Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
-
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried:
- Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links
- Removed any internal Duplicate Content
- Removed any broken links
- Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality
- No-Followed all outbound links
- Added any missing title tags
- changed hosting
- Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally
The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
-
Check Google Webmaster tools if you actually got a manual penalty, and what their reason was/is.
-
There seems to be a lot to your question. I am going to try to start at the bottom and work my way up.
• If another domain is copying your text and embedding it in your site without consent I would contact the copyright department where your server is hosted. The solution might take some time but they should be able to get your content off of another site. I know that GoDaddy helped us with this problem a few months ago. One of our competitors IFramed our website and used it as their own for a couple of days.
• The content on the site seems to be be pretty solid. There are a few pages that are lacking content and seem to be pretty thin. I suggest beefing up the landing pages a little bit and working on your title tags. It seems unclear which keyterms you are targeting from looking at the source code. There seems to be a lack of consistency on page with repetition of keyterms and using them in the URL, title tags and content. I would suggest a little bit more research on the keyterms to make sure the ones that are being targeted get a good amount of search traffic. I would maybe try to target some not so competitive terms just to get something from your sight to the front page to help your impression share increase.
• When you say you disavowed links, was that because of a penalty? If so you might not start to see improvement if those changes weren't good enough for Google to remove the effects of that penalty. If it were a result of a Penguin update you could have been suffering the effects of a negative penalty. Now that another update in process you might start seeing better results. If not, that means more work on the link profile needs to be done.
• When you say you no followed all outbound links, does that mean that any link on your website is a no follow? I am not 100% sure here, but I don't believe that is really best practice. I might reconsider that strategy. Too many no follow links don't look good to Google.
These are just some things that I can suggest briefly looking through the site. I hope that helps.
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
-
SEO audit for ccTLD sites
Hi.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOSanna
My customer has sites with Country code TLDs (e.g. https://sample.fr, https://sample.fi and https://sample.en) and I'm supposed to perform SEO audit for them. Is there any way to perform audit at the same time for all versions? Can I perform audit e.g. just for https://sample or do I have to run every .fr, .fi and .en separately in multiple tools I use? Thanks much in advance!0 -
Two sites with same content
Hi Everyone, I am having two listing websites. Website A&B are marketplaces Website A approx 12k listing pages Website B : approx 2k pages from one specific brand. The entire 2k listings on website B do exist on website A with the same URL structure with just different domain name. Just header and footer change a little bit. But body is same code. The listings of website B are all partner of a specific insurance company. And this insurance company pays me to maintain their website. They also look at the traffic going into this website from organic so I cannot robot block or noindex this website. How can I be as transparent as possible with Google. My idea was to apply a canonical on website B (insurance partner website) to the same corresponding listing from website A. Which would show that the best version of the product page is on website A. So for example :www.websiteb.com/productxxx would have a canonical pointing to : www.websitea.com/productxxxwww.websiteb.com/productyyy would have a canonical pointing to www.websitea.com/productyyyAny thoughts ? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evoe0 -
Site dropped after recovery
Hi everybody! I've been working for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com for some time now. They came to me as they had dropped heavily for their main term, "boot camp". This turned out to be due to a manual penalty, which was in part due to their forum being hacked, as well as some bad link building. Here's an example of the dodgy forum links - http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html. The anchor is "microsoft". They've all been 410'd now. Also, we cleaned up the other bad links as best we could, and got through the manual penalty. The site then returned to #5 for "boot camps", below its pre-crash peak of #2, but OK. Over the past few weeks, it has started to slide though. I'm certain it is not down to a lack of quality links - this site has great PR and links from national newspapers and magazines. There's been a few on-site issues too, but nothing outrageous. I'm getting a bit stumped though, and any fresh eyes would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Any SEO penalties for hosting a site on a sub-domain.
Hi, A client of ours has previously been hosting their main website on a sub-domain of their primary URL. They currently have a training application being hosted on the main domain. They also currently have a redirect in place so when you go to www.xzy.com, you're redirected to xzy.xzy.com. If need need to stick with this set-up for the website relaunch later this month, my question is: are there any SEO drawbacks to having the entire site hosted on a sub-domain? Should we fight to get the training application off the main domain, at which point we can host everything on the main domain? Many thanks! Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThisisPlanB0 -
Best way to SEO crowdsourcing site
What is the best way to SEO a crowdsourcing site? The websites content is entirely propagated by the user
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
SEO through Social Media, what have you been doing? :)
Hi, Just a general discussion really, what sort of thing have you been up to regarding social media and it helping SEO. One thing that does interest me is generating tweets/likes and also using Google plus profile to help SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0