Used SEOMOZ top 100 Directories, my site ranking lowered, what can we do to fix this?
-
We have made a big mistake.... So what can we do to fix this?
A trainee member of staff has used the seomoz 100 top directories and added to sites from PR10 to PR6 approx about 25 sites, using keywords were possible instead of using the website URL "which i now was stupid!.
Our website ranking have been lowered big time for all keywords used!, eg from 1st to 10th and even disappeared from the top 100
We are contacting all directories asking for the Title link to be changed to the URL instead of a keyword.. Will this help?
I understand that Google give sites a penalty for this!!, but what can i do to put this right and how long would this penalty last for?
Any advice would be highly appreciated...
Thanks
Dean
-
Do you think it could be something to do with the panda update?
My clients are based in the US and Canada so I am not up-to-date on the Panda rollout status in Europe. Hopefully others can offer feedback on that topic.
-
Ryan
We are going to change all the directory links to the url names..
Thank you for your SEO improvement suggestions...
1.footer links = remove
2. cannibalizing your keyword
3. images from a secure server (i will look into this)?
4. verified by visa" and "godaddy secured i will add link to godaddy SSL certificate..
I will make these changes and holpfully see if this improves things..
Do you think it could be something to do with the panda update?
If you think of any thing else that could be knocking us down please let me know...
Thanks Again
Dean
-
Thanks for the additional details Dean.
I need to be absolutely clear regarding "paid" directories. There is a line separating "good" and "bad" directories. Paid directories such as Yahoo, BOTW, Business.com and a few others are perfectly legitimate for Google. These are high quality directories who charge customers for reviewing their site. They have quality standards, and they reject some sites as not meeting those standards. They also do not offer refunds.
Any directory which charges to be listed, guarantees a listing, or offers a refund if you are not listed falls under the category of "paid directories" which would incur a penalty from Google.
With the above understood, is there any possibility your employee included any paid directories? I would suggest reviewing the receipts for any payments made to any directory companies. I suspect one or more directories may have been included which are not on the SEOmoz list. Alternatively, if I recall correctly that list is a few years old and some changes may have occurred with the business practices involved for any given directory service.
I took a brief look at your site and notice many signs of good SEO work, but I also notice many opportunities for improvement. A few quick tips:
-
many of your footer links are spammy. "Moving boxes", "Removal boxes", "storage boxes", "packing boxes", "cardboard boxes", "boxes for moving", "packing boxes for moving" are all anchor texts in your footer, and all of the links point to your home page. I would suggest removing all of them.
-
you are cannibalizing your keywords which has a negative impact on SEO. For example, you have a page on your site /storage-boxes. That page is clearly optimized for the term "storage boxes" yet your footer link points that term to your home page.
-
you are serving your images from a secure server. I believe that causes the images not to be cached which ultimately leads to slower page loads
-
your images for "verified by visa" and "godaddy secured" should be linked images. Users should be able to click the images and verify your site is indeed trusted in those areas. Providing images which are not linked properly is a sign of fraud and should be avoided. If your site has earned those credentials, allow your visitors to easily verify your status by using a properly linked image. If your site has not earned those credentials, remove the images.
-
-
Jacob
Thanks for repsonding
This happened at the begging of August 5th to 10th.. I have experienced this "Google dance" before but only dropping for a couple of days to a week at most and then an increased in ranking, but iv not experienced this for over a month?
I don't think this is the case... ?
Dean
-
Ryan
Thank you for responding..
We are running 4 Sites and 3 have had the same issue apart from one, it seems that only the home pages have been hit on all 3 sites.. internal pages are fine, This happened at the begging of August and the keywords was varied between 3-4 keywords..
We have done nothing different apart from accruing these directories, I have read in previous questions they had penalties for buying these directory links?
At first i though it maybe a panda update? Then i read about penelties for paid directories?
Any advice would be highly apprenticed, as i have come to a standing block?
-
You could be experiencing what is known as the "Google dance". I've noticed many sites will drop several ranks or even pages, only the next day to see they jumped forward 5-15+ ranks from where they started.
-
Hi Dean.
If you used the SEOmoz directory list, it is unlikely your ranking drop was related to any links you earned from those directories. Google can penalize you for paid links, but I am unaware of any directories in the SEOmoz list which violate Google's terms.
The only advice I would offer in using the directories is to vary the anchor text. It is not desirable to use the identical anchor text as those appear quite unnatural. Google obviously understands directory links are not the same as natural links, but it can still be an issue with their algorithmic penalties.
