New site started doing well, now it's tanking
-
Im confused by activity from a site I opened less than a month ago. I ranked in the top ten for the local version of my primary phrase. Within two weeks I was up to number two. I created a few new pages without content in order to build age. I also paid for a pair of clearly marked classified ads at trusted sites thatprovide traffic from potential clients.
Next, I stated revamping my pages by revising and editing content.
my site has dropped like a brick. My content is the best it's been and improving daily.
Im not sure what to do. Should I start over? Do I keep improving my site and give it a few months? Would anyone be willing to review my site and provide a few tips? Fyi, I understand some of my pages need more content.
my formatting is a mess with iOS 7 on iPad.
-
1. Website - When developing your site, be sure to check how it looks in Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome and Firefox. For mobile IPAD, Iphone and Android. If you have issues, it's probably with your CSS. Many websites use what they call responsive designs. They adapt to the type of device you are using. Even with responsive designs, they require tweaks here and there to get things looking right.
2. Website Tanking - Just to rule out a few items, take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools and see if there are any manual actions (messages) done on your site. Also check Webmaster Tools under section Google Index->Index Status to make sure all your pages are indexed.
3. Local Directories - At a minimum, make sure you are listed in these key directories: Axiom, Infogroup and Localeze. After that, claim/add your information in Citysearch/Citygrid, Local.com, Manta, Primeplace Nokia, Yellowbook, Yellowbot, Yellowee,Yellowpages,Insiderpages,Kudzu, Merchant Circle,Supermedia. There are more but this should keep you busy for a while.
4. Claim your Google Plus, Yahoo Local and Bing Listings
5. Know your competitors. How well does your website look against theirs? Does your site look trustworthy? Use <cite>www.opensiteexplorer.org/</cite> to check your backlinks against theirs.
Unfortunately, trying to rank isn't a set it and forget it operation. Keep updating your website, post to your Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Website Blog with engaging content.
-
Hi Jovan,
Very nice that you started working on improving quality of your website. That's a good thing and you should do it with no restrictions in the future.
However, as a SEO it's very important to stop worrying about ranking results on short term. 1 month is certainly to low. Google wants you to focus most energy bringing quality stuff to the users. It discourages over-optimization and even has a patent filed in 2012 (if I'm not mistaken) which de-values websites that do a optimization changes for a wile, just to see how the owner of the website react to lower rankings. If the owner removes the last websites changes after seeing low ranking - google might be facing people who -> optimize for search engines, not for users. We don't actually know if this happens in reality or not, but It certainly encourage us to check for results less - and focus on quality stuff.
So create the best content you cant with all the guidelines in mind and if in 3-6 months you can't see any results, then start worrying and what went wrong.
-
New sites can rank very highly for a month or two due to the freshness factor. Once this wears off, refreshing content can help a little, but ultimately you will need to get backlinks \ social engagement.
If you haven't done any black hat \ paid backlinking, then your best bet is to keep at it, and work on your content, do some guest posts, circulate some content in the social media channels to get social engagement.
If you want more specific advice you will need to post your url, so we can check out what is going on.
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
-
Before I request hundreds of links for "nofollow" I want to verify I'm doing the right thing
Happy Thanksgiving Mozers, In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow". I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google. Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow. Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing | | Patrick_G0 -
Amazon Niche Sites Or Adsense Niche Sites Or CPA Niche Sites for 2000$/month ?
Hello Seo Moz guys, I'm new in SEOMOZ Comunity but I have about 2 years experience in internet marketing. I build 5 websites with google adsense, all of them with about 50 articles, 1k+ backlinks, about 1$-1,5$ cpc, and in average 300 visitors per day. I monetize these sites only with google adsense. ( A LOT OF WORK I can say in manual way, I don't have automate or semi-automate tools for SEO-Link Building ) I didn't make more than 200$ per month and I want to make 2000$/month from online to be really happy. Can anyone suggest me a resource, a course, ANYTHING to improve my earnings? also, I want to change the business model from advertisements to affiliate marketing. I am in clickbank team and amazon asociates from 1 month and I didn't even make more than 30$ yet :)) Please please please, I want a good response, a respectable person to answer me 🙂 Thank you so much!
Affiliate Marketing | | Sebastyan210 -
Adroll vs Adsense: Pro's and Cons
Hey everyone, Do you prefer Adroll or Adsense and why? What are some pros and cons of each?
Affiliate Marketing | | jhinchcliffe0 -
How do the engines look at pages populated using content from an affiliate site?
We are building out a section of our site using an affiliate partnership in the travel space. How would you suggest organizing the content so we do not get penalized for duplicate content? Do you suggest not suing the content at all?
Affiliate Marketing | | TSDigital0 -
I want tips on how to start a Lead Mangement For a Human Resource website?
We as a SEO team has registered in niche specific forums and groups for community engagement (HR Forums and Groups). What else can we do to get a lead for our client.
Affiliate Marketing | | Virrtuo0 -
A subdomain or a new domain?
Hi all Mind it I pick some of your brains for a second opinion on something.... The current situation is thus: I have a fashion website which has over 10,000 free articles and videos, support forums with thousands of posts and user blogs. Also on the site is an affiliate store which is built using datafeedr. The store has about 90,000 products from hundreds of retailers. The goal of the site being a one stop fashion community site where people can get information, chat with other fashion fans and then use the store to search all the fashion sites at once. The problem I am having is despite endless seo work it is proving very difficult to rank the domain for even terms with low competition (We are used to ranking our clients for very competitive terms, often with several hundred million competitors including government websites, bbc, wiki etc). After testing we have come to the conclusion that it's the duplicate content in the store which is hindering our progress. Despite the exact layout of the store being unique, there is no original content on the product pages. There, we have decided to remove the store from the current url and on to it's own site. The question we have is would putting it on store.domain.com still hinder the main site? I recall reading that google are considering the subdomains and root domain as one these days, or if we were to put it on samedomainname.net would google then consider us to be sending users to another website? From a branding point of view I would favour the store.domain.com approach but the .net approach could be easier. Finally, if we were to move the store we have about 45,000 pages indexed which would all return 404's so I guess it would be best to set up 301 redirects from the old url to the new? Many thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
My new site experienced a sudden drop in Google rankings
We launched a new affiliate site at the beginning of April this year dealing in reviews, vouchers and price comparison for a niche product. We had a pretty good start, with some of our target keywords ranking #8 #10 #7 but this week they have suddenly dropped off dramatically - like 36 or 42 places. We haven't made any changes to the site apart from publishing new content pieces, such as news posts and reviews - does anyone know why this would suddenly happen? Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | JohnHillman0 -
Traffic down on site on regular intervals
Hi, We are running a sort of large affiliate website, with having 2000 web pages. We are having unique content, metas and related on every page. The problem we are facing is we are not gaining traffic constantly. We have some top rankings for sometimes few days, for few weeks and for few months. But suddenly we went few pages behind on serps, we loose all our ranking. After some time it will come again on serps as natural positions. Due to this after year of hard work on content, meta and many more small small issues, we are on the same no. of visitors. Given below are the my site traffic details with attached image. We used SEOMOZ Pro tools to evaluate all the possibilities and errors we are doing, We found lots of bad things happening our site, We started work them on since early January and which achieved the corrections as per the image of crawl diagnosis summary page shown below : we are not having sitemap on our site and having some soft 404s, but we are working towards it. Is there any thing more specific we can do to this kind of problem.. 5AyHO.png yxkEr.png
Affiliate Marketing | | semshah1430