Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
This could be because of the site becoming slow or if you had used a template that was badly written or had sitewide footer links etc etc.
There could be a number of reasons.
What kind of design change did you do? Is it a wordpress site? Did you use a template? Did you install any new plugins? Did you change your server or hosting?
Actually my experience has shown that keywords in the handle actually look spammy and most people tend to not take that account seriously.. Infact I myself had deleted a lot of follows who either had a keyword in their handle or a graphic of some sort. I cleaned my follow list to ensure I was getting tweets from people and not automated systems. I am probably digressing here... sorry....
It sounds like some other issue might be the cause of this traffic loss such as an algorithmic penalty or shuffle etc. As EGOL said, it is hard to guess with out really looking into all aspects of this website.
Hi, Even though you are setting up accounts for your clients, creating too many from the same IP would trigger the suspension. This is nothing new. I remember hearing about this last year. Mash
Yes, blog commenting would work BUT spend your time searching for ONLY relevant industry blogs. Again, number is not important. You have to post relevant and useful comments on relavant high quality blogs and they could add to your efforts. Also, make sure you do not comment on posts which are just space fillers and/or trash. The posts you comment on must be written for people and not for spam. If the post looks like junk or spun, just ignore and move on.
I see this absolutely in the graphic and logo design industry. Newer sites spamming the web with directory/forum/article spam links are getting to the first page and bumping off MUCH older sites that just post good content on their websites and do not actively go after spam link building!
Very unfortunate! But it is definitely working!!!
If you add some one (by adding their gmail address to your analytics account), they can access just your analytics and not your email etc. you can the set the permissions on how much of our analytics they can see. You do NOT have to share your gmail login details o have some one look into your analytics,
I would not worry too much if the posts have 400+ words.
Also, I see that the links are all category and archive links. These should be ok as long as you are using a plugin like the "All in One SEO Pack" in Wordpress and set NOINDEX on categories, archives and tags.
Also, you can set the categories to be displayed as a dropdown which would make the links invisible to the crawler (if I am not mistaken). A drop down category list may not look good but if the links are seen as links then it should help.
Of the the 4 activities you have listed the first 3 are ok but I would not bother too much with the 4th one. Link directories and Free PR sites are not worth getting links from. In fact, they may even hurt your rankings.
You should focus on getting organic links to the internal pages and the best way for this to happen is to write unique and interesting content. If you are just creating 10+ posts as space fillers with 500+ words, then you are probably wasting your time. Instead you should focus on 2 or 3 high quality posts that are well researched and interesting.
Do not go for "building links" - instead focus on creating interesting content such as infographics, industry related white papers or cheat sheets etc that people will feel like sharing or linking back to.
Hi, Not only do you have to combine pages - list 3 related topics on one page, you may also have to change the design of the site so you could have a 3 column design with the ads on the right column. The huge horizontal below header is not suc a great idea. My 2 cents. Mash
Yes, 150-200 words in the image ALT tag would be considered spammy and you may get some sort of penalty.
I recommend having the product name as the image ALT.
You can use this to get a crawl report including a list of all pages crawled.
You are right. You can not have the same product name for all images. That would be bad too. Some sites simply use the image name. If there are hyphens in the image name, then some Javascript can take care of that and you would have some decent ALT tags. But then the images should have good file names in the first place. If the names makes no sense than they would make no sense as the ALT tags too.
There is no easy way to apply bulk rules to images in ecommerce sites.
Hi Malte,
Even though technically and logically it should not hurt your sites, I do have some experience in this where I had seen rankings and saturation affected when I had added unrelated websites into my GA account for easier management.
Of course this could have been coincidental or perhaps I was being paranoid. But I could not find any other explanation (as far as my investigation went) for this.
A cached page version is just a version that Google holds in cache and is not really related to their crawling are or to how you are ranked. If you have made changed to the keywords on the home page then you will have to wait till Google reindexes you site and the algorithm would decide the rankings.
In my experience, I have seen Googlebot come and crawl almost daily but the cached version was several weeks old.
From experience I can tell you that Google does not treat similar phrases the same. In fact, even a difference of one syllable would be considered as a different and unique word and swapping around words would definitely be considered different.
Hi Steve,
There is no easy way to prevent duplicate penalty with such a large number of pages being pushed into the site, short of no-indexing those pages.
Perhaps a noindex, follow placed into the head of all these pages would help. I assume you would not want these indexed anyway because that is where the problem will raise it's ugly head!