketch and requires work but would pay off in the long run. The way you have it setup now, needs to be modified to succeed in the long run

Hope to see a future post once you get it all aligned and working for you!

Cheers.

[Fergus_Macdonald]

Thanks for the reply - interesting opinion.

I'm aware that our 'brands' are also URLs and contain keywords so perhaps changing the blogs from having keyword only anchor text to having brand name anchor text is better.

Ultimately, I'm happy to do whatever will be better. As we have control of the links it's very easy to remove them quickly. I thought about doing that and then recalled someone saying 'all links are good links' so wondered whether it wouldn't be worth the effort.

At least a good starting point is - from looking at our link profile - do you think those links from the blogs are the ones that we should be concerned about?

[Jonathan_Hatton]

Personally, I think that the recent updates have targeted non-relevant linking heavily; I read an article somewhere written by the owner of a UK based web design agency. His company website was effected by the updates because they placed footer links on all of the websites he they had designed. When they changed the anchor text to brand their rankings started to increase again.

In my experience, a client of mine had dropped considerably in the rankings. I looked into their linking profile and realised they had blog roll links from several non-related websites (built by an old agency). I had them removed by contacting the website owners directly and we are now starting to see rankings return.

If you want to keep the links on your blogs, I would recommend linking with brand anchor text rather than keywords. I know this may be difficult given the URLs of the websites you have given haha.

[Fergus_Macdonald]

Sure thing, probably should've done that in the first instance!

Sites are: buyakilt.com buyahipflask.com buyatankard.com buyaquaich.com

Blogs are: fer.gy callum-macdonald.com

[RobMay]

I think you should share you sites and blogs (with links) to help us get a view and a better picture of what might actually be causing the issue