General drop in rankings

[Emil_78]

We've made a LOT of improvements to our on page SEO and we've been on the right track, but since about 26/7 our rankings appears to have gone down. Since early 2015 we've reworked a lot of the copy on our site to improve the unique/duplicate ratio, we've redone a lot of urls that didn't make any sense. We've improved image alt-text and file names. We've reduced image size on most of the site and we have disavowed spam links (obvious ones like nike shoes and oakley glasses). We've basically improved on-site SEO as much as we can with headers and whatnot.

We've been hacked 4 times since January and we had two partial manual penalties from Google, but they were quickly dealt with and we've switched server to one that is both safer and a lot faster. Most of the hacked content seems to have disappeared from Googles index but not all of it.

We have also tried our best to deal with URL parameters and we've made 301's out of hundreds of URLs with duplicate content from old slideshows that basically only had an image. And there's even more things we've done like working a lot more with social media, but despite all that were loosing ranking every week and our SEOlytics SVR is at its lowest since early 2014. And we've never (afaik) bought links or anything like that.

Obviously we're doing something wrong but frankly we're running out of ideas. We've lost rankings on individual important phrases but there's site-wide general drop.

[Toddfoster]

Hello Emil - to answer your questions:

On-Site Content

For starters, your best bet is probably to initiate a campaign to produce a fair amount of static content for your website which will form the "backbone" of your on-site ranking factors. For any site, you want to make sure your Home Page and any landing pages feature a fair amount of content (estimates range between 500 and 2000 words, on average) in order to maximize ranking potential. Text-based content is huge, especially if your site is primarily based in images/Javascript, etc.

Next Steps:

1. Create a categorical page and ensure all images are unique/receive alt-text

This is the way to go if you get significant traffic to your website but not your social media accounts, or you don't have the time/resources to be on social media all the time. The idea here is to create static content on your site which Google typically reacts more positively to.

2. Create a blog for images and share on social media platforms

This is the way to go if you want to extend brand awareness and build it up. From what you tell me, this sounds like something that is occurring naturally and something you can leverage for future traffic/rankings. Social media signals don't directly impact rankings, but they do create traffic which can produce positive signals to Google if your content is well-received on social media. This requires a bit more time and dedication to social media, but the results are there for the taking. It also doesn't require lengthy articles.

Social Media Platforms:

In terms of what social media outlets to use - Instagram and Pinterest are great places to start, and you can utilize twitter and Facebook as well. If you have something more business-oriented, linkedin is a decent option. For you, though, Instagram should be your bread and butter. There's no reason why you can't have a blog on your domain and an instagram account with the same set of images, etc.

Duplicate content is a bit of red herring as it tends to be seen as a penalty-causing factor when in reality it is generally neutral to a website's rankings. The only way this would cause concern to me is if you are using spammy tactics or literally duplicating another website verbatim. If your content is reoccurring on your site (and no one else's) then you are probably fine from a Panda perspective.

Hope this helps and feel free to bounce any ideas off of me moving forward - love to help!

Rob

[Emil_78]

Dear Rob,

Thanks again for your time and effort.

Speaking of new content, that's something we've been discussing for a while. The company I work for have alot of knowledge about the area in which we work and we also have a huge amount of unique photo content. We share some on Facebook and there has been posts that get reach almost beyond the amount of followers (we have thousands) without boosting, simply because people recognize locations and people (and also a few other reasons). It's all "genuine", no stupid memes or clickbait, just a simple photo with a caption.

We would like to do something else with that content, and we have a couple of options. We've thought about an Instagram-account, or a photo blog on our own domain that would be more of a resource for our customers and also an inspiration for people that haven't used our services. What would be the best route for us? We don't really have the resources to write lengthy articles or spend a lot of time on social media. I believe our site does suffer a bit from thin and/or duplicate content (I always mix up Panda and Penguin:) ). I've used Siteliner and checked our site and there is a lot of text that's reoccuring.

