Links disappeared

[WallerD]

Hi,

I am a wedding photographer based in Liverpool. I have been trying to do my own SEO for the last 6 months.

I have been hovering around the top of page two for the main search terms for the past few years.

I used an SEO company before christmas who got a lot of spammy links which resulted in my site dropping to page 4 of the SERPS. With the help of this forum I managed to locate them and disavow those links, and have tried to do it myself.

I have managed to gain a few "featured weddings" on national wedding blogs and wrote a few articles for another wedding blog and also some forum comments. I have also got a  few links for example from a wedding band in exchange for some photographs.

I have got onto page 1 about 4 times, the best result was at position 6 on page 1 but every time I have slowly dropped out again. I have methodically (once a month) checked for any of the spammy links and updated the disavow list.

My competitors have at best old forum comments and the like and on checking their websites with open site explorer are not actively link building at all.

I have just checked my Webmaster tools and google is only recognising 51 links. (none of my good wedding blog links are there) I have an external links csv from the 28th June with 602 links on it.

I changed my website around May of this year but it is still on the same domain name www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk.

Can anybody help?

Best wishes.

David.

[WallerD]

Hi Marie,

I think if you feel I am not going to be penalised, I will leave them alone.

Best wishes.

David

[MarieHaynes]

OK. So for that particular page, it looks like you've redirected it to itself. I have a plugin that shows me the redirects and I see:

"..../blog/2013/01/liverpool-wedding-photography-rebecca-david/

301: Permanent redirect to ..../blog/2013/01/liverpool-wedding-photography-rebecca-david/

At the bottom of that particular post, in the Yoast Advanced settings you should see a box that allows you to choose which page to 301 redirect this to. Perhaps an appropriate page to redirect to would be the weddings category page (/wedding-gallery)?

I should mention though that there is a good chance that these 404 errors are not a huge deal. Google will eventually figure out that these pages are gone and will remove them from the index. Having 404 pages is not going to cause you any sort of penalty. But, in general, it is better for users if they don't consistently land on 404 pages. I wouldn't get too worried about these and spend a lot of time on them though.

[WallerD]

Hi Marie,

I have just checked search console and i have 74 soft 404's and 443 not found 404 errors. I am sorry I don't know what to do with this information. Most of these urls are for pages i have deleted from my old website, so don't exist any more. Do ifind a relevant page and redirect to that? so for example this page is a 404 on search console:

blog/2013/01/liverpool-wedding-photography-rebecca-david/

I have a page which has that content on and in advanced in yoast at the bottom is the 301 Redirect

but i still dont know what to do!

Also i dont know what to do with the soft 404s!!!

Best wishes.

David

[MarieHaynes]

That's great to hear that you jumped after disavowing. There are some algorithms other than Penguin that consider links as well, so it's possible that these were affecting you. Or...it's possible that for some reason the change was not related to the disavow.

Here's what I did to find those 404 pages:

site:yoursitename.com

Then, scroll to the bottom of the list. If you see "show results with omitted results included", click on that. Then, move to the last page and scroll to the bottom.

Don't worry if you see some results in there that say they are blocked by robots.txt. I don't know why Google shows them on a site: search but it's nothing to worry about. But, click on some of the non-blocked results you see in the list and you'll see that they are on 404 pages.

Now, there's an easier way for you to do this and that is to look in Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). Click on crawl and crawl errors and you'll be able to see the 404 pages that Google has recognized.

Regarding redirects, I see that you have Yoast's SEO plugin installed. If you click on the advanced option for each page, you'll see a line where you can choose to redirect each page or post to another. The other way to do this is via htaccess. There are lots of resources online for how to edit your htaccess file to implement a redirect. But really, I think that for what you are doing, the Yoast option would be the easiest.

Hope that helps!

[WallerD]

Hi Marie,

Thank you for taking the time to look at my site and give me more great insight!