If your staff member varied the keywords, then his efforts are fine. If he or she used the identical keyword or phrase, I would only suggest adjusting it a bit.
While the above is accurate, it does not explain your ranking drop. What other changes have been made to the site? Dropping from 1st to 10th is quite a drop. When exactly was the last time you saw your site at #1 for the keyword? Is it possible there are other issues for which you may have been penalized? Has there been other SEO changes in your site? Or perhaps you were looking at a different search engine?
Without knowing your site URL, the keywords and pages involved we are left to guess.
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
-
Site hacked, but can't find the code
Discovered some really odd words ranking for us in WMT. Looked further and found pages like this www.pdnseek.com/wll/canadian-24-hour-pharmacy. When you click it it redirects to the home page. The developers can't find /wll anywhere on the site. The pages are indexed and cached. Looked at the back links in moz and found many backlinks to our site from other sites using URLs like this. The host says there is nothing on the server, but where else could it be. We've run virus scans, nothing, looked through source code, nothing. Anyone with some idea? www.pdnseek.com is the URL
Technical SEO | | Britewave0 -
Can I have an http AND a https site on Google Webmaster tools
My website is https but the default property that was configured on Google WMT was http and wasn't showing me any information because of that. I added an https property for that, but my question is: do I need to delete the original HTTP or can I leave both websites?
Technical SEO | | Onboard.com0 -
What can i do to move my site up the search engines
Hi. my site www.in2town.co.uk is currently number five in google for the search word lifestyle magazine, sometimes it moves to four but for over a year it has not got past four. before we had to do the site from scratch due to a major problem upgrading, we were number one in the search engines and our traffic was around 30% higher than it is now. For the keyword lifestyle news, we are on the fifth page of google and would really like to improve this. I would like to know what i need to do on our home page to try and improve our rankings for these two words. the most important word for us is lifestyle news. any help in my goal to improve our rankings would be great. We have improved our design which we are still working on, and we have upgraded to a bigger dedicated server to improve the speed.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How do crawl errors from SEOmoz tool set effect rankings?
Hello - The other day I presented the crawl diagnostic report to a client. We identified duplicate page title errors, missing meta description errors, and duplicate content errors. After reviewing the report we presented it to the clients web company who operates a closed source CMS. Their response was that these errors are not worthy of fixing and in fact they are not hurting the site. We are having issues getting the errors fixed and I would like your opinion on this matter. My question is, how bad are these errors? Should we not fix them? Should they be fixed? Will fixing the errors have an impact on our site's rankings? Personally, I think the question is silly. I mean, the errors were found using the SEOmoz tool kit, these errors have to be effecting SEO.....right? The attached image is the result of the Crawl Diagnostics that crawled 1,400 pages. NOTE: Most of the errors are coming from Pages like blog/archive/2011-07/page-2 /blog/category/xxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxxx/page-2 testimonials/147/xxxxx--xxxxx (xxxx represents information unique to the client) Thanks for your insight! c9Q33.png
Technical SEO | | Gabe0 -
Can you mark up a page using Schema.org and Facebook Open Graph?
Is it possible to use both Schema.org and Facebook Open Graph for structured data markup? On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they say, "you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers." Source - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html
Technical SEO | | SAMarketing1 -
SEOMoz is finding jpegs on my site and reporting them as pages with missing meta titles
SEOMoz has just done a crawl of my site, and found 600 pages with missing meta title errors. When I have checked the list of these pages, they are all jpegs and not pages. Why is SEOMoz reporting that this .jpg files have missing meta titles on my site, which is www.webmakercms.com? SEOMoz has run several crawls of my site and this is the first time it has brought up this list of jpegs as errors and I don't understand why?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
How much of an issue is it if a site is somehow connected to a site that was penalized by Google?
I am working with someone that is about to launch a new site, and one of the sites was affected by the Panda update. Does it matter if the two sites are connected? Share the same hosting provider and same Google Webmaster's account?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Will using https across our entire site hurt our external backlinks?
Our site is secured throughout, so it loads sitewide as https. It is canonicalized properly - any attempt to load an existing page as http will force to https. My concern is with backlinks. We've put a lot of effort into social media, so we're getting some nice blog linkage. The problem is that the links are generally to http rather than https (understandable, since that's the default for most web users). The site still loads with no problem, but my concern is that since a redirect doesn't transfer all the link juice across, we're leaking some perfectly good link credit. From the standpoint of backlinkage, are we harming ourselves by making the whole site secure by default? The site presently isn't very big, but I'm looking at adding hundreds of new pages to the site, so if we're going to make the change, now is the time to do so. Let me know what you think!
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0