Struggling to re-rank website
-
A client of ours - www.helenbattphotography.com - was ranking well for local keywords. However, the rankings started to drop as of January this year (slowly) and quite considerably since May. We have not had any Google penalties.
To date we have gone through backlinks and removed a few low quality/dubious links that were built around 5 years ago by another agency the client was using and also disavowed some others. This was done around 2 months ago. No impact to date. The website is hovering around page 4 and 5 for the keywords that it used to rank for on page 1 for.
We are really struggling to increase the rankings for this client. We have introduced good, unqiue content to the site - not that this was ever really a problem on the site - but this has also made little difference.
Would be great to get some feedback on the site and any obvious pointers that we might be missing here - a case of not being able to see the wood through the trees.
Thanks
-
Thanks Oleg. Much appreciated.
Will take a deeper look into the anchor profile.
-
Removing links won't increase your rankings. You need to 1) produce relevant, quality, unique content and 2) build quality relevant links to the website.
The reason you started dropping in rankings is because your anchor profile is too keyword heavy. You need to focus on getting more links to the homepage using the naked url or brand keywords i.e. "Helen Batt Photography", "Helen Batt", "Photos by Helen Batt", etc
Other specific actions you should take:
- include the full business address on the website footer
- get links from local and niche directories (photography related, wedding related, UK-based, Kent-based)
- review the competitors that are ranking above - what kinds of things are they doing? where do they get there links from? can I use these methods on my site?
Cheers,
Oleg
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
-
The better my blog gets, the lower my rankings!
My blog was hit by Google Panda on July 21. My rankings dropped dramatically overnight. Nothing I do is helping. In fact, the day my guest post was published on one of the biggest blogs in my niche (DA over 70) my Google impressions dropped to an all time low and then got worse. (250 impressions and 12 clicks) You can see the first drop and the second drop in these screenshots and yes Google Webmasters and Google Analytics match. http://tinypic.com/r/2dvtvlj/5 http://tinypic.com/r/4u83t4/5 I am getting more fans, subscribers, traffic etc but my Google traffic just gets worse. I would really like to get some organic traffic! But I have no idea why this is happening. I checked manual actions and there is nothing. I cleaned up crawl errors and duplicate content. I get several backlinks a week within my niche from high authority sites. I just don't get it and I am very discouraged. What should I do?
Link Building | | 2bloggers0 -
Is my SEO Strategy is good to rank ?
I just planned my SEO Strategy for low competition keywords 1. Submit articles to top 30+ web 2.0 sites 2. Submit bookmark to top 50 sites 3. Submit Article directories to top 10 sites 4. Link them all with Wiki and blog comments Kindly let me know your suggestions
Link Building | | chandubaba0 -
I want to know about guest posting is it the right way to optimize a website ?
Hi i want to know should i publish the article by gust posting .my keywords are rank in major search engine if i use the wired content that is beneficial for website
Link Building | | SameerBhatia0 -
Will placing links in articles on my site help my rankings?
I have a few page rank 2 articles on my site. Will placing links to other pages on my site with appropriate anchor text in the body of these articles help the other pages to rank higher for the anchor text i place in these links in the articles? Thanks in advance! Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Small business websites
It seems the days where a small business to rank well with out doing linkbait and real marketing are over. What tactics do you still see working post panda and penguin for small budgets ?
Link Building | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
Rank dropped suddenly. Ways to bounce back?
So, like million threads out there I lost my rank for a particular page and is looking to bounce back. However there might be something different in my case, hence the thread. 1. The rank drop was an after effect of design change, where we merged two pages together. Page A - which was ranking for Keyword A and Page B which was ranking for Keyword B. So we merged it together in the sense that both had similar content and design except the meta tags and page title (I wasn't involved in this project so...) and Page B gets kicked out of Google web index. Page A still remains number 1 for Keyword A. 2. There was some shady link building contract that was implemented some 3 months back (again me not involved, I joined later) and there were an unnatural number of links created with a striking artificial anchor text pattern from low quality "built for link building" blogs. I presume this also affected page B. as this effort was done only for Page B and not A. So now, I managed to clear all the pages for duplicate content, implement a better page structure where I deleted out possible similar pages, redirected them (301) to main pages, and created a new page for Page B, like Page B1 with different content. Implemented a better internal linking profile too where terms related to Page B (Keyword B, Keyword B1, B2 etc) links to Page B. Its been two months now, and Page B ranks for Keyword B1 but not the original Keyword B. I suppose the "penalty" still remains in Google. Any clues how I can get around this? What I want to achieve is to get ranked for Keyword B for Page B, if not the first result, at least start all over from a lower rank but at least break out of the penalty.
Link Building | | Druva0 -
I have 87,636 links to my website from a single domain, is this bad?
Hi guys I have 87,636 links from one website, of which 75,189 of those link to my homepage using my website name as the anchor. Another has 29,811 links back to my website, again the majority of the links using my website name as the anchor. Is this a bad thing? Let me explain how this has happened - a company by the name of Daylife uses our RSS feed and distributes this to hundreds of their clients, which include indiatimes, usatoday, dallasnews etc, now I noticed that the majority of these websites all link back to our website with the same anchor text used several times on a single page. Attached is an example. Would this be a bad thing seen as the majority of these links have the same anchor text and link to my homepage? Looking at my GWT there is an estimated 183,373 backlinks that are all like this. Our traffic has dropped since Mr Panda hit and I am trying to find out if this could be adding to the problem. Thank you for you time links.jpg
Link Building | | hstdigital0 -
Forum doesnt rank
Hey, I have a site which ranks well for a certain term, lets say "books". I added a forum about 6 months ago. I'm optimizing it for "books forum". However, somehow it doesnt get to the top 10, although I placed some quality link to it. It ranks for some long tail keywords... We have daily new posts and use vbulletin + vbseo. The strange thing is that there a ranking really low-quality sites under the top 10. Hardly any content and low quality links... Any tips?
Link Building | | netminds0
