Rankings Drop since Humingbird - Could it be my link ratio between .co.uk / .com ?
-
Hi All,
I have an UK tool hire eccomerce muliti location website with different locations pages for each category. My stratedgy has been to specialise on local search for each location as oppose to try and compete with highly competitive keywords on a national level.
I do have some duplicate/ thin content issues on these location pages but I've been actively writting additional unique content on these pages to address this issue which also making sure my title tags, h1 , h2 tags etc are unique for each location along with having individual google local + pages etc etc. I have never previously been affected by any duplicate contents issues and always ranked first page (mainly top 5) for most of my local keywords).
However, when google humingbird update came out , I suffered approx 25% drop in traffic and rankings. rom what I read , local search sites have suffered somewhat in this update and I did a link detox report to try and asterain toxic links etc. I found a few which I disavowled but I have had no manul penalty message in my GWT so I can only assume I was affected by an google algorithmic penalty.
From looking at opensite explorer , I can see my link ratio for my .co.uk site shows
43% .com
37% .co.uk
I am wondering if it could be this which has been the cause of my local rankings to fail ?.
Has anyone else suffered the same as I am at my witts end as to what are the likely factors which could have caused such a drop ?
Any tips, greatly appreciated. Happy to give my sites url if anyone would like to take a look ?
thanks
Sarah.
-
Hi Peter,
Many thanks for your thoughts and taking the time to answer. Yes I have been trying to add richer content on my most popular local pages although it can be quite difficult when you have 90 odd locations , so I've done the top 25-40 depending on the category and I will remove some of the lesser popular locations for now to decrease duplicate/thin content ratio.
I agree , that the citations would be the way forward. I have started doing these as well for at least 20 locations although some don't have a link back to my local page but I believe that google is really looking for the NAP as a way of local verification as opposed to a link.
Good point regarding the .com and co.uk. These mainly go to my home page but I am looking ay my competitors,their ratio is better than mine so I will try to improve this also.
Thanks for the Miriam Ellis Article - I will study this in details. First impressions , it does look very good and has some great pointers.
One again Many thanks
Sarah
-
Hi Sarah
I have seen some odd bounces around of local pages since the late summer, but whether they could be attributed to Hummingbird it's difficult to be sure. With Hummingbird designed to refine search results based on the search intent I think it's possible that Google are looking for 'richer' content for local results and more guarantees from a semantic analysis of pages in a locality that they meet what local searchers are looking for.
Based on that, I think your thoughts on the link ratio between .com and .co.uk would seem to have some basis for concern. However, I don't think it is the ratio so much but rather the genuine value or lack of it of a link in a local search result.
Google will be looking at citations for the service your business provides in each locality and it would seem reasonable therefore that they will discount links coming from .com sites and therefore possibly non-UK locations. They may even treat those links negatively, but on that I am speculating. A link from a non-UK site for a local search result does seem to have little relevance semantically so if your pages are relying heavily on non-UK citations then that is likely to affect the performance of your pages in local search.
Miriam Ellis has a great deal of knowledge on local search ranking factors. I recommend reading her excellent, "Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors: An Illustrated Guide".
I hope that helps,
Peter
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
-
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
Can one back-link fluctuates ranking of website with thousands of back-links?
It happend to our website. We have seen major ranking fluctuations for our website because of one back-link. What kind of links those can be? Why Google is not stopping them even though they claim that such back-links will be taken care of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Visibility for https://goo.gl/gJH7eh
Hi Mozzers, I am wondering if anyone can help me with the following. At the start of May this year we really lost visibility for the homepage of this site https://goo.gl/gJH7eh. This was particularly noticeable by tracking rankings for the term 'oak furniture'. We previously ranked on page 1 for the term 'oak furniture', but since May the homepage has struggled to make the top 100 positions for this term. We're confident that we have done everything within Google's guidelines, but it seems something is really holding the homepage back. The site ranks on page 1 for 'oak furniture' on Bing. The site had previously had a manual penalty for unnatural links (warning received several years ago). These links had a particular emphasis on using the anchor text 'oak furniture'. When we took over the site we did an extensive link clean up and disavow and managed to get the penalty removed at the end of October 2013. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OFS0 -
Domain.com/old-url to domain.com/new-url
HI, I have to change old url`s to new one, for the same domain and all landing pages will be the same: domain.com/old-url I have to change to: domain.com/new-url All together more than 70.000 url. What is best way to do that? should I use 301st redirect? is it possible to do in code or how? what could you please suggest? Thank you, Edgars
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edzjus3330 -
Keywords Ranking Varies When Search changes Location/City (Not Google Places)
We have a client that are ranking well on most Australian cities for competitive keywords except Google Sydney. If you toggled the cities on the search field when you search for a keyword, their places are almost exactly the same except for Sydney on which they can't be found at all in the Top 100 results. The keywords are not city specific, they are general commonly searched keywords about health. This is not a Google Places issue. The search result shows the right landing pages of the site for their respective keywords. Any ideas or experience on this kind of situation. Much appreciated Louie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | louieramos0 -
27 of 127 Domains Agreed to Remove Bad Links, Is this an Unusually Low Ratio?
Hi MOZ Community: I hired an SEO firm to run a link audit, identify bad links, request that those links be removed and upload a disavow file to Google Webmaster tools for the domains that would not agree to remove their links. My SEO company after emailing the owners of the bad domains linking to us obtained the following results: NYCOfficeSpaceLeader Total for Removal: 125 (118) Found: 87 (84) Removed: 27 (27) Only a total of 27 domains out of 87 found domains have been removed so far. Seven additional domains have asked for a link removal ransom which we are refusing. Only getting 27 removed seems really low. Is this normal? Is there any way to increase this number? Will the disavow file have any effect and if so when? If Google does not actually remove the links, how can I determine when the disavow file has been processed. I feel a little silly having paid a lot of money and the only tangible effect to date is that links from 27 domains have been removed. Has it been a worthwhile investment for only having links from 27 domains removed? My company does not have an unlimited marketing budget so obviously there is some concern. At the same time the SEO firm seems professional. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Poor Link Profiles Out Ranking Whitehat
Hi guys / girls, We have a few clients in some very competitive areas that are struggling to gain the top spots. We have been building some good quality links, relevant directories, quality citations, guest posting from good quality websites, broad anchor texts profiles, really strong social signals, competitor back links lookup etc. The issue is that nearly all the websites that are out ranking us have really bad links profiles, lots of spammy links, abusing anchor texts etc So what can you do in this situation. The obvious path is to think, right well lets match them for cr*p links and get some results. However I am more than aware that Googles Algorithm eventually will pick up on this... well at least you hope so. Its just very frustrating when you're getting your ass kicked by poor link building techniques and you're doing good work. I am sure other people have come across this, and I was just wondering if there are any bits of advice of how to move past this? Or is it simply a case of keep doing good work and eventually we will get rewarded? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline1 -
Non www has 110 links the www has 5 - rankings have gone
A site I'm working on resolves on the non www address and has 100+ links pointing at this address, last month it started to rank and had various phases within the top 50, this month it's totally gone from the search results. The www has 5 links. My questions Which is best? Www or non How do you fix it? Any reason why the rankings have disappeared!? It's a word press site domainname.co.uk = 100+ links www.domainname.co.uk = 5 links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | therealmarkhall0