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Unfortunately I've already been through the Webmaster Tools links and disavowed hundreds of domains (blog comment spam primarily).
I did overlook any press releases though, whether hosted on PRWeb or picked up on other sites, so the question remains should these be disavowed despite the fact they are no follow links?
There are only 7 external, equity passing links to this page - none of which use exact match anchor text.
There are also internal links; 284 banner links pointed to the page until last week (the same banner appeared on each page, hence the number) with the img alt text "sage erp x3 energise your business". In addition there are links throughout the site that feature the exact match anchor text - it is in the nav on every page for example. Im not sure if Google would take this into account, in my opinion is shouldn't as it is natural for on-site links to be exact match, unlike off site links.
That leaves the PRWeb articles, hosted on the PR web site and on sites that picked up the article, which are all no follow with exact match anchor text.
The only other thing I can think of, which I mentioned previously, is that there are multiple valid URLs for each page (with and without www, with and without .aspx, etc) -this bumps up the number of internal links, increases number of pages that can be indexed, could trigger duplicate content issues and 'water down' seo juice.
I've had a look and it seems all PRWeb links are no follow these days - could Google still be filtering due to anchor text despite this?
We have around 30 articles on PRWeb with around 3-400 pickups on really low quality sites, all with the exact match low quality anchor text links but they are all no follow.
No manual actions are listed within Webmaster Tools; I'd checked previously as the fact pages are listed in site: searches but not site: searches containing the term in question (e.g. "sage erp x3 site:datel.info") made me think that search engines were removing results in some way.
Links crossed my mind - there is another page on the site has a large number of very spammy links (hundreds of blog comments with exact match anchor), which I disavowed around 2-3 weeks ago. This page also suffers the same issue of appearing in the site search but not if the term is mentioned and it doesn't rank for the term, though it used to.
As I mentioned in one of the other comments, the number of links that competitors have for these sort of terms is very low and PR Web seems to be something we've done that competitors haven't. How would I go about finding out if it the culprit? Disavowing PR Web links, or seeing if the articles can be amended to remove the exact match anchor text?
It's an area with very low volumes of links. Comparing to two competitors, looking at only external link equity passing links:
and two press releases (DA 52 and 44)The only significant difference in backlink profile is that Moz reports we have a vast amount of internal links. I believe this is due to the main navigation have 2 sublayers via dropdowns - available on every page of the site.
In addition, URL's aren't rewritten in anyway, so the same page can be accessed:
This creates a vast number of combinations which results in our 4-500 page site having 100,000 internal links.
Though the site is available with different links, all links to the site and all links on the site use www and .aspx with no trailing slash, and Google has only indexed these pages, there don't appear to be any duplicates with different combinations of URL.
Other than not being an ideal set up, and it is something I want to change (IT are looking at installing the IIS rewrite module), could this be causing any harm I'm not aware of?
Thanks so far everyone - the responses so far have been helpful and have given me some areas to improve.
Unless they are related and I just don't know, the responses so far have addressed how to rank better and why the page may not be ranking for a term, however as far as I can see they don't address why the specific page isn't listed in the SERPs when you search for 'sage erp x3 site:datel.info', but it does appear for 'site:datel.info'.
The page has the keyword used a fair amount, but instead every single sup-page is listed - as are pages with only one use of the keyword in a paragraph of text. Until last week the keyword was used excessively on this page (over 35 uses of the keyword on a relatively short page) - which is why I wondered if Google may have suppressed it as it was being too spammy for that keyword? I've changed it now so if that were the case it should hopefully be changing soon, but I just wanted to know if that was a possible cause, or if there was something else that could be causing.
Thanks, I'm now in the process of changing this - for some reason keywords have been over abundant in every link and subpage, as you say it may be hard for google to select the correct page.
I checked but nothing that I can find unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it).
Looking at traffic, it looks like there was a drop in March 2013 but it's hard to pin point for certain as January 2013 was lower than January 2012, and there was a general downward trend until May 2013 at which point things have leveled out.
Unfortunately I wasn't working at the company at the time, so I'm not sure if any of this would correspond with levels of marketing activity.
The site in question is http://www.datel.info and the specific page I'm looking into at the moment is http://www.datel.info/our-solutions/sage-erp-x3.aspx though it isn't the only page affected. I just find it odd that it appears for the site search, but not the keyword & site search.
The site also has a fair amount of low quality links from comments on chinese blogs and forums due to the activity of an 'SEO Agency' 3 years ago. As I'm unable to get these removed, I've disavowed them in both Google and Bing webmaster tools. They were all anchor text rich, but none of them for this term or page.
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again.
Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th.
I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well.
I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.