Shoemaker with ugly shoes : Agency site performing badly, what's our best bet?
-
Hi everyone,
We're a web agency and our site www.axialdev.com is not performing well. We have very little traffic from relevant keywords.Local competitors with worse On-page Grader scores and very few backlinks outrank us. For example, we're 17th for the keyword "agence web sherbrooke" in Google.ca in French.
Background info:
- In the past, we included 3 keywords-rich in the footer of every site we made (hundreds of sites by now). We're working to remove those links on poor sites and to use a single nofollow link on our best sites.
- Since this is on-going and we know we won't be able to remove everything, our link profile sucks (OSE).
- We have a lot of sites on our C-Block, some of poor quality.
- We've never received a manual penalty. Still, we've disavowed links as a precaution after running Link D-Tox.
- We receive a lot of trafic via our blog where we used to post technical articles about Drupal, Node js, plugins, etc. These visits don't drive business.
- Only a third of our organic visits come from Canada.
What are our options?
- Change domain and delete the current one?
- Disallow the blog except for a few good articles, hoping it helps Google understand what we really do.
- Keep donating to Adwords?
Any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks! -
Ahh I get it now, redirect every URL from the old site to its homepage. Makes sense!
For point 2) I meant the URL Removal tool to de-index the whole site but this would no longer be needed if I apply the above suggestion.
Thanks a bunch!
-
Yep. The site isn't done. Every time we try to finish it, another couple of referrals come in.
Regarding "non-google sanction duplicate content" that's just my way with words. You have a French version of the site and an English version of the site. Without proper hreflang usage, that is duplicate content.
-
Well spotted, Travis!
-
ABSOLUTELY do NOT 301 anything from the old site to the new site...or you risk transferring the penalty!
I'm not sure what Google will do if you disallow via robots.txt AND 301. Most likely, this is safe, Google will remove the old site from the index and ignore the 301s. But I think there's some risk here that Google will read the pages anyway, see the 301s, and perhaps transfer the penalty.
Deleting the domain in webmaster tools will have no effect, other than to prevent you from seeing what Google thinks about the old domain :-/. Google will continue to index the old domain, follow redirected links, see duplicate content, etc.
-
Hello / Bonjour.
It looks like you might have an awful lot of duplicate content (e.g. category pages, date archives) on the site. I'd try getting rid of that before deciding to switch domains.
-
Hi Travis, thanks for your response.
I swear those hreflangs were OK not long ago! We'll fix them up, thanks!
Can you give an example of "non-google sanctioned duplicate content"?
The robots.txt file seems OK even though it's a bit heavy in verbatim. I'll ask to shrink it a bit. (By the way, I was curious about PhysVisible's robots.txt but looks like you're disallowing everything. Thought I'd let you know!)
Thanks again!
-
Merci Michael!
Can you elaborate on "Keep the old site running, but 301 redirect all of the pages to the home page..." ? Should any URL on www.oldsite.com redirect to the homepage of www.newsite.com?
We had these options in mind. What do you think of those?
-
robots.txt disallow the old site and map every URL with a 301 to help our users get to the right page while Googlebot won't follow those links (to be tested but seems logical), and/or...
-
Delete the whole old domain in GWT.
Thanks for your time!
-
-
Full disclosure: I've been studying hreflang/rel=alternate for the glorious day when someone wants, and will pay for, a solid Spanish translation. That day has not come. But I wanted to be prepared. So here goes:
Your English pages are pointing the canonical at the French pages. No nationalized form of English is mentioned in the hfrelang alternate. If your English speaking audience is Canadian, put en-ca in the empty quotes after hreflang=. Example from /en:
rel="alternate" hreflang="" href="http://www.axialdev.com/en/" />
All of your canonicals point to the fr-ca version of the pages. For the en-ca pages, they should point to the en-ca pages.
I grew up in Michigan. I have quite a few Canadian friends. The only thing that's different about spoken Canadian English is the pronunciation of 'about' and they tend toward en-gb in spelling. But you should use en-ca anyway.
Yep, you have a lot of site-wide links. That is true. That may be part of the problem. But right now, you have a lot of non-google sanctioned duplicate content.
The site also has one of the most involved robots.txt pages I've seen in a month or so. It may not be a good idea to call any old user agent, *, and not give them a directive. Check the end of the file.
A site should not nose dive within the space of a couple weeks without extensive search engine manipulation, or serious on-page issues. Your site has been live for seven years. It's better to doubt on-page first though.
-
Bonjour! (I lived in Montreal for 6 years :-).
I do a lot of penalty recovery work, and you're in the same situation as a number of my clients: algorithmic penalty (probably), and you've disavowed links, but....no Penguin update for a year.
The next Penguin data update is mostly likely very soon, from mutterings from Matt at SMX Advanced. It's been almost a year since the last one. Your disavows won't take effect until there IS a data update.
I would wait for the data update, and see if you recover on rankings for the 3 terms you had in your footer links from client sites. If you do, then great, continue on...
If not, then I'd be inclined to start a new domain, and move your content from your old site (and blog) to the new site, WITHOUT 301 redirecting. Keep the old site running, but 301 redirect all of the pages to the home page....you want Google to successfully fetch all of those blog pages with the great content, but find it's permanently moved to your home page, where that content no longer exists. This way your new site's content will not be seen as duplicate by Google (if you just 404 the pages, Google will presume the content is still as it was before it 404'd....FOR MONTHS).
