Hit hard on Google last October.
-
Hi all,
I'm just wondering if anyone is able to help me with why my website lost practically all its ranking last October (2012). My website is here: http://bit.ly/nAOfNj
Since early 2010, we have been ranking in the top 3 for our keyword when searched all around the country. Between end September, and end October 2012, we started dropping (from 2nd to 8th, then in December, 13th, January, 18th place... and then March back up to 13th, now ~10th).
The main problem seems to be that Google has changed how websites rank for our keyword (trampoline). In Brisbane, Australia (where we are based), we only rank in the local organic searches. We don't have a separate listing there anymore (with the meta description), even though we had a normal organic listing (and local listing) for the last 2 years! When searching from other states/suburbs further away, we dropped way off the first page. Our product is sold by resellers in 400 stores around Australia, so its not like we're just in Brisbane.
Has anyone experienced Google changing how they return results for a specific keyword like this? Did they do it a lot towards the end of last year?
We have a place page for Brisbane, but for some reason I have little to no control over it (Places/Local+ stuff up means I can't manage the page on Local+, can't add pictures/videos etc). My boss suggested we even try deleting the maps page or our local+ page to get out of there. We don't get anywhere near as much traffic through the local listing than a normal listing... I'm not sure if that's best though?
From what I can tell, the only Google algorithm updates that may have affected us at the time (October 9th) were the page layout updates that penalised(?) sites that have a lot of "ads" above the fold. Our website is designed to have splash banners on the top of every page to either promote our own product, competitions or the athletes we sponsor. Up until last week, the banners were always 500px high on larger screen desktops and 300px high on smaller desktops, laptops, ipad etc. I have recently changed them to all be 300px high to test, but I imagine i'll have to wait a while? Is this the kind of content that Google means by "ads above the fold"?
I've spent the last 4 weeks working on our SEO, from HTML validation, to rich snippets, content optimisation, a lot more internal linking, setting up some location-based content, doing a lot of keyword research, and now starting to work on cleaning up our Blog and creating some real sharable content that we'll share on our Facebook.
I really just wish I knew where the problem was so I could tackle that Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated!!
-
Hi Mario,
Thanks for your reply! Hmm... the thing is we honestly haven't paid for any links at all ever. The listing on linksjuice.com was premium because we put a reciprocal link in an old blog post. Are these types of big directory listings things that Penguin targeted? Because a number of our competitors (who weren't affected last year), are also listed in similar directories. A number of the directories we are in now are only recent additions (a month or so ago, in response to our big drop in traffic 8 months ago).
Did you find our most common anchor text from open site explorer's 'anchor text' listing? The anchor text you mentioned is only used 5 times according to OSE. There's 'trampoline australia vuly trampolines' as img text, did you mean that one? That's just one website who has a badge on each page of their website.
We started a campaign in April for our authorised resellers to have a badge linking back to our website, not for our primary keyword, but to our trading name and company name. We aren't paying or forcing them to put it on or anything, we have some very loyal resellers who love our products, and there are also some that are fake (which is also one of the reasons we started this) and pretend to sell our products but ship other low quality models.
We have a SEO company that also does work for us on link building sometimes as well. Thing is, I never know what they do or what links they build for us. We have left it totally up to them and never done any of our own link building until a few months ago to try and get back up.
So do you think it could still be a bad back-link thing? If someone were to link to our website's homepage, and we want to rank for 'trampoline', should the anchor text always be trampoline? That's something Google has been trying to fix up with Penguin isn't it? Noticing when its all the same anchor text and ignoring some of the links because of it?
If you look at linking root domains, you'll see stuff like stackoverflow, css-tricks etc (these are all from when I've posted and used my website's URL in the website field). Could this have diluted our ranking at all? Google should be smart enough to recognise that?
-
If you're traffic started dropping last October, its most likely that you have a Penguin issue. After looking at some of your links, this is most likely the case. A quick look at your link profile shows that your top anchor text is "vuly trampolines australia", which doesn't seem like a natural way that people would link to you, especially when links show up on pages like this: http://www.linksjuice.com/7/Sports
I would recommend that you compile a list of your inbound links, and work to identify and manually remove any links which you paid to have placed or were part of an exchange. Document what you are doing and then upload a disavow file in webmaster tools and make a reconsideration request. Then focus on building some great content and EARNING real links.
From what I've read, it will take some time for the site to recover, but this is the correct way to address the problem. Good 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
-
HTTPS Google Search Console Verification
Hi we have clients http version of our site verified in our search console but for some reason the https version is not verified, do you usually have to install another HTML tag to do this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Html language deprecated by Google?
Hi Mates, Currently we are using on our site two tags for language (we are targeting english ) .... and these are defined on the head section, my question is it is required by Google in order to rank well or it is deprecated. Thank you Claudio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayRey0 -
Copyright Theft and Google Rankings
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more. Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us. I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape. What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetBit0 -
Google is showing 404 error. What should I do?
Dear Experts, Though few of my website pages are accessible, Google is showing 404 error. What should I do? Even moz reports gives me the same. Problems:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Somanathan
1. Few of my Pages are not yet catched in Google. (Earlier all of them were catched by Google)
2. Tried to fetch the those pages, but Google says, page not found.
3. Included them in sitemap, the result is the same. Please advice: Note: I have recently changed my hosting server.0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Does google penalize for banner ads?
client has banners on site 1 linking to site 2 and vice-versa but these links are auto generated with each blog post ( new post means new ad link) is this a problem? see, its not like he just has one banner on reach site pointing back to the other - his ads automatically appear on each page that a blog post is posted - im sure you know what i mean but im trying to to my best to make sense here everytime another blog post is created for site 1 then another banner is also created linking to site 2 client thinks it may be a big problem - is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ezpro90 -
My own brand name disappeared from google?
Hi, about 20-30 hours ago my own brand name disappeared from google results (We redirected old domain to new one about a month ago) My website is: www.websiteplanet.com If you search for Website Planet in google you will not find our homepage any longer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ouzan
Not only that the brand name disappeared but we also dropped in rankings and lost about %50 of the organic traffic we had. It's important for me to say that we have never done any sort of blackhat or even greyhat SEO, at all. I could probably come up with many ideas of why it happened but maybe one of you mozzers already experienced this and could enlighten me. Will really appreciate any kind of response/help. Thanks.0 -
Ranking Factors for Google
Yesterday a blog post appeared on SEOMOZ titled 'A Tale Of Two Studies' - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies-google-vs-bing-clickthrough-rate It suggested some of the ranking factors Google and Bing take into account when ranking. A few of them I want to talk about: Social Signals, Age of Domain and H1 HTML Tag So I thought age of domain and H1 both had some weight in Google? I guess not! And social signals, now I know it gives some weight but its right up there in the list for both SE's, so should getting likes, tweets, plus1's now be part of my everyday link building? Bing-Google-CTR-Infographic-e1321978731479.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0