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Thanks for your response Matt.

A lot of the bad links have been disavowed. Does Ahrefs filter these out?

Perhaps a second round of link cleanup is in order?

A client i'm working with is desperate to rank top for the term 'wholesale jewellery' (it's a UK company and that's the UK spelling). He previously held the top spot but got hit with a penalty and is now bottom of page 1.

So far nothing I have done has had much of an impact despite this being a relatively low competition term.  We've fluctuated around the first page for the last few months but the highest we got was 4th before dropping again. The site's domain authority is on par with the site ranking top (who have no content to speak of) and is superior to most other sites on the first page.  The site also has similar social metrics to the top ranking site and superior to most others on the first page.

I've focused on building fewer good quality links and some of them have been excellent - DA 80+ and yet, still no movement. On-page optimisation is spot on as well.

A couple of things I have spotted that might be having an impact:

-my client's site has a .com domain where most others have .co.uk

-most sites on the first page have either jewellery, wholesale or both in their domain names

-relevance of linking istes could be playing a part here. My client has links from wholesale sites but few from jewellery-related sites

-within my client's link profile there are very few, if any exact anchor text links for the term 'wholesale jewellery'

-legacy of a penalty could be making ranking progress that much more difficult?

I'd appreciate your input because I've hit a brick wall. The site is http://www.parklaneonline.com

Thanks Toby, good to get a second opinion on these things and some clarification.

The platform is the agency's own proprietary one but i don't know if it's based on an existing framework or completely bespoke. Having looked at some of the other sites they have build though, it seems other clients are experiencing similar indexing problems as they have all utilised a workaround of some sort.

I'll share the name of the agency with you by email if you want to do some digging but I don't think it's fair to name and shame them on here - shr109@hotmail.com

I'm going to have to post the page in question which i'd rather not do but I have permission from the client to do so.

Question: A recruitment client of mine had their website build on a proprietary platform by a so-called recruitment specialist agency.  Unfortunately the site is not performing well in the organic listings.

I believe the culprit is this page and others like it: http://www.prospect-health.com/Jobs/?st=0&o3=973&s=1&o4=1215&sortdir=desc&displayinstance=Advanced Search_Site1&pagesize=50000&page=1&o1=255&sortby=CreationDate&o2=260&ij=0

Basically as soon as you deviate from the top level pages you land on pages that have database-query URLs like this one.  My take on it is that Google cannot crawl these pages and is therefore having trouble picking up all of the job listings.  I have taken some measures to combat this and obviously we have an xml sitemap in place but it seems the pages that Google finds via the XML feed are not performing because there is no obvious flow of 'link juice' to them.

There are a number of latest jobs listed on top level pages like this one: http://www.prospect-health.com/optometry-jobs and when they are picked up they perform Ok in the SERPs, which is the biggest clue to the problem outlined above.

The agency in question have an SEO department who dispute the problem and their proposed solution is to create more content and build more links (genius!).

Just looking for some clarification from you guys if you don't mind?

Thanks Lynn, that's perfect!

Another question then - the job listings are syndicated out to the job boards automatically via a 3rd party (probably used by 75% of Uk recruitment companies).  If I was to put a rel=canonical tag on each job listing it should be carried over to each of the job boards which would get around the duplicate content problem. However, each job listing page on our site would carry the re=canonical tag essentially pointing back to itself. Would this cause any issues?

Thanks

I'm currently working on a recrutiment website.  One of the things we do to drive traffic to the site is post our job listings out to a number of job boards eg. Indeed. These sites replicate our own job listings which means that for every job there are at least 5-10 exact duplicates on the web.  By nature the job boards have good domain authority so they always rank above us but I would still expect to see more in the way of long-tail traffic.

Is it necessary for me to claim our own job listings as the original source and if so, how do I go about doing it?

Thanks