Welcome to the Q&A Forum

They were dofollow but recently examiner changed it to no-follow due to massive abuse

Could help you with this. PM me your email

Sent you a PM with more info

You dont have a manual penalty.

But you are or used some questionable link building in the past.

Quick breakdown

#1 You need more branded keywords because your top linked/anchored word is Flat roofing. The top referring keyword should be http://yoursite instead of a single keyword

#2 A lot of the links you bought (or your SEO company did) are using private blog networks or sites blog sites built for SEO. Consider using other methods.

The exact times in traffic drop are due to the updates.

Took a quick look, few things:

A. You lack authoritative links. Your highest PA/DA link that is not internal is 20/40 and its a directory site. Get high PA/DA links.

B. Probably insert a Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions to meet Googles Quality guidelines and general good practice.

C. Your top competitor "mydefence.ca" is using SAPE links. Usually this is unsustainable for more than 6 months but who knows how long he can rank with it.

D. Your other competitor simply has more authoritative links than you.

E. Add more content onto your homepage. 400 words or more.

F. Reduce the word count of "law," "criminal," "criminal law". Word density is too high.

G. Switch up your H1 so it doesn't match your title exactly. Change the order of words.

Make these changes and get some high PA/DA links. This analysis was just done in 5 minutes. One month and 10-20 quality links and you will rank. Damn, this is so much easier than in Los Angeles. :S

Hey Thanks for the responses.

The site in question does not have any manual penalty. It just has a bunch of junk links that I need to get rid of before I start building an authority site.

I would like to avoid using this domain name but it is a 3 letter EMD thats brandable.

What if I transferred the domain to a new owner that does not have the whois blocked? Thereby maybe letting google know that there is a new owner. Anyone have experience with this?

I am looking to buy a new domain for a brand.

Problem is the domain has was registered in 1996 and has around 6k backlinks (according to ahrefs) that I need removed as the old content will have no relevance to my new site.

Should I just disavow all of them? Is there anything "special" I can do to let Google know that it will be new site owner/content and to remove/discount the current links?

FYI by setting it to USA, you will more than likely lose ranks in other countries.

A Google tool that has the option to allow webmasters to manually approve EVERY SINGLE Link. Or it will not count towards rankings.

Few things.

Reason why your title is below meta description? Seems awkward. Put keyword into H1 preferably.

Put more content onto homepage if that is the page you are trying to rank. I aim for 800+ words.

Your link profile foundation is really good. You have a very easy site to work with and can see some pretty good rankings. Main issue is you lack links with the anchor text you are trying to rank. Thats an easy fix for the most part. 51 DA? Wish my clients would have similar clean sites to work with. Would make my life sooooo much easier.

Your content looks like its farmed. Grabbing it from a content farm? Try to create higher quality content and send social signals to it. Also, its best to put blogs + excerpt + date stamp on homepage.

Lastly, you are getting 70/100 in terms of desktop page speed. Have to optimize images, minify JS/css/html. and move JS to footer. I assume your site is hosted in the US? Response time is a little slow so you might consider using a CDN.

I see that you are located in SD, I am in LA. If you want to chat, PM me.

With the army of new TLD's coming out. We will have to see how much weight (or lack of) Google will place on them.

But from previous actions, the top TLDs .com/net/org will carry more weight than usual in terms of Exact or partial match domain.

1. Guest blog on niche related high PR/PA/DA domains.

2; Get ultra high Authoritative links. (yahoo, usnews, huffingtonpost sites)

3. Press release to get authoritative links

4. Top paid directories such as Yahoo.

Best bet is start with #2 and work your way to #1 then #3 then #4.

Looking at their content, authority and such, honestly its not that hard to rank those keywords to the top though #2 is difficult to say. Top 5 is definitely do-able in a few months.

WP is what I recommend to use for building ecommerce sites that really want to focus on SEO.

I have tried all the other "easy" solutions out there, Shopify, pixelspace, bigcommerce, 3d cart, magento, opencart etc.

They are great platforms - they build very sexy sites, but lack in the ability to build optimized pages. The only one that stands out among the pack is Magento and that thing is big and heavy. A lot of expensive development work is required to make Magento a suitable platform.

