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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.

Hi,

I'm scratching my head with this one, I have a website with around 40 pages of unique content produced by a professional copywriter who works magazines and PR agencies - each page has around 750/1000 words - according to Google the reading age is intermediate as you would expect from a good copywriter, I have anchor points jumping around the page to information the user shows an interest in - this happens I have video recording and heat maps.

I also receive 100s and on some pages 1000s of social shares from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and G+. I wanted to build a site the way Google wants you to so I have done no link build at all, everything focused onsite so I just spent the last 2 months making the whole site responsive for mobile and tablet devices - I also spent time getting the load time down and 'was' in the process of hooking into a CDN for extra performance.

Ive done everything I can to make the site just good and its reflected in the social sharing and natural links from sites such as huffington post.

On the 23rd my sites rankings which were solid for over 2 years have crashed, but what's worse is ive been dropped and replaced with sites using the same tactics as the Payday Loan industry, and it seems great favouritism has been given to sites containing Adsense - I can see ranking one page sites with less than 300 words content and 3/4 ad units above the fold and sites which have taken chunks of content off Wikipedia and rank.

Thumbs up Google, great job.

Just asking.

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.

Are you sure eyepaq?

If I had 5 domains so say .uk .fr .de .ie and .es and pasted the same 1000 words on each I would assume it would be duplicate content and wouldn't have equal rankings across all 5 domains, but I may be wrong?

I don't think Cole is talking about recreating the same article in different languages because then I would understand the use of the href-lang tag but I think he means the exact same article on separate domains, could be wrong here as well

@Colelusby - Is a sub-domain for each location on one domain out the question? So

uk.example.com, fr.example.com etc You can then tell WMTs the sub domain UK targets the UK and the fr targets France etc.

Im seeing lots of flux on the bank holidays term. As you say 9th then back to 5th then 6th etc.

wiki and .gov have been in the top 5 before i even moved in (2years back) so these were they guys i was looking to beat at one point, some times even jumping above for a week but now im just trying to stay on page 1.

Thanks for reply.

im sorry to say no. What would you be looking for if i had?

Hi,

At the moment im confused. I have a page which shows up for the query 'bank holidays' first page solid for 2 years - this also applies to the terms 'mothers day', 'pancake day' and a few others (UK Google). And there still ranking.

Here is the problem: Usually I would rank for 'bank holidays 2014' (the terms with the year in are the real traffic drivers) and would be position 3/5. Over the last 3 months this has decayed dropping position to 30+.

From the screenprint you can see the term 'Bank Holidays' is holding on but the term 'bank holidays 2014' is slowly decaying. If you query 'bank holidays 2015' we don't appear in rankings at all.

What is causing this? The content is ok, social sharing happens and the odd link is picked up hear and there. I need help, how do I start pushing this back in the other direction, its like the site is slowly dying.

And what really kills me, is 2 pages are ranking on page1 off link farms.

URL: followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays

serp-decay.jpg

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 very much for coming over and making some suggestions.

1. Good point, I will create some anchor points in the table to info lower down page. I see what you mean by 700px down, I wanted to put a little content above it because I didnt want Google crawling it and just finding thin content above the fold - I will have a look at this tho and see if I can find away to get the good stuff higher up.

How important do you think social sharing for SEO is for this type of content? Would say A/B testing for more social shares be a high priority? or forget that just keep adding content?

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.

Hi,

Some may have seen me around the forum recently asking a few questions about my website which was being re-vamped. Well its now live.

www.followuk.co.uk

Would love some actionable advice / constructive criticism.

Website background: It started life as a website displaying dates for UK bank holidays, noticed some good traffic/sharing so decided to open it up to UK occasions. This resulted in more traffic and social sharing so over the last month I have re-built the whole website to be responsive and 'I hope' professional / interesting to visitors.

I also opened it up further into other UK dates such as sporting events and festivals - these categories will gain more pages as well as new categories to come. I'm hoping to turn it into a little UK resource for this type of content.

Thank you.

Hi,

I understand a site which loads quickly is greater for the user but how does site speed affect rankings?

I mean does Google log the speed pages load, the faster it loads the better the signal? So say I have a page which loads in 1.5sec would Google 'Rate' the site better if it loaded in say 0.8sec?

