Another client copies everything to blogspot. Is that what keeps her site from ranking? Or what? Appears to be a penalty somewhere but can't find it.
-
This client has a brand new site: http://www.susannoyesandersonpoems.com
Her previous site was really bad for SEO, yet at one time she actually ranked on the first page for "LDS poems." She came to me because she lost rank. I checked things out and found some shoddy SEO work by a very popular Wordpress webhoste that I will leave unnamed. If you do a backlink analysis you can see the articles and backlinks they created. But there are so few, so I'm not sure if that was it, or it just was because of the fact that her site was so poorly optimized and Google made a change, and down she fell.
Here's the only page she had on the LDS poems topic in her old site: https://web.archive.org/web/20130820161529/http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/ Even the links in the nav were bad as they were all images. And that ranked in position 2 I think she said.
Even with her new site, she continues to decline. In fact she is nowhere to be found for main keywords making me think there is a penalty.
To try and build rank for categories, I'm allowing google to index the category landing pages and had her write category descriptions that included keywords. We are also listing the categories on the left and linking to those category pages. Maybe those pages are watered down by the poem excerpts?? Here's an example of a page we want to rank: http://susannoyesandersonpoems.com/category/lds-poetry/
Any help from the peanut gallery?
-
Sorry for the slow response Christy. We never could pinpoint the problem. Since everything looked good, I asked her to give it time. Took about 6 months after the website launch, but she's back on the first page in position 2 and 3 for "LDS poems." She just kept doing everything right - writing poems and posting in her channels. She also continues to post on Blogspot on the same day she posts on her main site. I advised her not too but it apparently doesn't matter. Google is not showing her blogpspot site in the SERPs. I added the publisher and author tags on this site and connected that to her G+ account, so maybe that helped at the time.
-
Any updates, Kat?
-
Hi Kat, were you able to sort this out? We would love an update. Thanks!
Christy
-
Did you notice the precipitous drop in backlinks in March?
I'm still trying to get data from her so I can get a timeline, but I bet that's it. Looks to me like some site might have taken her out of a blogroll with so many pages suddenly disappearing, but the domains also went down and continue to fall.
Thanks, Marie.
-
Hi Kat,
I found that link by looking at the links from ahrefs.com sorted by anchor text.
-
Hi Marie,
I share your concern over blogspot. She says she's been doing it for years and never had a problem, but you and I know the only thing constant about Google is change and what worked yesterday may not today. I'm trying to get her to no-index that site, but she is reluctant, so I'm looking at other things as well. To address your comment about similarity in the sites, there is very much that. Many pages are identical.
Most of her backlinks also come from the blogspot site. The answer may be in the backlinks alone. As we saw what happened with MyBlogGuest, she could be guilty by association. So looking at all the backlinks is a something we need to do as well. I didn't find that mention you did but found others. How did you get that one?
I need to add in here for the benefit of other small business owners, be careful who you hire for SEO. She bought SEO services from a very well respected web host thinking that with their good reputation, she'd get great service and great results. She got great price and great expense.
Trying to get data and dates from her now. She was not using Analytics but some other tracker software. I'll share when I get it.
Thanks for your input! - Kat
-
"...client copies everything to blogspot."
If a large amount of the content on her blogspot site is the same as her main site AND if for some reason Google has chosen the blogspot site as the originator of the content, then there's a good possibility that the Panda algorithm is looking unfavorably on the main site. The key would be to noindex the duplicate content on the blogspot site and if this is the cause then within 1-2 Panda refreshes you should see improvement. Panda generally refreshes around once a month.
I'm guessing it's not Panda though as when I search for her name, her blogspot blog doesn't come up prominently. Still, it's not a good idea to publish to both places unless you can noindex or canonicalize one. It is ok to put the poems on more than one site provided that there is significant difference and value on each page other than just the poem.
I'm definitely seeing unnatural links too though such as http://demo.classyhost.com/SocialNews5/story.php?id=409614. It may be worth disavowing those types of links.
Can you tell if there is a specific date when the traffic decline started? If you can reconcile it with the date of a Panda (content) or a Penguin (links) refresh that might give you a better idea of what is going on.
