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.

[katandmouse]

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?

[katandmouse]

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.

[Christy-Correll]

Any updates, Kat?

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Kat, were you able to sort this out? We would love an update. Thanks!

Christy

[katandmouse]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi Kat,

I found that link by looking at the links from ahrefs.com sorted by anchor text.

[katandmouse]

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

[MarieHaynes]

"...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.