Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help
-
Hello Mozzers.
We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site.
examples -
site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london
site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester
These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked.
We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do.
It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc.
Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8
thanks
Pete
-
Thanks Craig,
We are basically a tool hire website but previously as also had a number of mini sites which just specialised in one aspect of what we hired, so for instance, we had a carpet cleaner hire website and a generator hire website as well. This helped to give us a larger SEO footprint and until the start of 2014 was proving very successful. By we got a penalty(due to some links from myguest blog which an seo freelancer did for us ) and this took a few months to clean up and we also then stopped the microsites for saftey as well.
I will check the traffic from the 301 domains and see if I can remove them.
thanks
pete
-
Hi Peter, quite a history you have.
It looks like you have a lot of good advice above, but I want to add a little to what Josh said. I think you are correct to clean up the site, these things will bite you eventually, but it would probably make sense to do it in a staged approach. By cutting off a bunch of pages that rank, you are unfortunately going to lose a lot of traffic, that doesn't mean it isn't the correct long term solution, but the situation you've found yourself in now is as bad as a penalty.
If you are not getting a lot of traffic from the redirected domains I would recommend removing the 301s too, eve with the disavow file I would be concerned that it could be causing issues, especially as such scale and such a variety of topics. I don't see how redirecting a generator hire website to a cleaning website is relevant at all, I suspect Google see it the same way.
To summarise, if this change is costing you money, I'd reverse it, but start planning to get to the point where you can remove the pages asap without the same level of drop, at the moment you've essentially given yourself a penalty.
Best of luck
-
SO much easier to understand now - thanks.
When you get rid of links or tidy up things to clear up a penalty you have a situation where you used links that shouldn't have ranked you to rank higher than you actually would have. You remove those links and fall down to where you really sit.
We think by cleaning those, we've now "improved" the site - and you have - but at the cost of all the old link juice you had. Now you need to go about doing things like "link earning" and better link strategies than you've had in the past. I'm not going to give away everything we do here in Q&A on Moz but let's just say there're enough ways to build links and earn links that your site will rank again if that's the part of the equation you focus on most.
-
Thanks Dirk for taking a look,
Sorry my fault (typo) , The urls are actually case sensitive so it needs to be done in lower case.
So for example , site.co.uk/cleaning-enquipment-manchester would 301 back to cleaning-equipment
thanks
pete
-
Hello Matt,
Many thanks for taking a look at our site.
-
The other sites which are 301'd to our site used to be separate microsites we had . We closed these down last year and just 301'd the links to our homepage.
-
The links from Motorhomes etc are all in our disavow file . We used to hire everything but then just concentrated on tools so the seo agency we used at the time spent alot of time cleaning up our link profile and disavowing whatever we couldnt get removed ourselves
-
The links from leedssearch.co.uk and similar are from citations and these link to our branch pages
We did have doorway pages but we 301'd them back to the main category page (the urls are in lower case)
example - http://www.website.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-manchester will 301 back to http://www.website.co.uk/cleaning-equipment
How would we rebuild some authority ?.. We did get a manual penalty last year which we recovered from for unnatural links and it took along time to sort out and get it removed. We are naturally quite scared with regards to link building after what the last freelancer did and got us links from a blog network which got penalized. The seo agency we use to use only provided a few links from poor quality domains and it wasn't worth the money we were paying them every month ?
What would you recommend ?
thanks
pete
-
-
In addition to Matt's reply - you state that you redirected the doorway pages type site.co.uk/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester - however if I try this with the url you provided it returns a 404 - rather than redirecting to branches/manchester-tool-hire-shop or /cleaning-equipment
Dirk
-
Lots of wild goose chasing later...
Exactly how many sites are 301'd into bestathire.co.uk?
10? 20?
