My PR1 website with no manual action is not appearing in the google top 200 result, it used to be top 1

[ChelseaP]

Hi All,

My website has 5 years of history, it used to be top 3 for its keyword with an SEO firm I hired back then with PR3. After 2013, its ranking starts dropping to not appearing at all in the google search result. But my site is not banned. There are still some long tail google traffic. There is no manual action in the webmaster tool. Even today, it still has PR1 but it is still not appearing in the top 200 results of google. My onsite optimization for the main keyword is good. It's just not appearing in google results at all. I manually reviewed all the top 200 results, there are so many spammy blogs were listed but not my legit website homepage with unique content.

I do regret hiring that SEO firm now. But there is no manual action to my site according to google so I don't know if I should disavow all the old backlinks. I started to do some quality SEO works myself now. My ranking is now at around 11~15 in Yahoo/Bing from 30~40. Do I see some light at the end of the tunnel? Does that mean my site may appear in google again?

Thank you all for the reply.

[MoosaHemani]

I agree with Matt, in order to get the advice particular for your situation you need a real pro that look in to your website and backlink profile but here is a general advice.

If there is no manual action on your website, it’s a good part in my opinion and you have time to fix things up before Google actually put the manual penalty on it. My advice is to look in to your link profile and see how many bad links you have and separate bad links from the good one and ideally you should disavow all bad links to tell Google that these links have nothing to do with you and you are not looking for a link juice from all the bad websites.

The next step is to see what good links you have and get as many relevant and authority links as you can and you will see that the rankings will go up with increase in DA as well.

Again, this is a general advice for anything in particular you need to share your URL here!

Hope this helps!

[MattAntonino]

Hi Qian!

Sounds like you definitely need a (real) pro to look at the site for you. You don't have to have a manual penalty to have Penguin, Panda or some other Google action affect your site.  Moving up in Yahoo or Bing doesn't necessarily mean you're going to start to see recovery in Google.

Sounds like over-optimisation & Panda to me but would have to see the URL to know for sure. Post it or PM me if you want me to take a further look.

[jlane9]

Would you mind providing the url of your website so I can have a deeper look for you ?

Have you checked all your backlinks for quality and scores ? You may want to disavow any really bad links you find. Have you checked your anchor text variations ? Also have you compared your website, DA and PA scores against some of your competitors ? With some research you should be able to pinpoint the issues so you can make a game plan to improve your ranking results.

Thank you,

Joe