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Hi Dana, thanks for posting that link, I never knew that mozcast existed so that is great and certainly shows some heat over that period. Couldn't agree with your comments more and that is why I just began making all the changes at once because I knew that overall it would have a positive impact going forward. Thanks for taking the time to post your response.
So the good news is that for the first time since April 24th, one of our websites is back in the search results as of around December 12 but I am still unsure as whether it was panda or penguin (or both) that was impacting the site?? Note this was not a manual penalty.
I diagnosed it as a penguin issue (drop on April 24th, aggressive on-page optimisation, around 10% of links from spammy directories like addyourfreelinks.com with anchor text built by a questionable agency), but on further advice it was thought that panda was also an issue because it is a hotel microsite so there was duplication with our own brand site and across third party travel sites and there were a number of pages with bare content. I figured it was a good time to clean everything up to address both.
Here is a summary of actions taken:
I have searched to see if there were any algorithm updates around December 12 but cannot find any mentions.
Thoughts?
I think it will be valuable to do a competitor analysis to see what they are doing better. What is there link profile like, what keywords are they targeting, what is their page optimisation and content like etc?? This will give you some areas to focus on.
I have just had a really quick look at your site and have noted a couple of things:
Correct me if I am wrong, but it doesn't look like there is any actual content (body text) on the homepage? I would have thought you would need at least a few sentences describing to visitors and google what your site is about?
Also - Are your product descriptions unique? I know I have had a lot of issues with duplicate content over the past year (since the panda update) where Google is filtering out pages that have not enough unique content. Often generic product descriptions get caught up with this. There are some good ways to help make your product page unique and more appealing - I recommend taking a look at this post .
It looks like a lot of your navigation is quite deep - for example your Parts page is 3 layers deep - http://www.motorcyclecenter.com/l/Motorcycle-Parts/932.. This might be making it tough for Google to crawl deep into your site. I know it depends on how your site is set up, but if you could have www.motorcyclecenter.com/motorcycle-parts as a landing page optimised for 'motorcycle parts' - that would be ideal to help rank.
Just a few thoughts....
Cheers,
Andrew
I would give it more time to see if your links are going to be indexed and focus on building a 'natural' link profile. Building 100+ links in a short space of time with a new site can be dangerous if they are low quality/spammy. My advice is to slow down and focus on quality links from a range of sources.
Hi everyone,
Ever since the Jan 19th Google 'above the fold update' I have noticed some strange ranking changes in some of my sites.
1. rankings increased dramatically (not in top 50 to page 2) on Jan 19th for about 5 days then dropped out completely from the top 50.
2. our rankings then did the same thing again around Feb 2nd for about 5 -6 days then has bottomed out ever since.
We do not have any ads on the site but our pages are dominated by images for most of the 'above the fold' section then followed by the content down the page.
Any insight into this would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Andrew
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your response and a very valid point. Duplicate content wont be a big issue as brand.com is very light on content for each location so the sub domain will have a lot of new content (and some re-written content).
Good tip on the regional data. Will make sure we implement this.
Hi,
We are about to launch a subdomain and I am not sure about which subdomain will benefit us the most:
Before I continue I must point out that unfortunately subfolders are not an option (sorry, hard to explain).
Things to consider:
According to the following post if we were to go for location.brand.com we would benefit from ‘some’ amount of inherited domain authority but would loose out on Geo target bonus. If we went for location.brand.co.uk we would benefit significantly from Geo target bonus but would loose out completely on inherited domain authority
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/folders-vs-subdomains-vs-cctld-in-international-seo-an-overview
I was more inclined to go for location.brand.co.uk as our SEO agency advised that we will not benefit from the domain authority as we will be considered a new domain. However, after looking into it further I am finding it hard to decide because if we could capitalize on brand.com and inheriting part of its domain authority then it could help our seo efforts significantly.
Thanks!!
I would give it more time to see if your links are going to be indexed and focus on building a 'natural' link profile. Building 100+ links in a short space of time with a new site can be dangerous if they are low quality/spammy. My advice is to slow down and focus on quality links from a range of sources.
I have just had a really quick look at your site and have noted a couple of things:
Correct me if I am wrong, but it doesn't look like there is any actual content (body text) on the homepage? I would have thought you would need at least a few sentences describing to visitors and google what your site is about?
Also - Are your product descriptions unique? I know I have had a lot of issues with duplicate content over the past year (since the panda update) where Google is filtering out pages that have not enough unique content. Often generic product descriptions get caught up with this. There are some good ways to help make your product page unique and more appealing - I recommend taking a look at this post .
It looks like a lot of your navigation is quite deep - for example your Parts page is 3 layers deep - http://www.motorcyclecenter.com/l/Motorcycle-Parts/932.. This might be making it tough for Google to crawl deep into your site. I know it depends on how your site is set up, but if you could have www.motorcyclecenter.com/motorcycle-parts as a landing page optimised for 'motorcycle parts' - that would be ideal to help rank.
Just a few thoughts....
Cheers,
Andrew
Hi Dana, thanks for posting that link, I never knew that mozcast existed so that is great and certainly shows some heat over that period. Couldn't agree with your comments more and that is why I just began making all the changes at once because I knew that overall it would have a positive impact going forward. Thanks for taking the time to post your response.