Cleaning up backlinks and changing URLs
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Currently we are performing very poorly in organic clicks. We are a e-commerce site with over 2000 products.
Issues we thought plagued us:
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Copied Images from competitors
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Site wide duplicate content
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duplicate content from competitor site
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Number of internal links on a page (300+)
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Bad backlinks (2.3k from 22 domains and ips)
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being linked to from sites like m.biz
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URLs
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URLs are abbreviated, over 50% lack our keywords
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Lack of meta descriptions, or too long meta descriptions
Current State of fixing these issues:
- 50% images are now our own
- Site wide duplicate content near 100% completed
- Internal links have been dealt with
- Rewrote content for every product
- 90% of meta descriptions are fixed
From all of these changes we have yet to see increase in traffic...10% increase at best in organic clicks. We think we have penalties on certain URLs. My question for the MOZ community is what is the best way to attack the lack of organic clicks. Our main competition is getting 900% more clicks than us. Any more information you need on the topic let me know and will get back to you.
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Hi there
Immediately, I would check your Webmaster Tools and see if you have a Manual Action of any kind.
If you do have a manual action - read through the Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal.
It seems like you are taking care of your On-Site SEO pretty well. I would also make sure you are using canonical tags on product and category pages properly.
I would also start benchmarking your sites as they currently stand and tracking progress as you go through implementations and changes to your site. Take a look at this competitive analysis resource from Moz, not to copycat, but to instead utilize for your own unique website and audience.
Make sure your mobile SEO is the best it can be. Also, make sure you are taking advantage of Schema.org as it can potentially help your website improve in rankings - here is Google's Testing Tool to see if your web development team implemented it correctly.
Take a look at Enhanced Ecommerce to see what products are giving you the best traffic and conversion rates. From there, you can structure your site in ways based on audience behavior and implement that behavior into your marketing strategy.
And lastly - start tracking your keywords in Moz and Webmaster Tools so you can see where you have opportunities and where you can improve.
Hope this all helps! Let me know if you have any more questions or comments! Good luck!
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