Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried:

1. Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links
2. Removed any internal Duplicate Content
3. Removed any broken links
4. Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality
5. No-Followed all outbound links
6. Added any missing title tags
7. changed hosting
8. Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally

The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site -  just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.

Hi Ruben

Thanks for your reply.

Google have cached the majority of main pages since we made the changes.. but perhaps if they haven't crawled the site very deeply, they won't have picked up some of the site wide changes that we've made. Eg. in WMT, they haven't yet picked up that some of the bad links are no longer live, and these were taken down a few weeks ago now..

Katie

Hi Donna - no notices in WMT.

I work with a site who specialise in life insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions - http://goo.gl/Drwre6. The site has ranked really well historically, but was hit hard on 16th June when we saw an almost 100% drop in rankings overnight.

We picked up on quite a few issues straight away and rectified these. A list of steps we've taken so far are below:

• removed CSS & JS files from robots.txt
• changed hosting provider back, as it had recently been moved somewhere new
• updated copy on main landing pages to remove small amounts that were duplicated
• requested removal of some suspicious looking backlinks and submitted a disavow
• found and removed a test site that was live and indexable
• found an external site that had scraped copy from our site - requested removal (this site is no longer live)
• cleaned up any 404 and ensured all redirects are working correctly
• updated the diabetes page to include more valuable info - including linking out to authority sites

After taking all these steps, we have still seen no improvement. It could be that Google just hasn't yet re-crawled the site to take the changes into account...?

We're aware of one other site in our industry that has noticed a drop in rankings in the last couple of months, but a number of our competitors are still ranking well for our target terms.

We wonder if the site was caught up in the Payday Loans update, as the timings almost line up. Other sites with spammy medical content seem to have been hit, so we wonder if the "medical" type content on our site could have been penalised? Incredibly frustrating if so, as it's a valid, genuine service being offered!

Really at a bit of a loss as to what to do next, so any help would be hugely appreciated!

Katie

Hi,

Thanks so much for that, it's really interesting.

I've resolved the issue now, it was a case of some (a lot!) of missing canonical tags. Phew!

Thanks for your help!

Just 1 at the moment.

Hi,

I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.)

Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix?

It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag?

Any help appreciated,

Karen

Hey Chris,

Thanks very much. I think you're right that I am over-thinking it (as any SEO would when trying to figure Google out!). One thing that stands out for me is that when I do a search (for example for 'cheap console tables', very few of the results on page 1 mention 'cheap' or 'discounted' in their title tags, or their pages. Yet it does seem to know which sites stock cheaper console tables (ebay, gumtree, asda etc). Do you think this could be just down to the use of the word 'cheap' across the rest of the site?

Karen

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience in targeting cheap/discount/value etc keywords in an SEO campaign?

I'm interested to find out:

• How Google perceives these keywords, as the search results are only very slightly different if you search with or without a 'cheap' keyword.

• Whether Google differentiates between 'cheap synonyms ie 'cheap' and 'affordable'. There are far higher searches for 'cheap' but affordable is much more user- and conversion-friendly.

Thanks,

Karen

Hi, A bit of a general question, but has anyone noticed a improvement in rankings for large domains - ie well known, large sites such as Tesco, Amazon? From what I've seen, the latest Panda update seems to favour the larger sites, as opposed to smaller, niche sites. Just wondered if anyone else has noticed this too?Thanks

Hi,

I've used Squidoo for link building before and it does provide a good backlink.

You need to make sure that your article is live on Squidoo before the link is seen by the search engines. This isn't easy, but it is possible.

Firstly, make sure your post is worthy of being published. Make your lens as interesting and unique as possible - lots of content, images etc. Squidoo seem to love 'top 10' articles.

Secondly, make sure your article is live. Squidoo will often put your post live at first and then take it down over the next day or so. This can be rectified by building links into your squidoo page (ie plug it on a social network page like Facebook, or build some free directory links into it).

Another site similar to Squidoo is 'HubPages', this is good for link building as well.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

Sorry - 'live' in Squidoo language is 'featured'. For your article to be visible to search engines external to Squidoo it needs to be a 'featured lens'. You can see if your article is featured by logging in and seeing if you have a red circle or green tick by it.

Another way you can get your lens featured is to encourage other squidoo members to comment on the article.

With regards to HubPages - you need to have a Hub Score of more than 40 or a hubber score of more than 75 for the links to be made 'dofollow'. If your article is good enough and you build some links into it, or promote it, it doesn't seem to be too difficult to get a score above 40.

I typically work according to a 1:2 ratio - for every 1 directory link I build (niche-specific), I build 2 links from other link sources. This seems to work well for us.

I think there are still some really good natural directories out there (that aren't just for SEO), so I'd be surprised if Google didn't take into account directories.

Does anyone know of a free video sitemap generator? Thanks

Thanks Keith, totally agree with you - directories definitely aren't as valuable as they used to be and they only make up a tiny part of our link building strategy now. This is why we seem to have developed our favourite ones as we submit sites to so few directories, we want to make sure they're good ones!

Hello from a not-so-cold (but not sunny yet) Bristol.

Remember Google can crawl a page and still not index it - so you probably want to know which pages Google has indexed?

To see how many pages are indexed in Webmaster tools it is useful to look at your sitemaps page - it'll tell you how many pages have been submitted and how many of those have been indexed.

One thing you can do to see which pages are in Google's index is type the below into Google search engine

site:http://......

There is a good thread on this in the webmaster tools forum that you might find useful - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=378b3cdf485ee3a7&hl=en

Thanks,

Karen

Hi,

I don't know much about the service if offers, but I'd imagine anything 'automated' would be classed as black hat by Google.

When link building I often go by the moto - if it's too good to be true, it probably is. Depressing huh? But it's a good way of keeping link building under control...

Karen

We're having a bit of a debate in the office today about SEO directories. We all seem to have our favourites here - Octopedia, AbiLogic and JoeAnt to name a few that have been mentioned.

Just wondering what everyone else's favourite directories for SEO are?

Which pass the best link juice? Which offer the best value for money? Would love to know everyone's thoughts...