Ranking Issues Recently Popping Up
-
We have a site that based on your research tools, holds its own in almost all aspects in regards to # of links, # of different linking domains, quality of links, mozrank, moztrust and all that stuff. Compared to our top competitors, we do very well based on your tools via our campaign monitor.
The issue is we seem to be dropping like crazy every month in our rankings and traffic despite this fact, and we can't get our head around the cause. I do have a couple of ideas, and I wanted to run them by you guys to get your opinion.
Domain: bonitaj.com
My Thoughts On Possible Issues...
1. Text Content & Panda Update
I know one of the big things with the panda update was quality of content. I know one thing we have for sure is a lack of "text-based" content. Sure, we have home page, main cats, sub-cats and product pages, but they are mostly just windows into the product pages, and don't have a whole lot of good copy. THIS IS MOST EVIDENT ON OUR PRODUCT PAGES, where each product page is loaded with content, but only 3-4 very short paragraphs of text. Do you think this is hurting us? THE ONLY ISSUE IS THAT our competitors also don't have a whole lot of text-based content on their pages.
2. Too Many Category Pages & Same Products Featured Somewhat on them
I think another problem may be that on each category page, we do have a lot of the same products featured. I don't think its crazy duplicate content or anything, but I do think that back in the old days we got a little crazy with creating "niched out" category pages that pretty much feature the same products as some of the more important and base category pages. Do you think this is hurting us?
I've pitched a solution to this that involves trying to tone down the amount of sub-cats we feature that were originally geared towards attracting long-tail traffic. In the end that really isn't working anymore anyway, so maybe we're spreading our site thin by going to deep with some of these niche category pages?
3. Lack of a sitemap?
We used to use an xml sitemap, and really don't anymore. We have nothing on file with google webmaster tools. I've recently read in one of your blog posts that a simple thing like adding a good sitemap could help our 600+ page site or so get crawled a bit deeper allowing more pages to rank?
IN THE END, MY QUESTION IS SIMPLY, IF THERE IS ONE OR TWO THINGS I CAN DO TO GET OVER THIS HUMP, WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST?
-
Interesting note to add to this, I did just notice via Google Webmaster Tools, that our blog had been hacked and 150 or so of our blog posts were injected with hidden link spam. In webmaster tools it said that the 2nd biggest keyword within our site was Viagra. So that is definately playing into these drops in rankings I'm guessing within the last couple of months.
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
-
Facing issue related to my website.
I am facing issue regarding to my website **https://mylovelylawn.com/. As some pages are not indexed by google yet. Can Anyone help me out how to indexed those pages to improve my ranking. **
On-Page Optimization | | qwaswd0 -
Index or No Index (Panda Issue)
Hi, I believe our website has been penalized by the panda update. We have over 9000 pages and we are currently indexing around 4,000 of those pages. I believe that more than half of the pages indexes have either thin content. Should we stop indexing those pages until we have quality page content? That will leave us with very few pages being indexed by Google (Roughly 1,000 of our 9,000 pages have quality content). I am worried that we would hurt our organic traffic more by not indexing the pages than by indexing the pages for google to read. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jim Rodriguez
On-Page Optimization | | dustyabe0 -
Do i optimise only the page that i want to rank or do i have to optimise my entire website.
I'm looking at 2 keywords and i have optimized my main page towards it. My website consist of other pages like, "About Us, Contact Us, Testimonials". My SEO title and Meta Description for these pages are just the basic. Q: My question is, do i have to optimize the pages that i do not want to rank? Is there any way to utilise these pages to help my main page to rank?(besides using them for internal links)
On-Page Optimization | | kevinbp0 -
Solve duplicate content issues by using robots.txt
Hi, I have a primary website and beside that I also have some secondary websites with have same contents with primary website. This lead to duplicate content errors. Because of having many URL duplicate contents, so I want to use the robots.txt file to prevent google index the secondary websites to fix the duplicate content issue. Is it ok? Thank for any help!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
Wrong Page is Ranking
My client is an Ecommerce reseller of a few major scooter brands. We currently rank fifth for a particular brand name but our main brand page isn't the one that ranks. Instead, it's a product page. The main brand page has an A rating from Moz for the desired keyword phrases. Neither page has any backlinks. Any ideas on why our main brand page would be outranked by a product page? What could we do to change this?
On-Page Optimization | | TrinShin0 -
Using a subdomain to improve rankings
I have a pretty simple landing page that at present targets several keywords. Is a good strategy to add a blog to the site on a subdomain with pages targeting individual keywords? Will this help the main domain rank? Also is the best strategy to focus on building links to the home page or individual pages on the subdomain? As long as each page on the subdomain links back to the home page it should pass link juice back to the home page shouldn't it? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Is it difficult to rank for a keyword phrase with an H2 halfway down the page?
If your competitor has a page that is optimized for a keyword (title tag, URL, content) and you target the keyword halfway down a page with an H2 and a short paragraph about the keyword, are you at a strong disadvantage?
On-Page Optimization | | ProjectLabs0 -
Inner page rank higher than domain
Hey there, Today my site received it's first Google pagerank and noticed something strange. My domain got a PR of 2 whilst most of the other inner pages got PR1, so far so good. But then one particular inner page which is just 2 weeks old and has zero backlinks has PR 3. I'm not one to fixate on PR but this just struck me as weird. What do you guys think?
On-Page Optimization | | barabis770