Dramatic drop after rapid rise for new site
-
just launched a new site edenprairieexperts.com. The site jumped to the first page on yahoo and bing within a couple of days then fell off a cliff and isnt in the top 10 pages. Any reason for this? seems really strange for me. The only think I can think of is I got some really poor quality back links from someone screwing with me. If someone could take a glance at the site or give me some general direction I would appreciate it.
-
There is not any direct actin you can take other then to contact the source of any spammy links and request their removal.
Indirectly, you can earn quality links to dilute the bad ones in your profile. Most sites will have some spammy links to them. It is perfectly natural. The question is what percent of the links to a given site are spammy.
-
There are an infinite number of ideas for link generation. You are in real estate so I'll share a few examples:
-
create a mortgage calculator or other tool which is helpful to clients and agents alike. Take a look at other tools on the market and try to make your tool better, offer more features, have a cleaner interface, etc.
-
write articles people want to read and link to. Some examples would be: Top 5 things to look for in your next home, 10 reasons to find a new real estate agent, How the 2012 tax law changes will affect your next home purchase, etc.
-
write about any scams or issues home buyers want to avoid
-
tie into any recent news items
-
share a success story, or a failure story and how others can avoid the same pitfall
I view SEO as a straight line. Build a solid platform (i.e. website) you can use to share your message. Offer your message (i.e. articles) in the highest quality manner possible, and talk about subjects readers want to learn about. Then let the world know about your site (i.e. link build).
The problem most sites face with link building is the sites are poorly built, or the site doesn't present the company in the best possible view. The next challenge is either the site has great content written about topics which are not of interest to people, or they have average content which is available on a hundred other websites. Be current, be relevant, be exceptional and your results will follow.
-
-
as a follow, how do I remove the backlinks on my own? Is there a way to do that, without waiting for someone at the spammy directory site to respond to me?
-
Thanks a million for the good advice. I appreciate your time, any good recommendations for seo professionals would be appreciated. Also any advice once the content is approved for getting some links other than directories would also be helpful.
-
Dan, I agree with your thought process about the bad links. If a new site grabs a bunch of "bad" links such as low quality directories and such, it can directly damage the site. It's a case that absolutely can show the idea "links can never hurt you" is not correct.
I don't agree it's a problem for the snippet you used showing the article rather then the home page. The text you copied is an article snippet with proper anchor text on the home page linking to the article, telling Google the article itself would be the best result.I tried searching for a bit of text unique to the home page "As Eden Prairie Realtors and Certified Community Experts(sm)". It was returned as the #1 result in Google.com.
Overall the site has a lot of issues. The more I look at the site, the more I see. The article you quoted is titled "Eden Prairie Homes Still in Demad" Mis-spellings on the home page is really bad and a sign of a lower quality site.
In short, there are a variety of issues which need to be resolved. My suggestion would be to fix the site, try to remove as many of the spam backlinks, earn authentic links to offset the spammy links, and then wait 30 days at which point rankings should improve IF the site has good content.
-
Also, this google webmaster tools video is interesting too: what steps can I take to diagnose a drop in rankings?
-
Hi Ryan
Yes, you're absolutely correct to question that, good call. What I saw in Majestic (which I hadn't time to share before) was all of those sitewides were coming from "bestdirectory4you.com" (see screenshot). What do you think? Not a very high value site, including the others from the screenshot. It was all exact match keyword anchor text, on pages with tons of other links etc.
Secondly, check out the next screenshot - text cut and paste from the homepage and put into a search with quotes, but we're only getting two inner pages in the results. Seems like there's something going on with the homepage not showing (although it is in the index).
In fact a site: search doesn't show the homepage first, but it brings up all the inner MLS pages.
It would seem the drop in rankings has something to do with the homepage losing a lot of its juice, in google anyway?
Thoughts?
-Dan
-
Hi Dan.