These have a couple thousand links and redirect 301 to your site:
bestathire.com
londononlinehire.co.uk
jetwashhire.co.uk
woodchipperhireuk.co.uk
chainsaw-hire.co.uk
platformhireuk.co.uk
nationalgeneratorhire.co.uk
scarifierhire.co.uk
carpetcleanerhireuk.co.uk
patioheater-hire.co.uk
rotavatorhireuk.co.ukThese are the most obvious link networks in the world:
motorhoming.eu
a272.co.uk
motorhoming.org
motorhoming.net
motorhoming.com
motorhoming.biz
motorhoming.co.uk
motorhoming.mobi
motorhoming.info
motorhoming.me.uk
motorhoming.org.ukThen there's .info spam
iclanky.info
schoolpay.info
0b0b.info
2fashion.info
freestockphotography.info
toptravellingtips.com
vidysporta.info
kivis.info
schoolhide.info
weddingdesignideas.co
syerasale.comAnd a local UK network
leedssearch.co.uk
nottinghamsearch.co.uk
plymouthsearch.co.uk
leicestersearch.co.uk
bristolsearch.co.uk
norwichsearch.co.uk
edinburghsearch.co.uk
derbysearch.co.uk
sheffieldsearch.co.uk
cardiffsearch.co.uk
london-search.co.ukNearly 60% of the rest of your backlinks come from multiple subdomains on either blogspot or opendi.com
I'm assuming everything listed above is in your disavow? You may need to rebuild some authority having given up 80% of your link juice. And if they're not in a disavow, the link profile isn't nearly clean.
If you also had a bunch of doorway pages as well, have you checked WMT for a manual penalty? If not, you're just on the harsh end of some algo issues. Did you also pass the 301s from those old doorway pages to another part of your site?
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
-
Validated pages on GSC displays 5x more pages than when performing site:domain.com?
Hi mozzers, When checking the coverage report on GSC I am seeing over 649,000 valid pages https://cl.ly/ae46ec25f494 but when performing site:domain.com I am only seeing 130,000 pages. Which one is more the source of truth especially I have checked some of these "valid" pages and noticed they're not even indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Do Page Views Matter? (ranking factor?)
Hi, I actually asked it a year and a half ago (with a slight variation) but didn't get any real response and things do change over time. On my eCommerce website I have the main category pages with client side filtering and sorting. As a result, the number of page views is lower than can be expected. Do you think having more page views is still a ranking factor? and if so is it more important than user experience? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
On Page vs Off Page - Which Has a Greater Effect on Rankings?
Hi Mozzers, My site will be migrating to a new domain soon, and I am not sure how to spend my time. Should I be optimizing our content for keywords, improving internal linking, and writing new content - or should I be doing link building for our current domain (or the new one)? Is there a certain ratio that determines rankings which can help me prioritize these to-dos?, such as 70:30 in favor of link-building? Thanks for any help you can offer!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Non-home page ranking higher, very odd
One of my new clients has an eCommerce site selling chair mats, that ranks first page for their primary keyword ("chair mats"), but the serp is not showing their home page... It is an odd "resources" page that mostly just has outbound links. I've never seen this. Also, there are no external inbound links to this particular page. How can this be ranking higher than the home page... weeeeird. Update: I haven't done any optimization yet... and yes, I know the site is outdated 🙂 My location is set to San Diego. If I change it (New York City), the Resources2.htm page goes away from the page 1 ranking, and I get a page 2 home page ranking. This is so strange 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Tips to increase page rank in 2012
Can you suggest what are the ways to increase page rank of website and blogs? and according to current scenario, i can see google updating page rank anytime is it true?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | surajrathore0 -
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing. Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing under same keywords " parts washers" Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhart0 -
Re-platform effects on Page Rank
We are performing a major replatform for an ecommerce client who has many top listings on page 1 in Google SERPs for very competitive terms. We are implementing a 301 redirect for all existing URLs that they have now to the appropriate new URLs, but the client is concerned with how deploying a new site with 100% new URLs and site structure will impact their Page Rank. From our experience, the 301 redirects should cover it but wanted to see if there is a way to predictively forecast page rank effects as a result of re-platforming.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bucktown0