Unknown factors affecting our SEO effort
-
Good morning / afternoon / evening all,
We are continually working our website - www.movingeverywhere.co.uk , it has suffered some drastic drop in rankings with the last 2 google algorithm updates which we have been working to resolve. This has involved:
-
Redesigning the website (responsive now) , increase of speed, reduction of code, better UX and generally better all round experience for the user.
-
Signed up to Moz and resolved any issues which have been highlighted. (Hopefully fixed the last ones today)
-
Investigated our inbound link profile to try and weed out any bad incoming links or any links that were damaging the site.
-
Increased our social network profile and reach.
We have done competitor analysis and we are beating all of our competitioers with on site factors as per Moz results but it appears we are missing something which means we are not reaping the fruits of our efforts at the moment. The site is wordpress and we read there could be a canonical issue with Wordpres ssites
We are asking the Moz community for any guidance and assistance to try and diagnose any negative factors affecting the SEO effort on the site. Thank you for your time and help.
-
-
The sources are too numerous to list. You can find tons of posts on Moz though. Of note is we are handling the link cleanup on a rather large client and I decided to try out removeem. Based on weighing all we have seen so far with the software, I like it. Like with any there have been a glitch or two but their support has been very excellent.
But, as I am talking with a team member she says, "Our link to our client shows up as Toxic." So, I am like "Get outta here!?" Sure enough we were. Note about software: You have to look at what they are utilizing to call something toxic or not. In this case it had more to do with the anchor text that had been used in linking to this client. So, not all that are toxic are and not all that are clean are clean. That is where you have to be somewhat nuanced in your approach. I suggest that if it looks like a paid directory (Other than dmoz or Yahoo) or if it is one that is just a perpetual listing of firms with no real content or context, I would remove it. If it is comment spam on posts, etc. Those are the types of things that stand out readily.
Best,
-
Well, I have added the relevant information for the scheme microdata as a start and I have fixed some issues re. authorship so that is now included. Thanks for the tips. Checking for Toxic links.
What constitutes a "toxic" link though - Reading up on various things there are opinions. Any guidance or Moz article would be good.
-
Thanks - we will implement the authorship tool via WP and I have been looking into Richsnippers and Schema data too. Thanks for the info. I was just about to look into the Link detox items to see if there is anything negative there.
Hopefully more suggestions will come from others
-
When you consider a canonical as similar to a 301, you could have any number of canonical links on a site.
-
Brett
I snapped a minute after I sent this that you are underutilizing data markup / Schema. You are using postal address without utilizing local business and you don't have a phone number in it. Also, I would definitely use aggregate review markup, etc. for you. If not on the home page, you should be using authorship as well. If I were to change one thing it would be that first. With authorship and review schema you have a chance to standout on whatever serp you are on.
Best, -
First of all, thanks for a great response and thank you for the compliments about the site - It is always nice to hear good things about a site you have designed so it means a lot.
I will look at the Link Detox and the link profiles in more depth. We are targeting the local listings more now and trying to hit that hard - the keyphrase we are going for is "Manchester Removals" / "Removals Manchester" but also drilling into some more local areas.
I am hoping one of the WP geeks might be able to help. One question (I might have phrased wrong re. canonical) - Moz is showing up X number of canonical links in the crawl. Is that anything to worry about or any negative factor on the site?
Since this redesign our bounce rates have started to drop as well as we are trying to convert more of the visitors to the site to leads instead of just trying to get more and more visitors to the site (which isnt the answer). We have been focused on the information, the flow of the user and answering their needs.
-
Brett,
I took a quick look at the site and have to say I don't see anything on the top that is major. Personally, I like to utilize title tags with the business name in them and to follow the convention of Manchester Movers | 24 hour service | Moving Everywhere - so the business name is the last thing in the Title Tag. What I am trying to target most is at the first part of the title tag.
As to you v. your competitor, this is always a tough one. I suggest you look for what they are doing correctly and ask yourself if you are also doing that. With moving companies in the states, Local is everything. If you have not nailed Local as a moving company it will be hard to rank in a city here. I did not look at that for your site.
Now as to a universal WP canonical issue, I do not know what it is. We handle over 100 WP sites and I am fully unaware of any canonical problem we have ever had. While I do not touch every site even semi regularly, if there is an issue I am the first one made aware of it. I know there are several Mozzers who are Uber WP nerds (I say that as a form of admiration) and hopefully one or two will answer your query better.
I did not run a link profile, etc. but you could always try something like Link Detox to see where you stand. You could run Screaming Frog to check that all pages are giving correct response codes, etc. Ultimately, your home page would have a hard time ranking in a major city in the US from a DA/PA point of view with all the directories and then several older companies with good SEO there. You could get Local really right and have a good shot at showing there. I am not studied enough to speak to the Manchester market.
