Steady decline since Panda 4.0 but struggling to identify cause (and solution!).
-
Hello
I work as an in-house SEO (previously worked for an agency) for the website naturalworldsafaris.com. After a strong start to the year we were seeing really good growth but since Panda 4.0 was released we have been steadily declining.
Our site has, I believe, good, unique content and is largely free of technical issues. I'm struggling to identify what exactly is the issue for the drop. We've had several key terms drop from the top half of page 1 to page 2 of the SERPS, such as the term "Borneo Holiday" (on a Google UK search). I don't believe we have any duplicate content issues.
We've had a few external SEO specialists take a look and none have come up with anything new. Site speed has been flagged as a concern but when compared to our competitors in the SERPS we are consistently one of the faster sites so while we are looking to improve this, I don't feel it can be the only issue.
Any suggestions as to what else we should be investigating next would be much appreciated.
-
You've taken good steps so far and kudos for continuing to put time and effort into the cause. Great collective feedback. Additionally, have you run a keyword density tool on the home page? Your other top level pages are good candidates as well. Check All Text and Headlines. Other SEO's can chime in but rule of thumb has been no higher than 4% keyword density on a page. A high density in Headlines could indicate an issue as Headlines has historically been a key component in Google's algorithm. I haven't studied at this granular level but others may have. All the best.
-
Thanks Pixel by Pixel. We don't operate on a local basis which is why we've not done anything with Google local before.
I'll look into the images, thanks for picking up on that; I think a lot of it is to do with how the site was built, it uses a lot of images for all the styling. While the site is large it holds a lot of good, unique content and on the surface I think we do meet all the requirements that Google recommends for content depth and quality.
Will keep looking through to see if there is another issue we can spot though!
-
Hi Kate,
Unfortunately it's always a guessing game but couple of things i did notice - you've got a Google plus page set up but you seem to have forgotten about Google local (because it's always fun to confuse people by naming all your products Google "something") - https://plus.google.com/113270767742987744992/about it can be helpful to make sure that it is up to date as it can assist any local searches.
You've got a rather large site which is fine just make sure its all optimized so every page is helpful, authoritative etc.
Another oddity is on my quick look you've got a very large volume of images (nearly 90% of your links) which is fine but they all have very similar names (and a lack of lat tags).
Although somewhat controversial don't forget to get people to review you! e.g your Google local is without reviews which can help identify your site as a great place people are using and a reason why you should move up in the SERP.
Hopefully there is some 'Leads' for you to look into from my very brief look (I also noticed you're in Brighton High five)
Just a quick disclaimer all the above is not a garuntee and it's only observations i made I'm sure some of the Moz "recommended" list can come with a very good action place to help your site if you wanted a bit better advice etc.
The last bit of advise is remember Google wants to give the best answer to a search so make your site that, with information that's going to help and then back that up with e.g shares/ reviews etc. show people found it helpful if possible.
Best of luck!
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
-
Need Help - Lost 75% Of Traffic Since May 2018
Sorry to go in-depth here, but want to give all available information. We went live late April 2018 with our two websites in Shopify (moved from Magento, same admin, different storeviews...which we find later to cause some issues). Both of these websites sell close to the same products (we purchased a competitor about 5 years ago, which is why we have two). The nice thing is that they do almost identical amounts in sales. They have done very well for years, especially in the last two years. Well, the core algo update around May 22nd-24th 2018 happened and wiped out about 65% of our Google traffic for one website (MySupplementStore.com). And this latest update, wiped out another 20%. I couldn't figure out why this would have happened, because we were very cautious about keeping things separate, unique descriptions etc. So I did some digging and this is what I found: The reviews we migrated over from Magento somehow were combined and added to both websites. This is something I didn't notice. I had this resolved a month ago so that each site's reviews are now only on that website. Our blog section was duplicated across both websites during the migration. Again, something I didn't notice, as we have close to over 1,000 blog posts per site. This was resolved two weeks ago. As I was looking more, I found that the last 6 months, a person working for us (for 3 years), started writing descriptions and pasting them on both websites, instead of making them unique to each website. I trusted her for years, but I think she just got lazy. She quit about a month before the migration as well. We are currently working on this, but its been taking awhile because we have over 5,000 products on each site and have no idea which ones are duplicates. I did also notice: Site very slow when checking site speed tools. Working on that this week. When I take snippets of text or do searches, many times it shows up in omitted results. No messages in Google Webmaster Tools So the question is... Do you think it is the duplicate content issues that caused the drop? Our other site is Best Price Nutrition, which didn't see a big drop at all during that update. If not, any other ideas why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
PLEASE HELP - Old query string URL causing problems
For a long time, we were ranking 1st/2nd for the term "Manual handling training". That was until about 5 days ago when I realised that Google had started to index not only a query stringed URL, but also an old version of the URL. What was even weirder was that when you clicked on the result it 301 redirected to the page that it was meant to display... The wrong URL that Google had started to index was: www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling?channel=retail The correct URL that it should have been indexing is: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling-training I can't get my head around why it has done this as a 301 was in place already and we use rel canonical tags which point to the main parent pages. Anyway, we slapped a noindex tag in our robots.txt file to stop that page from being indexed, which worked but now I can't get the correct page to be indexed, even after a Google fetch. After inspecting the correct URL in the new search console I discovered that Google has ignored the rel canonical on the page (Which points to itself) and has selected the wrong, query stringed URL as the canonical. Why? and how do I rectify this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iHasco1 -
Decline in organic but all other sources up--should i be worried?
