Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why?
-
Hi,
We have had a Google action against us for over a year. After many "SEO Company's" we found someone who help us remove (December 2013) the action. Which was due to our bad back link profile.
We have 100% improved our content for our website, as Google has requested. We are active within social media, we add relevant content to our blog and we clean up our desk after we finish work
After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic, if anything its decreasing.
Is anyone else in the same position? or has anyone recovered from a similar situation?
Josh
-
I dont know if you think this would be a big factor, but iv noticed on moz that we have 'keyword stuffing' on quite a few pages. This is just a result of the category names on those pages etc.
would this be the cause?
-
Id say the main features that our main competitor has done better than ourselves are:
- get people to share category and product pages via social media
- Their homepage content changes more often because of the new products features
- their urls are shorter than ours
- They added content to the category pages a long time before us
But then they have negative things that i would say should harm their site, which are:
- The navigation has to many links which is bad practice for internal linking
- The footer has a spam page which just targets a particular keyword
- The footer also use keywords which would be classed as a site link. Spam again.
- They also have duplicated content in the products pages like ourselves
and im going to check to see if i can see any changes to their rankings
Also could you expand on your comment above about user engagement?
Thanks
-
Since you have updated your website, have your competitors done the same? It may not be tied directly to a Google update, or all of the changes you have made, but also if your competition has made updates and improvements. Use the moz tools to check for updates to your competitors ranking changes, and visually look at their sites to see if there is an area or particular area of their site that works better for users.
-
Hi, could you explain your thoughts on this some more. Thanks
-
We recently changed the descriptions to the bottom as we didn't want all the text to distract from people seeing the products
-
Thank you all for answering my question.
Im going to try and answer all your queries as best as I can. Iv scanned through our analytics's
- Last year we jumped by 40% after Google lifted the ban in December
- Then this year our organic has dropped from January to May by 50%. There has been no report from Google saying we have had ban etc...
So our thoughts are that its to do with a Google update, but all our main pages have new unique relevant content etc
Yes we are/have removed many of our back links which which understand would effect our rankings, but like the Silkstream says, we are ranking for important keywords. In fact our main keyword beads has jumped from page 3 back to page1 (we used to be no1 for this keyword) So there has been a massive important, but our rankings are still falling.
This would then mean that a lot of our long tail keywords that only get 1 - 10 session have completely dropped off the map. Maybe this is problem?
In one comparison from March this year to 3years ago. there is a
- 40% higher bounce rate
- 35% high conversion rate
- 30% Higher sessions
Its difficult to check everything because we have changed website since then, which was in March 2012 and that is about the same time Google gave us our ban.
I can see that a the main pages that we got our traffic from are still in the top 10, just less volume.
As Mark Ainsworth says, we need to build up our link profile again, agree this is something that we will be looking at and treating with more care. But its confusing when things are looking to be moving forward with our traffic to be improving, but then to drop off again.
Let me know all your thoughts?
-
"After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic"
It was an assumption of what he meant, as multiple items are mentioned. I think you know as well as I do that the questions are sometimes not clear on here
From another member in this thread:
"I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.
"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9"Seems his ranking is doing ok. What we really need to see would be the before and after rankings, which is why I stated he should look at his analytics, and compare time periods. Keywords, entry paths, exit pages, referring sites, root domains, ranking position, all that can be found there, and used to make an assessment of where they went wrong.
-
The title is "Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why" So I would take that their rankings are not well
When they said looking at "Moz tools we have great results" I took that to mean PA/DA, Domain trust etc.
-
He stated that they are ranking well, but traffic is lower. I'm thinking that links are not his issue, but rather some other factor ie lack of engagement, listings not standing out, products not marked up, etc.
-
I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.
"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9Seeing the usual ebay, amazon big brand domain clusters for these queries so I'd say your doing OK. You might want to consider moving your category descriptions above the fold to improve further rather than below your products on the landing page.
-
You need to think about why the website was performing well before the penalty. If it was spammy artificial links that were boosting your site, then removing the penalty means that they no longer help you. Therefore, your website is receiving considerably less link juice than before.
You may need to face facts that your link building efforts will probably need to start again from scratch.
-
Generally the reason is it was the bad links is what was making you rank so well in the first place, now they are removed you don't get the benefit they where giving you.
I had a quick look at you backlink profile with OSE, and I can see some good links there (channel 4), but also aload of junk directories. OSE just does not consider the quality of the back link so in the stats you may have better PA and DA but when you look at the backlinks your competitors might have better qualty links (not spam)
also there is a chance that the "seo company" you used might have disavowed some good links by mistake, but if they are any good they would not have done that.
-
Have you done a comparison month to month, or year over year since you received the penalty and after it was lifted?
Analytics can tell you where your visitors are leaving. Even if the content was revised, or changed completely, that doesn't mean it's connecting with your visitors. Check your exit pages, and on page time comparison with the following period to see if there are any negative changes that were made. I would look at your impressions as well.