I have not used the Majestic backlink tool so perhaps I am misreading the graph you provided. It seems on Oct 24th about 50 links were created. According to the 2nd graph, it appears all of those links came from a single domain. I would initially guess it is a site wide link on a smaller website, and not an issue. Would you agree?
-
Your last month of backlink history does look very suspect (see screenshot from Majestic SEO) See the giant spike about a week ago?
I took a quick look at the site of the company who designed your site, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was something that they were involved with, although I can't say that conclusively without further research.
I would HIGHLY suggest doing what Ryan says, especially the part about finding a reputable professional SEO, not a designer who happens to "do SEO" on the side.
-Dan
-
From a SEO perspective your site requires numerous changes. My suggestion would be to start with the Beginner's Guide to SEO and apply what you read to your site. The guide is short and easy to read. If you decide you would prefer someone else to do the work, reach out to others in your industry and locate someone who loves their SEO provider, the same way you might want someone to find a good realtor. You don't want someone who designs sites and does SEO on the side, nor do you want someone who does an "ok" job. Whatever standards you use in your business should apply to those who directly support your business.
A few examples of items which should be addressed:
-
your logo has a link to your home page URL as http://edenprairieexperts.com/index.php. Each time someone uses that link they are redirected to your actual home page link, http://edenprairieexperts.com/. The logo link should match your actual URL and not require a redirect.
-
your footer links also have an issue where they are redirected. For example your anchor text "Eden Prarie Foreclusures" link is to http://edenprairieexperts.com/?page_id=122, but it is redirected to another URL http://edenprairieexperts.com/eden-prairie-foreclosures. Any time a redirect occurs there is a loss of PR within your site. All internal links should be direct links.
-
your site lacks trust symbols. I imagine there are realtor organizations you belong to, certifications you have earned, etc. which provide a value to your clients. Advertise them! The only trust symbol you display is "Certified Community Expert". I have no idea what that means. The badge in your footer is not a link but simply an image which says those words. A trust badge should be a link which confirms the badge is authentic, and explains what it means.
-
every image on your site should use an ALT tag description to explain to search engines and visually impaired visitors what the image represents.
-
there are other issues such as you lack a meta description tag on your home page, and your title is targeting three phrases.
With respect to the question you asked about your site's appearance in search engines, your site is well indexed by Google. Bing/Yahoo both are using the same crawler and they are much more selective about indexing web pages. The only page I see from your site indexed by Bing is your home page. If I search for "Eden Prarie Experts" your home page shows as the 4th result in Bing.com.
If you wish more of your pages indexed with Bing and Yahoo, create a Bing Webmaster Tools account. You can submit up to 10 pages per day, 50 pages per month, to Bing manually. A better method would be to improve the quality of your site and earn authentic links to where they will naturally index your site and rank your pages better.
-
-
May I ask what keywords you are hoping to rank for?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate website pages indexed: Ranking dropped. Does Google checks the duplicate domain association?
Hi all, Our duplicate website which is used for testing new optimisations got indexed and we dropped in rankings. But I am not sure whether this is exact reason as it happened earlier too where I don't find much drop in rankings. Also I got replies in the past that it'll not really impact original website but duplicate website. I think this rule applies to the third party websites. But if our own domain has exact duplicate content; will Google knows that we own the website from any other way we are associated like IP addresses and servers, etc..to find the duplicate website is hosted by us? I wonder how Google treats duplicate content from third party domains and own domains. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Help guide pages from subdirectory must be opened in a new tab?
Hi, We have help guide pages for every feature we provide. They been hosted on different sub directory and we linked them from our website pages. Do we need to make these sub directory pages to open in a new tab when clicked from our website pages? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Site´s Architecture - Categories . What´s the best in my case?
