Are Forum Links To Website Causing Rankings To Drop ?
-
For many years our top keywords hve ranked in top 5. Usually top 3 for a few in particular. The last few months those particular keywords have dropped to 25 +. Our other rankings are doing pretty decent and are remaiing the same. We are members of about 6 forums since they relate to our website and sometime we have contests on them. I do know that the forums are based on those particular keywords and are linking to our website, as well as other forum members linking to us. Each forum has roughly 300 links to our website. It does not seem as if our competitors are affected by this, as they are members of the forums as well.
What could be causing this for these certain keywords? If those forums were affected by Google's new algorythm would this have an affect on our website?
-
If all your dealers are running your copy on their sites, verbatim, that could be a piece of your problem... certainly worth looking at. It's not uncommon for an affiliate to out rank their principal even though the principal had the original content up for a year or more prior.
Another thing worth keeping in the back of your mind, as you chase this down - sometimes we don't drop in the SERPs because we dropped, but rather because someone else ROSE.
-
The other keywords that are continuing to work rank well are not in the forums. There was nothing done to the pages. The competitors links scores look very similar as we actually are a bit better. But the domain authority number is a bit higher for a few. Our competitors sites actually all have shopping carts and a different link structure. We have more products but currently do not have a shopping cart. Our site has a lot of great unique content and is optimized and getting A and B scores. The only other thing I can think is that all of our dealers are stealing our website content, word for word
-
Its impossible to know, but you can research a few things to try to confirm your suspicion:
-
Where are most of the links for the affected keywords coming from (if they're mostly from these forums, that's more evidence for your hypothesis)
-
What about the unaffected keyword links? If they're also mostly from these forums that's evidence against your theory.
-
What about on-site SEO? Have you made any site changes recently? Are your pages keyword cannibalizing each other?
-
What do the link profiles of your competitors look like? Did they get most of their links from these forums or elsewhere?
-
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
-
Specific Ranking Mystery
Hello Mozzers I don't understand this specific ranking example, maybe somebody can help? For the serach term "elipslife" on Google Switzerland a client's page ranks around position 13. A competitor's page ranks at 9. And I don't get why: the competitor's page has no content and its DA is lower. Its PA is higher so I set a link in the client's homepage navigation a couple of weeks ago to lift the client's page PA above that of the competitor. This is not yet reflected in OSE currently however. Any ideas as to what may be the cause? Thx, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisCronimund0 -
General drop in rankings
We've made a LOT of improvements to our on page SEO and we've been on the right track, but since about 26/7 our rankings appears to have gone down. Since early 2015 we've reworked a lot of the copy on our site to improve the unique/duplicate ratio, we've redone a lot of urls that didn't make any sense. We've improved image alt-text and file names. We've reduced image size on most of the site and we have disavowed spam links (obvious ones like nike shoes and oakley glasses). We've basically improved on-site SEO as much as we can with headers and whatnot. We've been hacked 4 times since January and we had two partial manual penalties from Google, but they were quickly dealt with and we've switched server to one that is both safer and a lot faster. Most of the hacked content seems to have disappeared from Googles index but not all of it. We have also tried our best to deal with URL parameters and we've made 301's out of hundreds of URLs with duplicate content from old slideshows that basically only had an image. And there's even more things we've done like working a lot more with social media, but despite all that were loosing ranking every week and our SEOlytics SVR is at its lowest since early 2014. And we've never (afaik) bought links or anything like that. Obviously we're doing something wrong but frankly we're running out of ideas. We've lost rankings on individual important phrases but there's site-wide general drop.
On-Page Optimization | | Emil_780 -
Disavowed links, updated website etc - still no ranking improvements
Hi, Could anyone take a look at www.artificialgrass4u.co.uk - a few years ago it used to rank highly for 'artificial grass' ... then when Google rolled out its algorithms punishing websites with poor links it lost all it's rankings. We've disavowed almost all of the bad links, and have been adding new optimised content etc over the past few months but rankings still haven't improved. Is there anything I'm missing? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | icansee0 -
Should I remove 'local' landing pages? Could these be the cause of traffic drop (duplicate content)?
I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords. I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them. I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic. My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Why am I ranking on both Bing and Yahoo and yet the rankings are declining on Google
I'm seeing ranking go up on both Bing and Yahoo and yet they are going down on Google. I did see a bunch of spammy links show up about a month ago but have managed to get all those taken down although did not get any warnings from Google in Webmaster tools about them was more of a preemptive measure. The site in question. http://www.gocitrusnow.com
On-Page Optimization | | mwaters19790 -
Too many outbound links on a page?
We have a "Clients" page on our site with approximately 125 of our clients listed. We have a link to each client's website, so that's 125 links. I am rethinking this approach. Is there any value to having these outbound links? The SEOmoz PRO analysis tells me I have too many links on this page. I have read that more than 100 links on a page is too many, but that seemed to be referring to internal links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Do we have too many links in our footer?
Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley. footer.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JohnTulley0 -
Why did our ranking go up, then drop down again?
Hello SEOMoz community. I work for a website that runs a collectibles news service and sells collectibles online. I recently renamed one of the pages from "Stock for Sale" to "Collectibles for Sale" anticipating this would help our ranking for the term "collectibles for sale". This changes the Title, URL and h1 to Collectible for Sale. A few days later we were up to 5th on Google UK for that keyword. But now after the weekend we've dropped off the face of the earth... Or at least somewhere low down in the rankings. I imagine there could be multiple reasons for this, but what are the most likely causes? There is not much text on the page, it contains an iFrame with image boxes that link to relevant collectibles categories. Website: www.paulfrasercollectibles.com
On-Page Optimization | | PaulFraserCollectibles0