Thanks.

Hi,

Just a quick question.

How important are the signals received by Google on a websites user behaviour?

For example: Bounce Rate, Avg Time on site, # of pages viewed, Geo of user etc

Thanks.

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.

Thanks for the kind words.

Well my pages are better than the one pagers problem is its Q&A type of content.

So 1+1 is always 2 - once they got the answer from either me or a competitor its done and there gone. I just provide the answer better - more indepth with a better design like an actual resource so the sharing on my site is far greater than say the one pagers.

Well I got an even better design coming, responsive, faster load times, more pages so hopefully this helps.

I do have one Question for you though EGOL - how important is freshness? Can content go stale?

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

Hi,

How risky is link building nowadays? I have a site which has been left on its own and over time has generated links which is great, its a resource type of site so works well in that department. The reason it picks up links by itself is because I have spent time on it and in the past I could just leave and the links it would pick up would maintain its rankings.

Over the last 6 months a lot of marketers have noticed this large traffic, and have produced 1 page sites going directly for my main term - then putting adsense all over it.

So problem is, my site can't build links by itself as fast as these marketers are doing manually. Don't get me wrong I can do what they are doing but they don't care about their 1 pager as much as I do about my site - a lot of work has gone into it.

Can I link build without running a 'big' risk of having my site hit by Google? how does one build links the way Google is ok with?

Thanks.

Hi Everyone,

Hope your all doing well.

Im about 1 week away from relaunching my website and im a little worried it might hurt my rankings.

Basically im trying to make the website better, so its undergone a massive overhaul such as being made responsive on tablet + mobile, completely redesigned colours etc so now a flat design bringing less images in the hope to increase load times, navigation is more of a silo structure to try and make everything that bit more relevant and to cut down on clutter for users.

I haven't touched the urls so they will stay the same but I have stripped and added new content because as the years have passed, reflecting back some of it is basic and not professional enough - so ive had it reproduced by a copywriter.

I've also gone through the social channels and stripped out some content from there (almost reset them) because the style of the content and design no longer aligns with the new design and voice of the new site.

Without a doubt the site is much better (been in dev for 2 months) im just worried Google might not like something? It's a shame really because I should be excited but all im worried about is Google spanking it.

Thank you very much (see my reply below).

Thank you very much (see my reply below).

Nice, extremely helpful - thanking you both Dennis + David. Its not often I get responses on forums where im actually going to action the advice but I will here.

Going to share a few things in the hope I can gain some more actionable advice/insight.

So im purely after rankings in UK search - a query which is highly valuable to me is 'bank holidays 2014'. I was ranking in the top 5 for the last 2 years (sometimes I would be 3rd for a few months), David is completely correct my content may well be 'stagnant' as I don't refresh my content at all really - little worried it might flick a switch Google's end so I tend to do as little as possible changes wise.

Like I said, I have now dropped to bottom of page (FollowUK) and have even seen flux onto page 2. You will notice a lot of Auth sites which is absolutely fine with me, I understand the reason and the work involved to out rank. Its just the others which confuse me because far as im considered (taken David's advice on competitor analysis) all they have over me is tables. So the ones im looking at are -> year-planner-calendar.wanadoo / ownersdirect / publicholidays - All of which were below me before a week ago.

But I have to admit being open their content looks more interesting than mine, which falls back to Dennis's reply regarding content formatting.

Even still, when you take 900 unique relevant words against 50/150 words you would assume mine would be more valuable to Googe's users - unless you think adding something as simple as a table would do the trick (I doubt it).

Thoughts?

Thanks for your reply.

Makes sense, hopefully some of these sites get pulled back a little.

Do you think the way a website arranges content on the page matters also? So instead of having a chunk of content in a block, have it broken apart more with sub-headings, tables, bullet points etc?

Hi,

So my site supplies Q&A type of content - user queries a question and generally they get the answer from my site (landing page). I always make sure my content is (1) unique (2) answers the question (3) extensive in answering the question - reason being I rely on social shares quite a bit and that system works very well, sharing happens with my content.

But one of my main pages has dropped from position 5 to position 10 in the last few days - I assume its panda 4.0 because my rankings have been rock for around 2 years.

