Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi All,

So my website has dropped now to page 12, I have no idea why, I've tried myself to bring it back and I have also tried a few £1000 at outsourcing the SEO which has had no affect.

There are no penalties in webmaster tools but I personally think something the algo doesn't like is holding it back - I could be wrong. I think this because some of the results higher than me are a lot worse, hold little to no content and there backlink profiles have no links, some are even 1 page new domains that have been live for as little as a month ranking a lot higher than me.

At one point I was ranking page1, position4 for the term 'bank holidays' and now I don't rank anywhere. What's weird is if you search 'bankholidays' as one word I appear in that position.

Does anyone have any ideas what is going on?

Problem page: followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays - GoogleUK search.

I need some help please.

Duplicate on my site, well almost I replaced a few words for each page. It wasn't the main content just an intro paragraph but it was the highest piece of content on the page.

I've basically put it down to poor/thin content above the fold, which I replaced with unique better content which is more relevant to the subject of the page.

Ok so an update.

Regained rankings for that page I upgraded have remained stable and for some queries better position.

Most importantly I applied the same method/process to 2 other pages and they also regained position - ive put these pages on monitor, ill give it a week to make sure they stay stable then roll out the upgrade to the other 35ish pages.

Thanks Andy,

I'm in the process of getting the copywriter to produce unique content for the other pages so will post the outcome on here once those pages have been resubmitted also.

So thought I would share this with others as it 'might' help.

So I got around 40 pages, all of them have taken a dive in rankings so on average from Pg1/2 to Pg5/6.

I took one page and started working on content upgrades, I had around 50 words of boiler plate content above the fold and 750 words of unique content way down the page so maybe 600px below the fold before you hit it.

I removed the boiler plate content and produced 75 words of unique content to replace it, I shuffled things around and managed to get the 750 words maybe 250px below the fold then chucked another 100 unique words into the mix.

Fetched the page in GWMT's and resubmitted the URL - hour later that page alone, the page I upgraded had recovered its rankings back to the original position before Panda 4.1 hit.

Will the rankings for this page drop back down again, not sure but interesting this page was Pg6/7 since the 23rd and doing the above within an hour regained rankings back to Pg2 middle.

Cheers Dennis,

I see so it may see the changes in the short future rather than the long run.

Hi,

If you have been hit by Panda 4.1 and now putting fixes in place, for this example lets say you remove a load of dup content (and that's what caused the problem) - how long would it take for that fix to take affect?

Do you have to wait for the next Panda update? or will it be noticed on the next crawl?

Thanks.

Thanks for letting me know others are experiencing the same. If I find anything interesting I will be sure to let you know on this thread - Likewise if you notice anything interesting would be appreciated if you could come back and share also.

Hi JVRudnick,

No worries, see the above post and thanks for showing an interest in my problem/discussion.

No worries,

I can share here for you to look at and to help others who may also be interested (or disagree).

So the domain is Followuk.co.uk and seems the whole site has taken a hit but to make this more targeted im looking at the page Followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays - and the target term for this page is -> Bank Holidays 2015 in Google UK and although this may seem a small term this term and its variations receive millions of queries a month.

I could except the drop if it was related to the link profile as currently a little weak but according to my analytic's traffic dropped on the 23rd (inline with the panda rollout) which targets thin/low quality sites if im correct.

Now where it becomes interesting is im not complaining about not being higher up, but the fact I WAS on page 1 and had been for over 2 years, on the 23rd the page was demoted to page 6/7 while thin/low quality sites have been given higher positions or stayed neutral.

In this case the Panda update looks to be doing more damage then good for example take the second result - http://www.year-planner-calendar.wanadoo.co.uk/2015-public-holidays-bank-holidays-bank-holiday-dates.htm

Surely this comes under the types of sites Panda is looking to target -> thin, low quality, advertising heavy, spammy etc - BUT Google's algo thinks this is the second most relevant 'quality' site it should show to it's millions of users querying those terms and its not the only site like that in the top 10.

And I just want to say I dont think I should be number 1 or 2, 3 because there are better sites which deserve those positions but do I think I should be in the top 10... Yes.

