Does anyone have a clue about my search problem?
-
After three years of destruction, my site still has a problem - or maybe more than one.
OK, I understand I had - and probably still have - a Panda problem.
The question is - does anyone know how to fix it, without destroying eveything?
If I had money, I'd gladly give it up to fix this, but all I have is me, a small dedicated promotions team, 120,000+ visitors per month and the ability to write, edit and proofread.
This is not an easy problem to fix. After completing more than 100 projects, I still haven't got it right, in fact, what I've done over the past 2 months has only made things worse - and I never thought I could do that. Everything has been measured, so as not to destroy our remaining ability to generate income, because without that, its the end of the line.
If you can help me fix this, I will do anything for you in return - as long as it is legal, ethical and won't destroy my reputation or hurt others.
Unless you are a master jedi guru, and I hope you are, this will NOT be easy, but it will prove that you really are a master, jedi, guru and time lord, and I will tell the world and generate leads for you.
I've been doing website and SEO stuff since 1996 and I've always been able to solve problems and fix anything I needed to work on. This has me beaten. So my question is: is there anyone here willing to take a shot at helping me fix this, without the usual response of "change domains" "Delete everything and start over" or "you're screwed"
Of course, it is possible that there is a different problem, nothing to do with algorithms, a hard-coded bias or some penalizing setting, that I don't know about, a single needle in a haystack.
This problem results in a few visible things.
1. Some pages are buried in supplemental results
2. Search bots pick up new stories within minutes, but they show up in search results many hours later
Here is the site: http://shar.es/EGaAC
On request, I can provide a list of all the things we've done or tried. (actually I have to finish writing it)
Some Notes:
There is no manual spam penalty. All outgoing links are nofollow, and have been for 2 years. We never paid for incoming links. We did sell text advertising links 3-4 years ago, using text-link-ads.com, but removed them all 2 1/2 years ago. We did receive payment for some stories, 3-4 years ago, but all have been removed.
One more thing. I don't write much - I'm a better editor than a writer, but I wrote a story that had 1 million readers. the massive percentage of 0.0016% came from you-know-who. Yes, 16 visitors. And this was an exclusive, unique story. And there was a similar story, with half a million readers. same result. Seems like there might be a problem!
-
Thank you for responding Richard.
That would have been easy if there were any purchased or bad links, but there were none.
There were some links from blogs in sidebars and I did have two blogger blogs that referred to a number of our stories, but all of those were removed, and the two blogger blogs were deleted.
Most of the linking domains are real businesses.
I believe this is all about content, but I could be wrong. This is why I need help.
-
I had a site similar to the issue. The way I solved was to just use the disavow tool like a machete instead of scalpel. Mass disavowed any domains that was even suspected and ran constant reports through link detox.
Took around 6 months but it did the job. Then start rebuilding afterwards.
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
-
International SEO and Indexing in Country Specific Search Engines
Hey everyone! My company has recently migrated to a new domain (www.napoleon.com) which includes migrating many TLD separate domains to the new. We have structured the website to have multi-language and regions, including regional content, product offerings etc. Our structure is as follows just to give an example. napoleon.com/en/ca/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Napoleon.com
napoleon.com/fr/ca/
napoleon.com/en/us/
napoleon.com/de/de Currently, specifically the homepage version of the USA website is indexing into Canadian Search Engines, and I can't figure out why. It has been roughly 6 weeks since launch. Any thoughts on this? Thank you Dustin0 -
Blocking Dynamic Search Result Pages From Google
Hi Mozzerds, I have a quick question that probably won't have just one solution. Most of the pages that Moz crawled for duplicate content we're dynamic search result pages on my site. Could this be a simple fix of just blocking these pages from Google altogether? Or would Moz just crawl these pages as critical crawl errors instead of content errors? Ultimately, I contemplated whether or not I wanted to rank for these pages but I don't think it's worth it considering I have multiple product pages that rank well. I think in my case, the best is probably to leave out these search pages since they have more of a negative impact on my site resulting in more content errors than I would like. So would blocking these pages from the Search Engines and Moz be a good idea? Maybe a second opinion would help: what do you think I should do? Is there another way to go about this and would blocking these pages do anything to reduce the number of content errors on my site? I appreciate any feedback! Thanks! Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewstorys0 -
Sitelink Search Box mark-up when multiple query strings are used
Hi all, I'm looking to implement sitelink search box mark-up in Google Tag Manager in JSON-LD format. This would be popped into the Custom HTML tag and would look a little something like: The above option is great if you have one query string for your search term, but what if you had a URL that triggered two query strings - for example: https://www.example.com/search?q=searchterm&category=all Would you need to amend the code something like the below: Any help would be much appreciated! Cheers, Sean
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanginnaw0 -
Wrong Search words coming in search console
Hey there, My website All good but, in webmaster Search console some bad Queries(search terms) coming which is totally different from website. I want to make sure, is that harmful for my website traffic, as well as keywords Ranking?? How should i stop them to be crawl, ?? can any help for this query.?? i have attached screenshot of that, please check & help out, http://prntscr.com/cmusoq Thnx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
Google + Listings in Paid Search Area (with screenshot)
Hi Forum! How do I replicate how this company (Eloqua) has placed their Google+ page on the right side of SERPs where normally paid ads are? (see attached image) I took this screenshot earlier this morning, but for some reason I cannot re-create it. Thanks for all your help! googleplus-1.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Could ranking problem be caused by Parked Domain?
I've been investigating a serious Google ranking drop for a small website in the UK. They used to rank top 5 for about 10 main keywords and overnight on 24/3/12 they lost rankings. They have not ranked in top100 since. Their pages are still indexed and they can still be found for their brand/domain name so they have not been removed completely. I've coverered all the normal issues you would expect to look for and no serious errors exist that would lead to what in effect looks like a penalty. The investigation has led to a an issue about their domain registration setup. The whois record (at domaintools) shows the status as "Registered and Parked or Redirected" which seems a bit unusual. Checking the registration details they had DNS settings pointing correctly to the webhost but also had web forwarding to the domain registrar's standard parked domain page. The domain registrar has suggested that this duplication could have caused ranking problems. What do you think? Is this a realistic reason for their ranking loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Nuanced duplicate content problem.
Hi guys, I am working on a recently rebuilt website, which has some duplicate content issues that are more nuanced than usual. I have a plan of action (which I will describe further), so please let me know if it's a valid plan or if I am missing something. Situation: The client is targeting two types of users: business leads (Type A) and potential employees (Type B), so for each of their 22 locations, they have 2 pages - one speaking to Type A and another to Type B. Type A location page contains a description of the location. In terms of importance, Type A location pages are secondary because to the Type A user, locations are not of primary importance. Type B location page contains the same description of the location plus additional lifestyle description. These pages carry more importance, since they are attempting to attract applicants to work in specific places. So I am planning to rank these pages eventually for a combination of Location Name + Keyword. Plan: New content is not an option at this point, so I am planning to set up canonical tags on both location Types and make Type B, the canonical URL, since it carries more importance and more SEO potential. The main nuance is that while Type A and Type B location pages contain some of the same content (about 75%-80%), they are not exactly the same. That is why I am not 100% sure that I should canonicalize them, but still most of the wording on the page is identical, so... Any professional opinion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naymark.biz0 -
Does anyone have any tips for optimizing your Google Product Feeds?
How often do you submit them? What have you seen work? Are there any tricks aside from filling out all of the data fields?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric_since1910.com1