My Dear friends of MOZ, I´ve got you a case that has been driving me crazy for 2 weeks, Im doing an SEO audit for big brand that sells electronics. Since they sell all kind of electronics, and are very popular the site is quite big and has several categories. Now...Im working particularly in a kind of micro-site that sells two kind of products that are very similar but not the same. Lets say in this site they are selling super-light-weight-Laptops and tablets, so if you look the site its a Laptop/Tablet site. But the site is not under a laptop/tablet directory, some pages are under laptop and others in Tablet directory . For example : Home page URL: /light-laptops/home.asp ; Products general page page URL is light-pads/products.asp ; and each single product page is under laptops or pads according the type of product. From my point of view, they should create a new directory called /light-laptops-pads/ and single directories for products, and case studies, etc.. Since they want to show both products together when you click in products (off course they will be creating sub-directories for the two types of products). At the begining I thought they were really mistaken, but now that I see that all light-pad content is in one folder and light-laptops content is in another, and the site jumps from one category to the other I am a little bit confused. PLEASE HELP ME PD: I want to make clear that general categories like products, case studies , contact us, solutions pages are in some cases under /light-pad/ directory and in other cases under /light-laptops / directory PLEASE PARDON MY ENGLISH!
Algorithm Updates | | facupp10 -
Staging site - Treated as duplicate?
Last week (exactly 8 days ago to be precise) my developer created a staging/test site to test some new features. The staging site duplicated the entire existing site on the same server. To explain this better -My site address is - www.mysite.com The path of the new staging site was www.mysite/staging I realized this only today and have immediately restricted robot text and put a no index no follow on the entire duplicate server folder but I am sure that Google would have indexed the duplicate content by now? So far I do not see any significant drop in traffic but should I be worried? and what if anything can I do at this stage?
Algorithm Updates | | rajatsharma0 -
New Google Update In The Past Two Days???
Was there a new Google update in the past couple of days. Traffic on my test site has gone from ~ 1,000 per day to over 4,000 per day for no particular reason. Most of the traffic is still coming from Google and is not the result of any new major links. My keyword rankings also appear to be the same ...
Algorithm Updates | | Humanovation0 -
How on earth is a site with ONE LINK ranking so well for a competitive keyword?
Ok, so I'm sure you get the gist of what I'm asking about in my question. The query is 'diy kitchens' in Google UK and the website is kitchens4diy[dot]com - which is ranking in third from my viewing. The thing is, the site has just ONE BACKLINK and has done for a good while. Yet, it's ranking really well. What gives?
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve0 -
Significant Drop in Rankings without Explanation
My company has experienced a significant drop in rankings in the last month or so. How significant? Across our top 11 keywords, we've dropped an average of 6 positions. Some have dropped less (1 or 2) and some have dropped way more (38). We work really hard to provide great content on our site and have been building out our link profile with guest blogging on relevant sites (dailyshotofcoffee.com, for example). No major changes have been made to the URL structure or content on the pages that are ranking for our key terms, so I am not sure where the drop is coming from. For example: One of our key terms is "espresso machine" and we went from #9 to #22 in the last few weeks. We have not made any changes to the main content on the page that is ranking since September. Our on-site page report for this page has us nailing all of the critical factors, most of the high importance factors (not exact keyword in page titles - we use "espresso machines" as that is one of our other terms - or "avoid keyword stuffing" - unfortunately, our products are also named with "espresso machine" and i can't very well not follow those links or remove the term from their names), all of the moderate importance factors, and most of the low importance factors. It has been reporting this way since September. Most of our key terms are this way (haven't had content changed in the last several weeks to months and have great on-page grades). We don't engage in spammy link building (though I did some work this fall on cleaning up bad links a previous SEO company had built out). I'm just really taken aback by the sudden drop in rankings across the board. Any insight or advice anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | Marketing.SCG1 -
Ranking well for main key terms but site traffic has dropped sharply?
Hello All, Just a quick question. Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings. The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change) I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories. Put in place before I started here 🐵 Any help truly appreciated. Regards Tim
Algorithm Updates | | TimHolmes0