Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Rikki - your time and advice are much appreciated.

Best,

Chris

Hi Matt,  this clean link building is already underway... although this action should address the poor rankings it still doesn't remove the cause of the rankings loss obviously... Frustrating!!!

Best, Chris

I'm looking at it now.... Thanks!

Chris

Hey Matt,

Thanks for replying. I used that tool you recommended and there's a marked drop off from March 2012. Infact the traffic in June 12 is a quarter of what it was before the March 12 drop off. So obviously, this is very significant.

Typical keywords: "hard disk failure", "data recovery", "hard drive data recovery"

We used to rank on page 1 for them all...

Best,

Chris

Hi Rikki,

Thanks for your reply - the site completely bombed ranking wise mid Nov 2012. We are not aware of any changes at this time.

In Jan 2013 a new site was created to replace the old (and hopefully fix whatever was wrong) and used 301 redirects to map old pages to new.

As of today thou, we are still ranking very poorly..

Thanks

Chris

Hello All,

I wonder if you'd kind enough to help with your insights...

The site is www.dataclinic.co.uk

It's been up and running since 2002 and is a data recovery related site that for years ranked on page 1 for lots of data recovery search terms.

Now it's hardly ranking at all, despite decent content and updated blogs. Google (via Webmaster tools) says the site hasn't been penalized for bad links... but we are searching for an explanation as to why it's so difficult to get our once good rankings back.... (For example, the main search term we'd like to rank for is "data recovery"... we are currently on page 8... [google.co.uk search]... why???)

Any ideas greatly appreciated... and I'll reply to each of you privately if you wish.

Thanks for your time.

Chris

Hi there Russ

Thanks so much for your reply, you've given me lots of food for thought. You're right, we definitely need to think about how to improve the site design and the UX. It does look very jaded in comparison to some of our larger competitors.

We've recently done some KW research and have identified several new phrases we want to optimise now, which will shift the balance away from the two you highlighted. We're still looking into the best way to link build for these without relying on paid links as we have in the past. I think I'll look for some inspiration from our competitors' link profiles. I've also joined buzzstream today which I think may help.

Thanks once again for taking the time to reply - you've done your good deed for the day!

Sue

Hi there mozzers,

You have been so helpful in the past and we'd really appreciate your insights into our problem... we have two data recovery companies in the UK, one has been established for 11 years (dataclinic.co.uk) , the second (datlabs.co.uk) is a subsidiary that's been around for 5 years.

Dataclinic has always ranked highly, usually in the top 1-5 on page one for relevant KWs and towards the end of last year we had traffic of approx 1,800 UK visitors/month - now we're down to only 600. Week on week we're falling and I have started to dread the monitoring checks. We're slipping in the rankings too. As our business relies almost 100% on Google rankings our phones just aren't ringing.

In contrast our subsidiary company datlabs is climbing up the rankings and drawing more traffic - but unfortunately nothing like enough to compensate for the decline in the main company's traffic. We have used the same kinds of marketing strategies for both but have invested more energy into social for dataclinic, and more energy into local for datlabs. I'd say that our strategies have been less than sparkling clean - we've paid for directory links but not with the really spammy directories. We're at a loss to understand what has happened to have had such a dramatic and devastating effect - please help!!

Thanks so much

Sue

Hi Heather,

Thanks for the reply. The page you mention (<cite>www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-disk-raid-recovery.htm) has had a decent ranking for a while but it is specific & meant to appeal to a certain subset of data recovery traffic, rather than the whole lot. I think I'll just wait for a couple of days and see if there is any change... and perhaps there may be some more input into this discussion too !</cite>

Thanks for your time

Sue

Hi - Thanks for the input... To reply to your points

1. Hmmm, it seems you are getting different results in Germany... the data-recovery.htm page is not appearing on the UK results....

2. Yes, point taken - would that be the main reason though do you think?

3. It's ok - it seems your results are different to mine, which sort of answers the question

4. Specifically, http://tierradatarecovery.co.uk  - in UK results they are featuring very highly on a lot of top keywords - previously they were virtually no where

5. Yes - that's all being done anyway... I think it's probably important not to act in haste only to regret it later.

Thanks again

Sue

Hello Everybody,

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

Without further ado, I'll jump straight to it:

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk is the web site of a UK based data recovery company. Historically the site has always ranked well for popular data recovery keywords in the UK, with page 1 rankings for most things data recovery related. However, lately things seem to have changed for our most important phrase "data recovery".

We noticed several months ago that Google had started to favour the page  http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm instead of http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ when a search for "data recovery" (and similar) was performed.

This didn't concern us that much as our rankings remained good. However now, neither of these pages seems to be ranking well when a search for "data recovery" is performed (I gave up at Page 5 - who looks past there when searching?).

I would appreciate your input on this please - especially about the following points:

1. Why have these two pages now seemingly disappeared from SERPS when a search for "data recovery" is performed ?

2. Why has Google chosen http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm rather than http://www.dataclinic.co.uk  ?

3. Is this just something to do with UK results ?

4. Other sites I would expect NOT to see in the top results have started appearing - despite their link profiles etc remaining poor - perhaps Google is doing a bit of reorganisation with SERPS related to data recovery at the moment ?

5. And perhaps, most importantly - do you think we need to do anything about our current lack of visibility ?? As I mentioned, we've always ranked well, so these results are puzzling... Should search results revert "back to normal" in a day or so, or am I missing something and need to take action ??

Thanks for any input on this - we would be very grateful indeed for you help !

Kind Regards,

Sue

Great thanks so much for your help!

Hi, I'm a newbie at all this - I hope someone can help me.

We're thinking of running time-specific offers to try and convert as many of our customer site visits as possible e.g. 15% discount if you call between, say, 2 and 5pm.

It would be really helpful to me to find out what times of day people are visiting our site. I can't seem to find a way to do this on Google Analytics.

Can anyone help?

Thanks so much

Sue

Hi,

There's lots and lots of info (suggestions, views, opinions etc) in lots of threads on here already.

Just do some searches and you'll find a whole lot of stuff.

Regards,

Chris

Hi,

Infact SEOmoz's Campaign Manager provides you with a critique of your web pages. If they use the meta keywords tags, it recommends that you take them out.

Regards,

Chris

About 4 years ago we moved our hosting. As described in earlier posts, everything was replicated onto our new server beforehand, until all that remained was to switch the nameservers.

This was done, and there was no interruption or impact on our rankings. Everything was fine, and there really was no need to panic.

I guess the rule is, make sure the groundwork is done thoroughly and properly and then switch... you shouldn't have a problem.

Regards,

Chris

Hi Becky,

As a matter of interest, how old is the domain ?

Do you just have the one or do you have many sites?

Regards,

Chris

This is a useful link for you:

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

Best,

C

Hmm, regarding the re-direct, I honestly don't know... I will defer to other members who may be reading this and ask for their suggestion...

C

Hi George,

I would choose Option 1a.

I think the 'Board concerns' are valid ones - I assume that any loss of business could be very detrimental to the company, so the Board are rightly nervous about these changes... If they weren't, I'd be nervous !

By introducing the new product page along side the old one (with an explanation of what you are doing), regular visitors to the site will get the drift of what is going on & the changes they can expect to see. They will feel valued as you are keeping them informed of the site changes too.

I would also monitor the clickthrus on both the old and new product pages, and when you and the Board are happy that the users of the site have adopted the new Product Page you can begin to phase the old one out.

Best,

Chris