So what we are left with is Wordpress. Yes Wordpress does have a scalability problem but by the time any major issues arrive, you probably have the funds available to hire developers to customize and optimize the bottlenecks.

Hope that help,

Try using Link Detox

Probably a continuation of the roll-out of their new algorithm.

It seems that Google does not simply roll out a massive algorithm change in one day but it has become more dynamic and it changes over time. My sites seemed to have a little bit above the usual rankings volatility this past weekend.

Penguin 2.1 was released at the start of the month. And your clients were probably penalized a little bit.

Remove the bad links using a tool like LinkDetox and hopefully you will be able to recover some positions

Looks like Google enacted blended results. So a single site can no longer rank for both an organic keyword and the local 7 pack. At the same time, directory sites such as Yelp, yellowpages etc are dominating local keywords. You can frequently see the top 3-4-5-6 results being Yelp and the local 7 pack afterwards.

SEO your Yelp listing!

I had a site similar to the issue. The way I solved was to just use the disavow tool like a machete instead of scalpel. Mass disavowed any domains that was even suspected and ran constant reports through link detox.

Took around 6 months but it did the job. Then start rebuilding afterwards.

Hey Chris,

I sent you a PM with some of my analysis and some tips in case you did not want some of the info shared publically.

-Richard

Zappos.com by far.

Especially their technical side of dishing out images/content at an incredible speed. Their architecture is amazing.

Well after a quick look, your links are pretty weak. You have a lot of ground to cover to get back to your original rankings but it should be do-able since you have a pretty strong domain name and age.

I will send you a PM with a little more info

If you go that route, make sure to use different hosting companies or at the very least get different C-class IPs.

Interlnking sites is generally not that effective, a single link from an authority site will carry much more weight. You are better off spending your time contacting authority sites within your niche to get a link somehow (guest blog, get you featured etc)

If say you have 10 PR 1, DA/PA of 15 linking to 1 site. A single authority DA/PA of 35 and PR 3 would carry more weight than all of those combined.

Hope that helps.

Anyone have idea whats going on with adwords? The pre-existing data seems to be gone for many terms(avg monthly searches, competition, suggested bid). Even commonly searched terms Google is showing decreased amount of avg monthly searches.

Is this for everyone or just me?

Does the other website have stronger authority links? Its more than likely this issue or maybe a 301?

One of my sites with a DA/PA of 30 out ranks a DA/PA 50 site by having a few really strong high authority links. It also has no social media and I only update the content once a month.

Getting a few authoritative links PA/DA 80+ does wonders. Or it could be shuffling from Google this past weekend.

Give it a few days and see how the SERPs settle.Its probably Google doing a shuffle as I have seen extremely legitimate white-hat sites with almost zero links get hit really hard.

Its strange because all of my newer domains (less than 3 months) were not hit while the older ones were. Some have recovered while others have not. Whats worse, some super spammy websites have not budged at all! And some top ranked sites now have 5 backlinks or they are super spammy.

So just sit tight a week, and see what happens. Hope for the best.

You are suppose to reach out and have the links removed as disavow is suppose to be used as a last resort tool.

Penguin 2.1 is pretty strange, some of my clients sites got hit, others saw a rise. Whats weirder is that the larger companies (amazon, yelp, yellowpages etc) are dominating the first page. Theres a few local keywords where 8 out of the 10 rankings is yelp!

Anyhow, I think you should let the website sit a week or so and let the dust settle before resorting to disavow. I think Google is just shuffling.

There was an update today and it was pretty ugly. If your drop was in the last 24-48 hours, that might have been the culprit.

Did you use C-class IPs on the blogs? Or were they hosted on different hosts? Did you interlink the blogs?

Theres some silly rankings going on, sites with 1 backlink ranking for 25k monthly searched keyword.

Its not about google being "smart enough." Its the fact that your old domain carries a penalty and if you 301 it, the penalty will be passed on.

I have tested this in the past and the penalty ALWAYS gets passed on to the new domain.

As a pre-caution, either test it on another domain or just forget about it and start fresh.

If the previous domain was penalized and its still penalized, then it is a good idea to not re-direct. The penalty will carry over.

You can simply grab a fresh domain, re-direct the domain in question and see the results. If its positivie, then go ahead and redirect to your new site.