It's worth going through all of the backlinks for the old site, seeing which ones are from healthy sites, and manually asking those webmasters if they'd kindly update their links to point to your new site.
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
-
What's the best way to use redirects on a massive site consolidation
We are migrating 13 websites into a single new domain and with that we have certain pages that will be terminated or moved to a new folder path so we need custom 301 redirects built for these. However, we have a huge database of pages that will NOT be changing folder paths and it's way too many to write custom 301's for. One idea was to use domain forwarding or a wild card redirect so that all the pages would be redirected to their same folder path on the new URL. The problem this creates though is that we would then need to build the custom 301s for content that is moving to a new folder path, hence creating 2 redirects on these pages (one for the domain forwarding, and then a second for the custom 301 pointing to a new folder). Any ideas on a better solution to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Best way to do site seals for clients to have on their sites
I am about to help release a product which also gives people a site seal for them to place on their website. Just like the geotrust, comodo, symantec, rapidssl and other web security providers do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssltrustpaul
I have notices all these siteseals by these companies never have nofollow on their seals that link back to their websites. So i am wondering what is the best way to do this. Should i have a nofollow on the site seal that links back to domain or is it safe to not have the nofollow.
It wont be doing any keyword stuffing or anything, it will probly just have our domain in the link and that is all. The problem is too, we wont have any control of where customers place these site seals. From experience i would say they will mostly likely always be placed in the footer on every page of the clients website. I would like to hear any and all thoughts on this. As i can't get a proper answer anywhere i have asked.0 -
Best support site software to use
Hi Guys We currently use Desk to run our company support site, it seems ok (I don't administer it), however is it very template driven and doesn't allow useful tools such as being able to add metadata to each page (hence in our Moz crawl tests we get a large number of no metadata errors (which seems like a lost opportunity for us to optimise the site). Our support team are looking to implement MadCap Flare as an information management tool, however this tool outputs HTML as iframes which obviously make it hard for google to crawl the content. We recently implemented HubSpot as our content marketing platform which is great, and we'd love to have the support site hosted on this (great for tracking traffic etc), however as far as I'm aware MadCap Flare doesn't integrate directly with HubSpot....so looking for suggestions on what others are successfully using to host/manage their SEO optimised support sites? Cheers Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SnapComms0 -
Will these 301's get me penalized?
Hey everyone, We're redesigning parts of our site and I have a tricky question that I was hoping to get some sound advice about. We have a blog (magazine) with subcategory pages that are quite thin. We are going to restructure the blog (magazine) and feature different concert and have new subcategories. So we are trying to decide where to redirect the existing subcategory pages, e.g. Entertainment, Music, Sports, etc. www.charged.fm/magazine Our new ticket category pages ( Concert Tickets, NY Yankees Tickets, OKC Thunder Tickets, etc) are going to feature a tab called 'Latest News' where we are thinking of 301 redirecting the old magazine subcategory pages. So Sports News from the blog would 301 to Sports Tickets (# Latest News tab). See screenshot below for example. So my question is: Will this look bad in the eyes of the GOOG? Are these closely related enough to redirect? Are there any blatant pitfalls that I'm not seeing? It seems like a win/win because we are making a rich Performer page with News, Bio, Tickets and Schedule and getting to reallocate the link juice that was being wasted in an pretty much useless page that was allowed to become to powerful. Gotta keep those pages in check! Thoughts appreciated. Luke Cn6HPpH.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
Does anyone know why my website's domain authority has dropped from 51 to 49
However this does not seem to be in isolation. All of my competitors websites have taken a similar 1 or 2 points hit. I am thinking that as an industry we may have been affected by a mutual linking site being taken down, redesigned or just loosing its own domain authority. We do rank well for our keywords and we have been on a continual rise since I took over in January, we do a little bit of a guest blogging and I am trying to build links to the site but I am doing it slowly. Would anyone else have an idea on what has happened that would cause 4 sites in the same industry to take a 1 or 2 point hit? Thanks, Emmet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CertificationEU1 -
Could the top SEO's such as Rand enter any arena?
This is just a post for fun really. Do you think the top 3 SEO's in the world could be in the top 3 results of any industry in 6 months? I would love to see this in action really, a couple of guys against industry giants in insurance or something.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Competitior 'scraped' entire site - pretty much - what to do?
I just discovered a competitor in the insurance lead generation space has completely copied my client's site's architecture, page names, titles, even the form, tweaking a word or two here or there to prevent 100% 'scraping'. We put a lot of time into the site, only to have everything 'stolen'. What can we do about this? My client is very upset. I looked into filing a 'scraper' report through Google but the slight modifications to content technically don't make it a 'scraped' site. Please advise to what course of action we can take, if any. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen
Greg0 -
Rel canonical element for different URL's
Hello, We have a new client that has several sites with the exact same content. They do this for tracking purposes. We are facing political objections to combine and track differently. Basically, we have no choice but to deal with the situation given. We want to avoid duplicate content issues, and want to SEO only one of the sites. The other sites don't really matter for SEO (they have off-line campaigns pointing to them) we just want one of the sites to get all the credit for the content. My questions: 1. Can we use the rel canonical element on the irrelevent pages/URL's to point to the site we care about? I think I remember Matt Cutts saying this can't be done across URL's. Am I right or wrong? 2. If we can't, what options do I have (without making the client change their entire tracking strategy) to make the site we are SEO'ing the relevant content? Thanks a million! Todd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GravitateOnline0