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
-
301 Redirects to relative URLs not absolute a problem?
Hi we recently did a migration and a lot of content changed locations see: https://d.pr/i/RvqI81 Basically, the 301 goes to the correct location but its a relative URL (as you can see from the screenshot) rather than absolute URL. Do you think this is a high priority issue from an SEO standpoint, should we get the developer to change the redirects to absolute? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Google Is Indexing My Internal Search Results - What should i do?
Hello, We are using a CMS/E-Commerce platform which isn't really built with SEO in mind, this has led us to the following problem.... a large number of internal (product search) search result pages, which aren't "search engine friendly" or "user friendly", are being indexed by google and are driving traffic to the site, generating our client revenue. We want to remove these pages and stop them from being indexed, replacing them with static category pages - essentially moving the traffic from the search results to static pages. We feel this is necessary as our current situation is a short-term (accidental) win and later down the line as more pages become indexed we don't want to incur a penalty . We're hesitant to do a blanket de-indexation of all ?search results pages because we would lose revenue and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the rankings of our optimised static pages. The idea is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages. Our main focus is to improve user experience and not have customers enter the site through unexpected pages. All thoughts or recommendations are welcome. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iThinkMedia0 -
Recommended e-commerce site search for Magento?
Does anyone have recommendations for any particular site searches for large e-commerce sites based on Magento? Some (hopeful) requirements: Possibility to segment product pages and blog content on results page Doesn't cause any major SEO or technical issues Understands semantic search Ability to filter results Ability to sort (e.g. by price, popularity, new in stock) It'd be really useful to see examples and know if there are any particular issues to be aware of. Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Anyone Seen a Drop in Rankings from Article Links from Years Ago?
A client of mine did article marketing years ago with Ezine, PRlog, ArticlesBase, etc. Now those links are still linking to their domain. Do you think they'll see an increase in rankings from removing those links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan0 -
What to do when Demoted Sitelinks appear on search results under my main link?
Hello all, I had some links that i didn't want them to appear under search results (under my main domain) . Using websmaster 'sitelinks' i demoted those links and it has been almost a month and i can see those unwanted links on SERPS. Those pages don't even have high traffic, I am not quite sure why even they appear on Google. Is there anything else i can do to remove them under main domain search results. Thanks Seda
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
Should Site Search results be blocked from search engines?
What are the advantages & disadvantages of letting Google crawl site search results? We currently have them blocked via robots.txt, so I'm not sure if we're missing out on potential traffic. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
How do i get over my alt tage problems at a cateogry level?
At present at a category level, our site does not incorporate images specific to the category you are in and therefore we do not have appropriate alt tags to suffice SEO requirements.It only covers categories you are navigating too. e.g. http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels/catlist_fnct561.htm (no image placement available on page for that category, it only shows sub categories Does anyone have any suggestions how we get over this? How big a deal is it to not have image with appropriate keyword driven alt tag? Can you put more than 1 keyword phrase in a alt tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Anyone have an hour right now to cover some SEO questions
Hi folks, I need someone to Skype with me today, on some seo questions, for a multi wordpress set up I`m in middle of developing for franchise local sites. Will pay you $95 for the hour. Thanks Brent Sky pe me: cyberbrent (Brent H, Richmond, BC)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts1