How to re-rank an established website with new content
-
I can't help but feel this is a somewhat untapped resource with a distinct lack of information.
There is a massive amount of information around on how to rank a new website, or techniques in order to increase SEO effectiveness, but to rank a whole new set of pages or indeed to 're-build' a site that may have suffered an algorithmic penalty is a harder nut to crack in terms of information and resources.To start I'll provide my situation;
SuperTED is an entertainment directory SEO project.
It seems likely we may have suffered an algorithmic penalty at some point around Penguin 2.0 (May 22nd) as traffic dropped steadily since then, but wasn't too aggressive really. Then to coincide with the newest Panda 27 (According to Moz) in late September this year we decided it was time to re-assess tactics to keep in line with Google's guidelines over the two years. We've slowly built a natural link-profile over this time but it's likely thin content was also an issue. So beginning of September up to end of October we took these steps;- Contacted webmasters (and unfortunately there was some 'paid' link-building before I arrived) to remove links
- 'Disavowed' the rest of the unnatural links that we couldn't have removed manually.
- Worked on pagespeed as per Google guidelines until we received high-scores in the majority of 'speed testing' tools (e.g WebPageTest)
- Redesigned the entire site with speed, simplicity and accessibility in mind.
- Htaccessed 'fancy' URLs to remove file extensions and simplify the link structure.
- Completely removed two or three pages that were quite clearly just trying to 'trick' Google. Think a large page of links that simply said 'Entertainers in London', 'Entertainers in Scotland', etc. 404'ed, asked for URL removal via WMT, thinking of 410'ing?
- Added new content and pages that seem to follow Google's guidelines as far as I can tell, e.g;
Main Category Page Sub-category Pages - Started to build new links to our now 'content-driven' pages naturally by asking our members to link to us via their personal profiles. We offered a reward system internally for this so we've seen a fairly good turnout.
- Many other 'possible' ranking factors; such as adding Schema data, optimising for mobile devices as best we can, added a blog and began to blog original content, utilise and expand our social media reach, custom 404 pages, removed duplicate content, utilised Moz and much more. It's been a fairly exhaustive process but we were happy to do so to be within Google guidelines.
Unfortunately, some of those link-wheel pages mentioned previously were the only pages driving organic traffic, so once we were rid of these traffic has dropped to not even 10% of what it was previously. Equally with the changes (htaccess) to the link structure and the creation of brand new pages, we've lost many of the pages that previously held Page Authority.
We've 301'ed those pages that have been 'replaced' with much better content and a different URL structure - http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands to simply http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands, for example.Therefore, with the loss of the 'spammy' pages and the creation of brand new 'content-driven' pages, we've probably lost up to 75% of the old website, including those that were driving any traffic at all (even with potential thin-content algorithmic penalties). Because of the loss of entire pages, the changes of URLs and the rest discussed above, it's likely the site looks very new and probably very updated in a short period of time.
What I need to work out is a campaign to drive traffic to the 'new' site.
We're naturally building links through our own customerbase, so they will likely be seen as quality, natural link-building.
Perhaps the sudden occurrence of a large amount of 404's and 'lost' pages are affecting us?
Perhaps we're yet to really be indexed properly, but it has been almost a month since most of the changes are made and we'd often be re-indexed 3 or 4 times a week previous to the changes.
Our events page is the only one without the new design left to update, could this be affecting us? It potentially may look like two sites in one.
Perhaps we need to wait until the next Google 'link' update to feel the benefits of our link audit.
Perhaps simply getting rid of many of the 'spammy' links has done us no favours - I should point out we've never been issued with a manual penalty. Was I perhaps too hasty in following the rules?Would appreciate some professional opinion or from anyone who may have experience with a similar process before.
It does seem fairly odd that following guidelines and general white-hat SEO advice could cripple a domain, especially one with age (10 years+ the domain has been established) and relatively good domain authority within the industry.
Many, many thanks in advance.
Ryan.
-
Many, for pure backlinks check the most comprehensive are ahrefs.com and https://majestic.com
-
Something does seem wrong, that's what I thought.
The 20,000 links was from our development site, it should never have been indexed. It was taken down (the site) the same week so we should hope any penalty shouldn't stay for long.
8th September seems fishy also, we've certainly not done that ourselves. Is there any way to check these links? Any tool?
Thanks in advance.
-
I think you need an in deep analysis.
There's something definitely very wrong. I can see only 13 keywords, with a backlink profile of more than 500 linking root domains. Your traffic seems to have been in constant decline for a while but in May something happen which sort of killed it completely.
Also looks like you gained around 15/20 thousands links between Oct 9 and 15, that's smelling.
On the 8th of Sep you got 150 root linking domain in one day, wow, that's smelling even more.
-
Hi Max,
Thanks for the response.
There was no manual penalty at any point, and there still aren't any showing in WMT.
We're probably only ranking for perhaps 5-10 keywords, and most of them have no competition or are branded. There are a few local long-tail keywords we get traffic from still, such as 'Children's Entertainer in Wembley' and others similar.
This is why I thought of coming to the experts at Moz, it seems fairly strange that BEFORE the algorithm penalty (if indeed there was one) we were ranking fairly well for our industry keywords (think Children's Entertainers, Dancers, Clowns, etc etc) and were probably ranking for over 100 keywords easily.
Since disavowing, link auditing, and removing clearly spammy content + **then **adding new rich content, we're still only ranking for pretty much no keywords after about a month.
As far as I can guess, we've either not been indexed/ranked yet (which seems odd as we used to be indexed fairly regularly) or there's something else going on.
Thanks again for the response.
-
Is google WMT showing any manual penalty? And as far as I can see from a quick look you seem to be indexed for a very very limited number of keywords, how many keywords are originating traffic if you look at WMT?
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
-
Are bloggs published on blog platforms and on our own site be considered duplicate content?
Hi, SEO wizards! My company has a company blog on Medium (https://blog.scratchmm.com/). Recently, we decided to move it to our own site to drive more traffic to our domain (https://scratchmm.com/blog/). We re-published all Medium blogs to our own website. If we keep the Medium blog posts, will this be considered duplicate content and will our website rankings we affected in any way? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Spam signals from old company site are hurting new company site, but we can't undo the redirect.
My client was forced to change its domain name last year (long story). We were largely able to regain our organic rankings via 301-redirects. Recently, the rankings for the new domain have begun to plummet. Nothing specific took place that could have caused any ranking declines on the new site. However, when we analyze links to the OLD site, we are seeing a lot of link spam being built to that old domain over recent weeks and months. We have no idea where these are coming from but they appear to be negatively impacting our new site. We cannot dismantle the redirects as the old site has hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links pointing to it, and many customers are accustomed to going to that home page. So those redirects need to stay in place. We have already disavowed all the spam we have found on the old Search Console. We are continuing to do so as we find new spam links. But what are we supposed to do about this spam negatively impacting our new site? FYI we have not received any messages in the search console.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
Increase in spammy links from image gallery websites i.e. myimagecollection.net
Hi there I've recently noticed a lot of spammy links coming from image gallery sites that all look the same, i.e.: http://mypixlibrary.co/ http://hdimagegallery.net/ http://myimagecollection.net/ http://pixhder.com/ Has anyone else seen links from these? They have no contact details, not sure if they are some form of negative SEO or site spam. Any ideas how to get rid? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kerry_Jones0 -
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 -
Should I 301 redirect my old site are just add a link to my new site
I used to offer design and web services on a site that is current blank (no content, no links). My questions is should I add a little bit of content, maybe a brief explanation with a link to my new site. Or should I just add 301 redirect. This is purely a question of what is better for SEO and ranking for my new site (not a branding question).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tyrell0 -
Low quality websites with spammy EMDs still ranking higher than genuine websites?
Hey guys, I've just been doing some searching and couldn't quite contemplate how heavily low-quality and spammy EMDs are still running some Google searches. Just take "cheap kitchens", for instance. Here are a list of URLs that appeared; http://kitchenunitsdoors.co.uk/ http://www.kitchenunits9.co.uk/ http://www.aboutkitchenunits.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchenunits1.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchensonline.com/ http://www.buycheapkitchens.com/ http://www.cheapkitchenscheapkitchen.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchensforsale1.co.uk/ http://cheapkitchensaberdeen.co.uk/ http://www.kitchensderby1.co.uk/ http://www.cheapcheapkitchens.co.uk/ http://kitchen-cheap.co.uk/ http://www.cheapestkitchensinbritain.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchenss.co.uk/ http://www.cheaperthanmfi.com/ http://cheapkitchenuk.co.uk/ As you can see, none of them appear to be genuine retailers and are setup purely to influence Google rankings. I'm amazed that Google is still giving so much weight to these types of sites - especially considering how search is meant to be better than it ever was before! Any insights into why this is?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Ask Bloggers/Users To Link To Website
I have a web service that help bloggers to do certain tasks and find different partners. We have a couple of thousand bloggers using the service and ofcourse this is a great resource for us to build links from. The bloggers are all from different platforms and domains. Currently when a blogger login to the service we tell the blogger that if they write a blog post about us with their own words, and tell their readers what they think of our service. We will then give them a certain benifit within the service. This is clearly encouraging a dofollow-link from the bloggers, and therefore it's not natural link building. The strategy is however working quite good with about 150 new blog posts about our service per month, which both gives us a lot of new visitors and users, but also give us link power to increase our rankings within the SERP. Now to my questions: This is not a natural way of building links, but what is your opinion of this? Is this total black hat and should we be scared of a severe punishment from Google? We are not leaving any footprints more than we are asking the users for a link, and all blogposts are created with their own unique words and honest opinions. Since this viral marketing method is working great, we have no plans of changing our strategy. But what should we avoid and what steps should we take to ensure that we won't get in any trouble in the future for encouraging our users to linking back to us in this manner?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marcuslind0 -
If I redirect a penalized domain to a non-penalized domain, will the new domain still be penalized?
If I redirect a penalized domain to a non-penalized domain, will the new domain still be penalized?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MangoMan160