I would love to know if Google thought the above was the right thing for the algo to do because to me looking at it as if I was an outsider (which I try) this is a straight out.

Fail.

It took me a while to learn what EGOL just mentioned. If I have any quality content it goes one place, on my site.

But I do see social having its place and I also see a time limit for social as well, because before you know it large amounts of your time will be eaten up by it - and unless you know what your doing large amounts of it will be dead time.

So to me filling up a social profile with hash tags, unique content, links, images etc doesn't hold much weight. I just use social to list build numbers of followers, when I release a new piece of content on my site I share it with my lists - depending on the type of people in your list you may get re-shares, links, onsite shares, comments, email signups etc.

Thats just my thoughts though, I dont use social massively.

Duplicate on my site, well almost I replaced a few words for each page. It wasn't the main content just an intro paragraph but it was the highest piece of content on the page.

I've basically put it down to poor/thin content above the fold, which I replaced with unique better content which is more relevant to the subject of the page.

Hi,

Two questions here,

First: Does the position of content have any impact on performance? For example say a page displays a league table (20 rows) so eats up most of the above-fold space. Would that table being top followed by content have a negative impact? Would creating 'some' content before a table help?

Second: Does topic modelling actually help relevance signals? So say I sold guitars and the page had the word 'guitar' throughout the content, would including electric, acoustic, strings, amps etc also in the content help the page become more relevant for the term 'guitar'? Or would it just expand the terms the page would be eligible to show for?

Thanks.

Yeah its a good idea, I think I need a few more pages to make it worth the users time but I could see a basic account login then each page containing a add/remove button which works against the users personalised calendar. Maybe even just a cookie instead of an account but guessing it would be super annoying if that cookie got deleted.

We have something kind of half way, so if you entered rootdomain.co.uk/august you can see pages being combined into a group depending on date - once these pages are full enough (9 pages) we are going to create some functionality for the user to select one and view it.

So thought I would share this with others as it 'might' help.

So I got around 40 pages, all of them have taken a dive in rankings so on average from Pg1/2 to Pg5/6.

I took one page and started working on content upgrades, I had around 50 words of boiler plate content above the fold and 750 words of unique content way down the page so maybe 600px below the fold before you hit it.

I removed the boiler plate content and produced 75 words of unique content to replace it, I shuffled things around and managed to get the 750 words maybe 250px below the fold then chucked another 100 unique words into the mix.

Fetched the page in GWMT's and resubmitted the URL - hour later that page alone, the page I upgraded had recovered its rankings back to the original position before Panda 4.1 hit.

Will the rankings for this page drop back down again, not sure but interesting this page was Pg6/7 since the 23rd and doing the above within an hour regained rankings back to Pg2 middle.

Thanks Donna for advice and the resource links - much appreciated.

Ive added your idea of links inside table to body content so thanks for that.

Those social buttons are using the addthis service, just styled against the theme of the site. But I see what you mean, im thinking of dropping it altogether and using the sharedcount.com API in a format similar to mashable. It aggregates all social shares into one number and cuts down the button clutter.

Thanks for your help on this, I think the 'true' aim for me is to make my landing pages better than any other I find - I think if I achieve this ill be heading in the right direction.

Ill give it 3 months and share where im at in another post.

Thanks Andy,

I'm in the process of getting the copywriter to produce unique content for the other pages so will post the outcome on here once those pages have been resubmitted also.

Agree totally, im going to stick it out for a bit longer - make my site better and see if that helps. If in 3/4 months nothing changes ill have to start looking at ways of gaining SE exposure again because every position I lose to a one pager or brand with a blog post going for the traffic is affecting my rev stream.

I suppose the only positive is I know how to do SEO, I just don't like having to do it.

My 2 pence.

I think its a relevance thing, guest blogging was being bashed by spammers - target was (from what I sore) moz stats basically, "this blog will take my article it has a DA/PA 50 mR/mT 6.0" and on it would go linking to a website which was completely irrelevant to the blogs content.

I think YouMoz is all good if your linking to a digital agency, linking to a payday loan site im not so sure. I've watched vids of Matt Cutts even stating the above about a relevance issue basically telling the same story as I above.

Traffic from a none relevant blog is spam, traffic from a relevant blog in my eyes is not.