Best regards

Emil

[Toddfoster]

Hey Emil,

No worries, we have all been there! If you are looking for next steps, you probably want to conduct a code audit to determine whether there are still any active hacks on the site. Keep in mind that a hack will not necessarily be generating new links or pages if it is active. Once those have been dealt with, your next step should be completely finalizing your on-page SEO with new, optimized content.

Lastly, you should probably look towards generating some good links for your site to boost rankings. If you are worried about a Penguin penalty, the first step should be cleaning up your link profile before moving forward. In fact, if you already performed a reconsideration request, but your domain features spammy links, that could explain why you are dropping rankings. Google's algorithm features code that tracks whether a link problem is actually solved after a partial penalty is enacted.

These are all generic SEO answers, but they do a world of good for rankings. Within 2-3 months you should be operating near full capacity again.

The impact of partial penalties can stick around for some time, and from my experience they typically taper off rather than disappear completely. This can mean some sluggish rankings for months after being hit.

Best of luck moving forward!

Rob

[Emil_78]

Hi!

Thanks for taking the time to respond! I know that what I'm asking doesn't have a simple answer and that it probably needs a lot of time and effort to find out why things are the way they are. I'm not asking for free SEO, and I didn't provide the URL to prove so. It's more about letting off some steam I guess, and maybe get some pointers where to look next.

The the spamhacks created a lot of mumbo jumbo pages about different brands (Lacoste, Nike etc) which linked to other sites and other sites were linking to us, but all of that has been adressed and the last reconsideration request we sent was approved a couple of months ago. Almost all of the links I've found that are spam links points to URLs which are 404 (at the worst point we had 22000 404's in GWT, our site is like 300 URLs) now since we've switched server and the spam content was removed, but since we don't have a massive amount of good links I'm slightly concerned that the spam links pointing to our site will push us "over the tipping point" where we get caught by Panda.

Anyway, it's a mess trying to weed out what the problem is since there's still junk in GA and GWT and at the same time we're in a vertical that is seasonal and something you buy maybe once or twice a year which explains why we have less traffic now than a few months back (we do ok in comparison with last year this time). Maybe it's simple best just to play it cool and make minor tweaks, devow a few obvious spam links and just continue to improve the stuff we haven't had time to fix...

[Toddfoster]

Hello Emil,

It sounds as if you might be dealing with the after effects of the hacking on your website. We dealt with a similar situation with a client of ours last month who saw similar effects after his site was hacked. From that experience, there are a couple of options:

1. There is negative SEO being performed on your website

This would require a link audit to determine whether there are significant negative linking practices being performed on your website. This might also account for the penalties you are suffering (depends on whether you're getting hit by Panda or Penguin). Once this audit is conducted, a good SEO should be able to determine where the issues are and suggest future security actions to avoid it being repeated.

2. There are still active hacks on the website

This is a job for a more security-oriented person. SEO's can general diagnose these problems, but solving them requires a complete site audit to determine whether code has been hidden on your site. I have a team member who solved the problem this way - it is a tedious and time-consuming process, but it is better to solve the problem completely than be hit over and over.

3. Re-consideration request

Given you have been hit by multiple manual penalties, you will have to submit a reconsideration request with Google. Make sure you have solved all of the above problems  before you send that, or you might never recover the site. A client of ours was in this position, and it took them about 2 years to recover fully.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but please feel free to reach out to me and I can give you some further tips and tricks to help with solving this issue.

Hope you can work it out and that this helps a bit!

Best regards,

Rob

[seomozinator]

Hi.

Well, changing things around, not always means making them better. (I'm not saying that's your case). It looks like you need to have to hire an SEO company/consultant or at least have your website SEO audited. I don't think there is anything anybody can tell you what exactly to do to improve YOUR rankings for YOUR website under YOUR circumstances.

Overall, (as you have said yourself), to improve your rankings, you gotta optimize content, technical SEO (redirects, payload data optimization, metas etc), backlink profile. If you have done all this (and that's what I get from your question) and instead of rankings climbing, they drop, maybe the work, which has been done, needs to be redone...

Or it just wasn't long enough time for recrawl and reassessment of your website's content/structure after all those changes and Google penalties.