We migrated to a new CMS in Feb (put in redirects as needed). Since the migration, organic traffic is down 11% YOY, but direct is up 22%, FB referrals up 1,000% and PPC up 500%. Page views are up 35%. Should I be worried about the decline in organic traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BGR0 -
Why do people put xml sitemaps in subfolders? Why not just the root? What's the best solution?
Just read this: "The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/." here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location Yet surely it's better to put the sitemaps at the root so you have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
(a) http://example.com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-spongecakes.xml
and so on... OR this kind of approach -
(b) http://example/com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap/chocolatecakes.xml and
http://example.com/sitemap/spongecakes.xml I would tend towards (a) rather than (b) - which is the best option? Also, can I keep the structure the same for sitemaps that are subcategories of other sitemaps - for example - for a subcategory of http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml I might create http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes-cherryicing.xml - or should I add a sub folder to turn it into http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes/cherryicing.xml Look forward to reading your comments - Luke0 -
E-Commerce Panda Question
I'm torn. Many of our 'niche' ecommerce products rank well, however I'm concerned that duplicate content is negatively effecting our overall rankings via Panda Algo. Here is an example that can be found through quite a few products on the site. This sub-category page (http://www.ledsupply.com/buckblock-constant-current-led-drivers) in our 'led drivers' --> 'luxdrive drivers' section has three products that are virtually identical with much of the same content on each page, except for their 'output current' - sort of like a shirt selling in different size attributes: S, M, L and XL. I could realistically condense 44 product pages (similar to example above) down to 13 within this sub-category section alone (http://www.ledsupply.com/luxdrive-constant-current-led-drivers). Again, we sell many of these products and rank ok for them, but given the outline for how Panda works I believe this structure could be compromising our overall Panda 'quality score', consequently keeping our traffic from increasing. Has anyone had similar issues and found that its worth the risk to condense product pages by adding attributes? If so, do I make the new pages and just 301 all the old URLs or is there a better way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | saultienut0 -
Google WMT Turning 1 Link into 4,000+ Links
We operate 2 ecommerce sites. The About Us page of our main site links to the homepage of our second site. It's been this way since the second site launched about 5 years ago. The sites sell completely different products and aren't related besides both being owned by us. In Webmaster Tools for site 2, it's picking up ~4,100 links coming to the home page from site 1. But we only link to the home page 1 time in the entire site and that's from the About Us page. I've used Screaming Frog, IT has looked at source, JavaScript, etc., and we're stumped. It doesn't look like WMT has a function to show you on what pages of a domain it finds the links and we're not seeing anything by checking the site itself. Does anyone have experience with a situation like this? Anyone know an easy way to find exactly where Google sees these links coming from?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Are widgets dangerous after the Panda update?
My site provides widgets (online polls) which were developed so that each one would embed a do follow text link into the customers website. With Panda's unnatural link algorithm now in place should I modify these links to be nofollow and give up on this strategy or alternatively just set the text as my sites domain name? The only other option I could think of was to only embed links where the customers site had a certain page rank or above? Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish1 -
What's the best .NET blog solution?
I asked our developers to implement a WordPress blog on our site and they feel that the technology stack that is required to support WP will interfere with a number of different .NET production applications on that server. I can't justify another server just because of a blog either. They want me to find a .NET blog solution. The only thing that looks decent out there is dotnetblogengine.net. Has anyone had any experience with this tool or any others like it? Thanks, Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles1