Have we been penalised by Google?

[forgottenlife]

Hello guys,

Looking for some help here hope someone will be able to point us to the right direction, we have been scratching our heads for months!

Basically our Google rankings and organic traffic from Google have dropped signficantly in the last 12 months. At one point we ranked as high as page 3 with the term "holiday lettings". Now we are on page 16, and sometimes not found at all... This has been the case for months now.  Curiously, Bing and Yahoo have been much more generous to us, we have been and still consistently rank at No. 2 with the same term.

We are in the vacation rental industry - our website is www.alphaholidaylettings.com and most of the sites that rank above us are of much less relevancy, quality and authority. We just could not understand why we would rank so poorly on Google (both US and UK). Organic traffic has also dropped by more than 50% steadily in the last 12 months.

One thing we thought might have affected our site is the quality of content. Most content/listings on our site are user generated, and it is not uncommon for users to copy and paste details from an existing listing that they have on another site. Having said that, the same would apply to our competitors too.  In this case, might Panda or Penguin have had any negative effects on our seo? We have been adding unique content to the site in the form of a blog and "Holiday Feature" articles.

Could the actual design/structure/coding of our pages contribute to our poor rankings too?

Any opinions or feedback is much appreciated!

Thanks guys,

Tom

[forgottenlife]

Got you, thanks again Yiannis!

[artdivision]

Hello Tom,

It is an advanced segment you can use in Google analytics which scans all the Ws keywords that brough traffic to your web site such as "how", "why", "what" etc....that way you can see questions people ask on the internet and capitalise in content opportunities. You can then check which one of these posts converted (for example more than 3 visits and goal conversions from Google analytic) and again write further content.

To start with create advanced segments of the 5Ws, select january-Today 2013 in google analytics, go to organic traffic and keywords and apply the segment. There you go

I can not attach a picture here but your segment should be:

Include Keyword MatchinRegExp Who
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp Why
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp What
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp How
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp When
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp Where
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp Can

(I know more than 5 but I like including how and can too :-))

[forgottenlife]

Thanks a lot Yiannis, your reply is certainly very helpful and much appreciated.  It gives us faith to continue with writing content.  Just one quick question, when you mentioned "5 Ws keywords", what do you mean by that?

Cheers,

Tom

[artdivision]

Yes tom thats correct.

The idea of a press release is that you use it to reach your audience and not for link building. The fact that someone found that press release and decided to post/link it to his blog is totally ethical and you pretty much earned that link due to the "quality content" strategy you decided to implement.

In regards to your original query I jsut did a quick back  link profile check on your web site and the term you mention is at 8% of your total link building profile. I checked the domains and they are mainly article directories and link submission web sites. While I understand this is a necessary evil I highly doubt you will rank for such a high profitable and competitive keywords "holiday lettings" by jsut doing that, you will need high authority web sites to link to your content. If you ask me my advise would be to carry on writing quality content, use contexual keywords along with your targeted keyword and things will pick up naturally. For example you must have data from your clients as to how your special works on particular seasons or top countries brining traffic, or high referal sites..You could maybe do a white paper based on this report. use google analytics not for keywords but to drug out intelligence data. 5 Ws keywords that generated good traffic or page depth visits is one example. See which content works best and capitilise on that

Hope I helped a bit!

[forgottenlife]

Hi Yiannis,

Thanks for your reply.  As far as I know, the links in our press releases are nofollow.  I was told that by releasing quality content press releases via sites such as PR Web, it would have a positive impact on our seo.  But if the links are nofollow, is it a practice worth pursueing?

I have also noticed that when the releases were picked up by other online outlets, the links have in some cases become "follow".  I guess this is a good thing?

Tom

[artdivision]

please make sure that the links in your press releases are Nofollow as google recently stated that the links on all PR sites should NOT pass any link juice. Check with your agency!

[forgottenlife]

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.  We are not flagged in Webmaster Tools as having any manual actions placed against the site, really lost as to what is causing the issues.

We are not currently doing any link-building, but have started doing some press release marketing.  Not sure how much this would help I guess it will tell in time.

[Nightwing]

Hi,

I'd go into Webmaster tools for the affected site & see if you have any alerts in there. Also I think the quality of the customer content may be as you suspect an issue.

But your still listed so Is suspect you have not been google whacked just merely pushed down by better contnet. You may think about sourcing a cintnet strategist & give up on waiste of time activities like link building ( Not to assume you do this)

Dont worry with a bit of top contnet in there you climb back up!