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
-
Falling rankings - can't figure out why
I am still fairly green on in depth SEO, however I have a good grasp on making a site SEO friendly, as my skills are more down to website construction than technical SEO, however, I am working on a site at the moment which just continues to lose rankings and is slipping further and further. Keywords are dropping week on week in rankings Search visibility is also dropping week on week On site sales have fallen massively in the last quarter We have made huge improvements on the following; Moved the site to a faster stand alone cloud vps server - taken page rank scores from 54 to 87%. Added caching (WP Rocket) & CDN support. Improved URL structure (Woocommerce) removed /product and or /product-category from URLS to give more accurate & relevant structures. Added canonical URLs to all product categories (We use Yoast Premium) Amended on page structures to include correct H tags. Improved Facebook activity with a huge increase in engagements These are just some of the improvements we have made, yet we're still seeing huge drops in traffic and rankings. One insight I have noted which may be a big pointer, is we have 56 backlinks.... which I know is not good and we are about to address this. I suspect this is the reason for the poor performance, but should I be looking at anything else? Is there anything else we should be looking at? As I said, I'm no SEO specialist, but I don't think there's been any Penguin penalty, but my expertise is not sufficient enough to dig deeper. Can anyone offer any constructive advice at this stage? I'm thinking things to look at that could be hurting us that isn't immediately obvious? The site is www.glassesonspec.co.uk Thanks in advance Bob
Technical SEO | | SushiUK0 -
Have done everything for my site but not yet ranking in top 10 of critical keywords
I have conducted some highly technical SEO such as Link building, Social Media Promotion, On-page technical SEO, High quality Content, Superb Site architecture, responsive theme for good user experience, keyword analysis, title tags, description tags,etc. But currently not yet ranking even in top 5 of my critical keyword "Bulk sms kenya" or "bulk sms in kenya", my site is at http://goo.gl/X9vaLT am based in Nairobi, Kenya. Any advise, tips etc? As especially the keyword is not that highly competitive with a Difficulty Score of only 24%, what might I be missing?
Technical SEO | | ConnectMedia0 -
Why Custom Post Types Don't Get Ranked Well
So I have started to use custom post types and have noticed that they don't get ranked very well in Google. On the other hand a post will rank almost immediately. Does anyone know any tricks for making custom post types rank as well as posts in wordpress? Sincerely, Garret
Technical SEO | | eWebify0 -
Pointing Other URL to My Site? Good or bad for ranking.
A few years ago I purchased a few keyword rich domain names and set up some satellite sites. Spammy I now know. What should I do now? I own the domain names for at least another 3 years. Should I point them to my main site or would that hurt my main site ranking?
Technical SEO | | caisson0 -
Can anyone show me a good example of Microdata for a site
Hi, i am just learning about microdata after being told that it would be a good idea to have this for my site www.in2town.co.uk as i understand it, if i put this in, then it will allow google to understand more about my page I have been reading about it here https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 and would like to know if anyone is using it and if it is making a difference, also can anyone show me some good examples on a working website please i work in joomla so as i understand it, i would have to put this in each page to help google understand more about the page and its content any help would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Client's site dropped completely for all keywords, but not brand name - not manual penalty... help!
We just picked up a new search client a few weeks ago. They've been a customer (we're an automotive dealer website provider) since October of 2011. Their content was very generic (came from the previous provider), so we did a quick once-over as soon as he signed up. Beefed up his page content, made it more unique and relevant... tweaked title tags... wrote meta descriptions (he had none). In just over a week, he went from ranking on page 4 or 5 for his terms to ranking on page 2 or 3. My team was working on getting his social media set up, set up his blog, started competitor research... And then this last weekend, something happened and he dropped completely from the rankings... He still shows up if you do a site: search, or if you search his exact business name, but for everything else, he's nowhere to be found. His URL is www.ohioautowarehouse.com, business name is "Ohio Auto Warehouse" We filed a reconsideration request on Monday, and just got a reply today that there was no manual penalty. They suggested we check our content, but we know we didn't do anything spammy or blackhat. We hadn't even fully optimized his site yet - we were just finishing up his competitor research and were planning on a full site optimization next week... so we're at a complete loss as to what happened. Also, he's not ranking for any of the vehicles in his inventory. Our vehicle pages always rank on page 1 or 2, depending on how big the city is... you can always search "year make model city" and see our customers' sites (whether they're doing SEO or not). This guy's cars aren't showing up... so we know something is going on... Any help would be a lifesaver. We've been doing this for quite some time now, and we've never had a site get penalized. Since the reconsideration request didn't help, we're not sure what to do...
Technical SEO | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Can a site be removed from alexa?
let's say you have complete control over the webserver, and the hosting server. is there a way to set it up so that alexa statistics CANNOT be gained?
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites0 -
Can search engines penalize my site if I block IPs from some countries?
I have spotted that some countries in South America generate lot's of traffic on my site and I don't want to sell my service there. Can I be penalized for blocking IPs from certain counties? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Xopie0