But I don't think its dropped my site, I think it has boosted others above me. The thing I don't understand is the sites its boosted above me have very little content and in some cases lots of Adsense surrounding it.

I'm not moaning just a bit confused: I have 750 words of good content, another sites comes out of nowhere with 50 words -> how can Google decide the 50 word site is better using the panda algo?

This is me assuming the panda algo is purely content/copy based. Does it take other things into account such as freshness, layout, bounce rate?

Thanks.

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.

Hi Jane,

No they do rank well:

5th: Bank Holidays, 4th Mothers Day, 5th Fathers Day - The hard part now is pushing past Gov websites and the likes of Wikipedia.

Thanks for your reply, So links don't pass PageRank? Im a little confused because I always thought rel=nofollow stops PR hence the idea of Pagerank sculpturing?

Also what's the benefit of a silo structure? Because to my knowledge it retains more juice and makes everything that little more relevant - http://moz.com/blog/site-architecture-for-seo

Very interesting, I see your a bit of a Auth on SEO so really appreciate your input.

Ta.

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.

Hi,

I'm a little worried/interested in the affects of my new navigation on ranking.

So here is the current site - followuk.co.uk/mothers-day

I have chosen an internal page because 99% of my traffic goes to these and generally external links and social shares happen on these pages (naturally because of the nature of the content).

As you can see I have a nav bar on the left which links to all other pages. In my new design I will get rid of this nav bar altogether and have a breadcrumb which will give the user the option to root back to a category page which will contain these links instead.

Kind of like this: Home > Important Dates > Mothers Day (if your on the mothers day page)

I'm in two minds because maybe pages are passing PageRank helping each other to rank, but on the other side maybe the strong pages which do rank well and gain links/social shares are not ranking as well because they are passing link juice through the navigation to other pages.

Any thoughts?

Uh thanks for coming to have a look Ryan much appreciated.

The page itself is roughly 2 months old.

The guest blogging I did was through the MyBlogGuest system so 99% of the time links are do-follow.

Roughly 15 guest posts have been put up, the anchor text was split from 'UK Bank Holidays 2013' to 'Bank Holidays 2013' so roughly 8 each.

I am a little confused with your statement about guest blogging because I thought guest blogging was a good way of generating good links, I have seen a few videos from Matt Cutts and Rand on this subject but maybe I am doing the wrong type of guest blogging.

I understand what your saying about flux and term positions for different locations but I have consistently generated 50 visits a day from the term 'Bank Holidays 2013' and in the last 24 hours this has dropped to 0.

If it is as you say and it's just the way the cookie crumbles im fine with that and I know I need to generate more auth links but my worries are have I effected the ranking from the content changes I made, by the sounds of what your saying probably not.

Thanks again Ryan for looking into this.

Hi,

First off im new here, so hello to everyone.

Now to the reason why I have joined.

I am currently trying to rank for 2 terms:

**UK Bank Holidays 2013 (Term 1) **and Bank Holidays 2013 (Term 2)

The page which im trying to rank these terms on is:

http://www.followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays

Now some background history:

On the 29th Dec 2013, term 1 was 5th and term 2 was 7th - rankings achieved through guest blogging.

Last night I changed the h1 tag from 'Bank Holidays 2013' to 'UK Bank Holidays 2013'.

Re-worded the meta description to try and increase the CTR.

And removed the term 'Bank Holiday' from the end of each sub-heading - Ex: 'New Year's Day Bank Holiday' to 'New Year's Day' - I did this because I felt it was to much so in total 'Bank Holiday' term had been removed from 5 sub-headings.

Ok, so I went into WMT and resubmitted for indexing, over night the page got reindexed - the term 'UK Bank Holidays 2013' stayed at the same position (5) BUT the 'Bank Holidays 2013' term dropped into hell at roughly position 250.

I'm thinking of changing everything back and crossing my fingers that term which dropped comes back BUT maybe im being to rash and it might jump back as the page stands.

I did a grade test using SEOMOZ and both terms generate a grade of 'A'.

Has anyone got any ideas? Sorry if the thread is a bit messy im currently crying all over the keyboard as im typing.

Thanks