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
-
75% Overnight Drop in Organic Search Traffic
On April 10th my organic search clicks dropped 75% overnight. I have never seen anything like it. What Google algorithm change could have caused this? I have no manual actions and my indexed page count is about the same. I have noticed that several queries that I was number one for including my brand have dropped by anywhere from two to ten spots. The brand dropping out of the first spot is what really gets me. There is nothing similar to it at all. My speed score is moderate, so I don't think that is it. My site was down most of the day on the 9th or 10th, but that has never caused a drop in search clicks and the next day they were about the same. I noticed that the CDC now occupies the number one spot for my brand. Even though the exact brand name is nowhere in the text of the CDC page. I think this might be due to Google trying to help official health organizations do better due to COVID19, but the queries I have dropped on have nothing to do with Coronavirus. Also, none of my other sites have seen this type of problem. Only the health site seems affected. I recently did a press release campaign and my link counts are up, so I don't that is it either. The brand page is https://stdcarriers.com and an example of an effected query is Celebrities with STDs.
Algorithm Updates | | STDCarriers0 -
How can I tell if my site was impacted by the March 2019 Core Update?
I am trying to determine if my website was impacted by the March 2019 Core Update. Based on the various articles I have been reading, I do not believe my niche (software) was impacted. I see a very small tick up on search console and google analytics, but it is well within the normal range. Where else should I be looking to see if we were impacted? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | NikCall1 -
Drop in Organic Traffic for Homepage and Branded terms but Steady in Rankings and According to WMT.
I am stumped. I have been researching for over two days now. Our homepage organic traffic YoY is down approx. 25%. However, rank has not changed according to Conductor, Bing and Google WMT. Impressions have gone up according to both search engines and we rank now for more keywords in top 3 than we did last year. Both WMTs' present a pretty healthy picture. No insignificant indexing issues, Error URLs & blocked resources are down, daily page crawls are higher than ever, etc. I drilled into Google Analytics from a few different view points. The closest I got to an answer was I saw huge out-liars YoY in browsers and browser versions. We saw significant differences in organic traffic YoY from IE 11, 9 ,10, 8 and 7. Android Browser 31, 32 and Safari 6 and 7. I tested our homepage and search results in all of these, and found no issues. Yet, GA reports 50K+ differences YoY. My only thought is it is perhaps a GA attribution error? And/or browsers defaulting organic traffic to direct or other? Yet, our direct traffic is up but does not correlate with as much as we are down. Any tips on where to look next would be extremely helpful!
Algorithm Updates | | lunavista-comm0 -
Your search - site:domain.com - did not match any documents.
I've recently started work on a new clients website and done some preliminary work with on-page optimisation, and there is still plenty of work to be done and issues to resolve. They are ranking ok on Bing, but they are not getting any ranking on Google at all (except paid) - I tried the site:domain.com search and comes up with no results... so this confirms that something is going on with the google search rank! Can anyone shed light on what can cause this or why this would happen? My next step is to look at their webmaster tools (haven't had access yet), but if anyone has any tips to resolve this or where to look, that would be great! Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | ElevateCreativeAU0 -
Any SEO thoughts about Google's new Data Highlighter for products?
After searching around on the web for a while I couldn't find any case studies or interesting posting about Google's new feature to highlight structured data. In Google Webmaster Tools you can now tag your products to be displayed as structured data in Google's search results. Two questions that rose immediately: 1. What effect will Google's new Data Hightlighter for products have on your SEO? Can we expect better CTR's for productspage results in Google? Better conversion rates perhaps? Any case studies that show KPI improvements after using structured data for products? 2. I would love to see some examples in the search results to see what productpages would look like after Data Highlighting it. Your thoughts or input about this subject will be much appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | SDIM0 -
Does Site Size Influence Rank?
The Scenario:
Algorithm Updates | | kchandler
Currently one of my clients has 7-8 products that they sell on their website. For each product they have two different pages one with the product info and one with a video demo. So the pages began to split their authority as they began receiving new links. Since only one of the two pages for each product rank i suggested that we combine the two and redirect the video page to the product page to increases it's authority and rank. The Clients Response:
After explaining my reasoning and next steps the client mentioned that he thought a site's size was a ranking factor. I had never heard of this before so i told them i would do some research to prove my point, after a little digging around i am now even more confused. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-size-ranking-17044.html http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4591155.htm The Question:
Does a websites size/amount of content indexed in Google actually effect your sites ability to rank? I look forward to everyones feedback, thanks Kyle1 -
Did anyone else notice a DA Drop this week?
I have our site + 4 other competitors' sites in my SEOmoz campaigns and all of the DA's dropped by 1 or 2 points. Has anyone else noticed a drop this week? Two months ago, all of these websites also went down 1 or 2 DA points, then some of them came back up a point the next month. What's going on? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | pbhatt0 -
Bing Traffic drop
Anyone notice a drop in Bing traffic on January 26th? Slashed by 50% and holding for the past three weeks. 100% white hat site
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0