Also, look at your competitors ranking closer, not just using tools. Tools only show a portion of data. If your competitors are using rich snippet markup, even if you outrank them, chances are their listing could stand out more and be getting more clicks.
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
-
Is buying traffic from Internet traffic club harmful to rankings
From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
My rankings are not stable. Do I need to be worry about it
Hi, My client has an ecommerce website. He is ranking on top for many strong keywords. However with two prime keywords he is unstable. My client's business is in UK. Hence we are checking in Google UK. We are noticing that from 4rth Dec that our single keyword is unstable and home page at times ranks in top 10 and at times out of the picture. Please help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
Click Through's for ranking
Back in April of 2014, Rand performed an experiment to determine if Google clicks-throughs made a difference on rankings. He Tweeted and asked people to search on a specific term, and then click on a specific listing, to determine if the immediate clicks made a difference. Within 2.5 hours, his search listing went from #10 position to #1 position. My question is this: If this experiment still works today, could you right click, copy link address of the SERP listing from Google's page and put it in a Facebook or Twitter post, and receive the same results? Or would this be gaming the system? Here is an example of the link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiaqZD9-cXLAhUKyWMKHfFID70QFghYMAk&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbuzzy4shots.com%2Ffocus-pain-relief%2F&usg=AFQjCNElHaso_vXP4rWQdsaX1JdP8IItMQ&sig2=Sg9r6zSbW0pZQtb4ZbzJqg&bvm=bv.117218890,d.cGc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tdawson090 -
Trying to escape from Google algorithm ranking drop
in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates). since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings. We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages. we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80). we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions. we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content. we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords. We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower. 1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at. 2. we are even considering going to a new domain and 301'ing all pages to this domain in an attempt to shake off the algorithm filter (penalties). has anyone done this? how long can we expect to get at least the same ranking for the new domain if 301 all urls to it? do you think its worth it? we know the risk of doing this, and so wanted to seek some advice. 3. we have on the other hand considered the fact that we have disavowed so many links (70%) that this could be a cause of the page two problem, however we are link building according to moz metric standards and majestic standards with no benefit.. do you think we should increase link building? Advice is appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Competitor ranking well with duplicate content—what are my options?
A competitor is ranking #1 and #3 for a search term (see attached) by publishing two separate sites with the same content. They've modified the title of the page, and serve it in a different design, but are using their branded domain and a keyword-rich domain to gain multiple rankings. This has been going on for years, and I've always told myself that Google would eventually catch it with an algorithm update, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Does anyone know of other options? It doesn't seem like this falls under any of the categories that Google lists on their web spam report page—is there any other way to get bring this up with the powers that be, or is it something that I just have to live with and hope that Google figures out some day? Any advice would help. Thanks! how_to_become_a_home_inspector_-_Google_Search_2015-01-15_18-45-06.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inxilpro0 -
Manual Penalty Question
Hello dear MoZ community, I have already communicated this problem before but now it reaches to a level I have to make some hard decisions and would like your help. One of our new accounts (1 month old) got a manual penalty notification few weeks ago from Google for unnatural link building. I went through the whole process, did link detox and analysis and indeed there were lots of blog networks existing purely for cross linking. I removed these and the links got decreased dramatically. The company had around 250,000 links and truth be told if I go by the book only 700-800 of them are really worth and provide value. They will end up with roughly 15000 -20000 left which I acknowledge are a lot but some are coming from web 2 properties such as blogger, wordpress etc. Because the penalty was in some of the pages and not the whole web site I removed the ones that I identified were harming the web site, brought the anchor text down to normal levels and filed a very detailed reconsideration request and disavow file. I do not have a response so far by webmasters but here is where my concerns begin: Should I go for a new domain? losing 230.000 links ? How can there even be a "reconsideration" request for a web site with 85% of its link profile being cross linking to self owned directories and web 2 properties? If I go for a new domain should I redirect? Should I keep the domain, keep cleaning and adding new quality links so I take it with a fresh new approach? Thanks everyone in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | artdivision0 -
Page Rank is 0
Hi. Can you please point me in the right direction concerning a site whose default page has a PR of 0? There does not appear to be any errors in the robots.txt file (that I can tell). When I ran a duplicate content check by searching the title tag and first sentance in quotes it did not return more than 2 sites. When I ran a site: it is reporting 287,000 results. Does this mean that they purchased links and have now been penalized? Or where should I go from here? Thank you for any feedback and assistance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JulB0 -
Can someone explain how a site with no DA, links or MozTrust, MozRank can rank #1 in the SERPs?
I do SEO for a legal site in the UK and one of the keywords I'm targeting is 'Criminal Defence Solicitors'. If you search this term in Google.co.uk this site comes top www.cdsolicitors.co.uk, yet in my mozbar it has 0 links, 0 DA etc, I noticed it top a few weeks ago and thought something spammy was going on; I thought if I was patient, Google would remove it, however it still hasn't. Can someone explain how it is top in the SERPs? I've never seen this before. thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TobiasM0