Here is the good news and I do not often say this: I really like the look and feel of the site. While I did not test it for UI/UX, I liked the colors, the airy feel, the way it is inviting around a subject that is stressful. Excellent job IMO. Here is a hint that we keep front of mind: Does your meta description answer the query?
Hope this gives comfort of a sort.
Robert
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
-
Audit my SEO Project
Hey professionals, I works on "MyInfo Community" as a SEO worker, anyone can help me to audit my this project? Because i am newbie in this field. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smartpoedgr0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Hypothetical SEO Question
I am running a website for a law firm. It has been running for many, many years and has plenty of backlinks and authority. I then create a standalone website for a specific type of case that the law firm is handling. On that website, I have a page that copies some of the attorney bio text from the main website. How much of a negative impact will this standalone website have on the main website as far as duplicate content issues are concerned? Please explain your answer in detail. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Website not properly listed on google organic despite SEO efforts
Hello, I have worked thoroughly on my website tags including HTML titles, URLs, H1 headers and text on each section. The problem is that despite this effort, my website does not seem to improve in terms of ranking (the onsite optimization has been done 6 months ago already). We have a sitemap, we have done link building and everything but still no tangible progress. The anomaly I am experiencing is the following: If I search on Google.com.lb for "aparment for sale in lebanon" I don't get the section on my website that is optimized for that particular query (which is the Buy section located here http://www.ramcolb.com/apartment-sale-beirut-lebanon). my site appears only on page 6 but the Homepage appears which is very counter intuitive because it is not optimized for the "apartment for sale in Lebanon" keyword. And this anomaly is present on almost all sections and their relevant queries. The relevant section for the particular query never appears, it is always another irrelevant section that appears but far in the listings (beyond page 6). It is as if Google hasn't indexed properly my website and is mixing up the sections... Has anyone experienced this type of problems? what can be done? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImadKaram0 -
Help with homepage SEO please
Hi I have been looking after this site www.kids-academy.co.uk for 3 weeks now. I spotted that links were a major problem with the site and started to strip out the black hat inbound links straight away. I have also been doing some onsite optimisation for the main areas I have been asked to focus on. This saw results within a week for the subpages which is great. however, the design of the site meant there were no landing pages for the categories and the menu is a permanent "fixture" called a megamenu. I have advised /landingpages were needed not only for the ease of the end user to find what they need but also for SEO. Now the issues I have are that due to the menu style, it sees every one of those links within the homepage - over 200 links! I am wondering if I should nofollow some of them, or get them to change the style of the menu as surely this is having a direct result on the homepage and landing pages just not being seen at all within Google (as normal - Bing and Yahoo love the site). There is a lot of work to do on this site, but I would have thought to have seen some movement on the homepage at least by now. Any help is much appreciated. (Please note, there are some duplicate pages on there at the moment as I amalgamated some of the pages together last night and need to redirect these but I am having issues with redirect loops so those are not a contributing factor as this is a recent change). Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeanneSEO
Leanne0 -
SEO Company that bills on results?
After having bad experiences with a few seo and ppc companies, I would like to find a company that operates on the premise that they should get paid for producing results instead just for signing a contract. I'm not thinking that any payment is contingent results but that a large portion of the billing is. I also know that it can take several months to get to an seo goal so I'm not taking a "you have one month to fix our site or we don't pay" approach. Is there a company out there that has enough confidence in their white-hat processes that they actually back their services with some sort of guarantee?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
SEO for an exponentially growing site?
Hey Mozers! I was having a quick chat with a friend the other day on doing SEO for a site that grows in page size at an exponential rate and was just wondering how you would go about optimizing it? The example that we used would be a site that allowed users to upload videos and then have people vote on two videos against each other. So, if there are 100 uploaded videos and each of them are pared up with the other 99 to create a unique voting/battle page which has it's own unique URL, the site can get very large, VERY quickly. Meaning if just one more video is uploaded there would be How exactly would you go about optimizing the site? My biggest area of confusion would be generating sitemaps. I'm aware of best practices with large sitemaps (i.e. having a sitemap of sitemaps, not going over 50k in entries per sitemap etc..) But, how would you go about creating the sitemaps for this website if it's growing at an exponential rate, if at all? If you have any other questions feel free to ask and I'll clarify it. Thanks! 😃 **TL;DR How would you optimize a site that grows at an exponential rate? **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanChoo0 -
SEO Consultant for site audit
Can someone recommend an excellent SEO who can perform a full site audit of my fairly large Wordpress site? The site receives about 14,000 visits per month but traffic is waining one month after a recent change. Need analysis of some funky stuff in my Webmaster tools and overall site review.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0