To be honest as soon as I disavowed the majority of the rogue SEO companies links I jumped from 4th page to top of page two. Maybe it was also a case of changing the page title back to my main keyword also.

Can you let me know how I can do the site search and find the 404s? To be honest i dont think there was much deep linking going on, as most of my links go back to the home page which the url has not changed between site updates.

Also could you point me to a resource that will show me how to redirect?

Best wishes.

David.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi David,

I think Chris has given you some excellent advice. I have a few additional thoughts.

It sounds like you're doing a good job on the link cleanup. It's important to know that Penguin has not refreshed since last fall. If you were suppressed by Penguin, you won't escape that suppression until Google recrawls all of your disavowed links and then refreshes the algorithm again. As such, you may see a significant boost when that happens. We don't know when the next Penguin refresh is but it is likely going to be a few months.

I sleuthed out your site and had a quick look. Your title tag is keyword stuffed and written for search engines not readers.

I know it's not intuitive to do this on a photography site, but try adding a paragraph of text before your big image. The text should contain one or two keywords, but be primarily written for readers again, not keyword stuffed.

When you changed your site, did your urls change? If so, you need to redirect your old urls to the new ones otherwise any links pointing to those will be lost. When I did a site: search for your domain name and scrolled down to the last pages that Google has listed, they all ended up on 404 pages. I'd take those 404 pages and perhaps redirect them to an appropriate category page.

Be patient with webmaster tools. It can sometimes take a few months for links to appear in the list. It doesn't mean that Google is not seeing them though.

Hope that helps! By the way...you have some really awesome photos on the site.

Marie

[WallerD]

Hi chris,

i have been a bit of a dope and left my old site in 1&1's development server url, which had internal links so now going to my new site with the duplicate content!

Now back at 7th position and reassured the work I have been doing is working!

Thanks everyone for your help!

David.

[MattRoney]

Hi David!

I'd just like to recommend a Moz tool that I recommend all the time for issues like this—the Keyword Difficulty tool. Specifically, the Full SERP Analysis report in the Keyword Difficulty tool. It might give you some insight into why your competitors are outranking you.

Cyrus Shepard posted a great video on how it works here.

[WallerD]

Hi Chris thank you so much for looking at the list.

I'm a tad frustrated to be honest as for example this site:

<cite class="_Rm">www.liverweddingphotography.co.uk/</cite>according to moz has a domain authority of 8 and has 3 links, and he is above me!he is also got really spammy copy with the keywords repeated over and over, real old school.so everything that google now frowns upon this guy does and ends up on page 1!Like I previously  mentioned no one else is doing anything and they are above me, i am starting to think i have been earmarked by google or something after the spammy link spree of the SEO company last winter.

Best wishes.David.

[GPainter]

Hi,

I was more hinting towards not to bulk disavow and ensure you review each site but most of them (quickly looking over) hardly seem thrilling I'd keep

bitly.com (you list it twice) and delicious.com, one is just a url shortner and the other is just a social share site, shouldn't really do you much harm.

I'm also not saying your disavow list is bad just want to ensure you're not disavowing anything that isn't technically bad for you.

In Ahref I see:

Backlinks759Referring Domains83So don't panic just because you can't see them in Google doesn't mean they are not being counted!Hope that helps a bit, i'm sure some other users here in Moz will also have some great advice too!

[GPainter]

Step 1: DONT PANIC!

Step 2. Have you also looked into other tools like, Majestic seo, Ahrefs, OSE. Google doesn't always show you all the links you've got and by looking at the crawlers you can get a better idea of what you realistically have.

Step 3: Seems like you are being very pro-active which is good but be careful not to disavow too much as sometimes you can remove links that might be benefiting you. Google won't give you a penalty over one or two bad links (assuming they've got good DA & PA etc.) so it's sometimes okay to leave a cheeky link in there if its adding value, however that's just my opinion.

I hope Step 2 will give you some good insight, you can normally see a basic over view for free.