Have we been penalised by Google?
-
Hello guys,
Looking for some help here hope someone will be able to point us to the right direction, we have been scratching our heads for months!
Basically our Google rankings and organic traffic from Google have dropped signficantly in the last 12 months. At one point we ranked as high as page 3 with the term "holiday lettings". Now we are on page 16, and sometimes not found at all... This has been the case for months now. Curiously, Bing and Yahoo have been much more generous to us, we have been and still consistently rank at No. 2 with the same term.
We are in the vacation rental industry - our website is www.alphaholidaylettings.com and most of the sites that rank above us are of much less relevancy, quality and authority. We just could not understand why we would rank so poorly on Google (both US and UK). Organic traffic has also dropped by more than 50% steadily in the last 12 months.
One thing we thought might have affected our site is the quality of content. Most content/listings on our site are user generated, and it is not uncommon for users to copy and paste details from an existing listing that they have on another site. Having said that, the same would apply to our competitors too. In this case, might Panda or Penguin have had any negative effects on our seo? We have been adding unique content to the site in the form of a blog and "Holiday Feature" articles.
Could the actual design/structure/coding of our pages contribute to our poor rankings too?
Any opinions or feedback is much appreciated!
Thanks guys,
Tom
-
Got you, thanks again Yiannis!
-
Hello Tom,
It is an advanced segment you can use in Google analytics which scans all the Ws keywords that brough traffic to your web site such as "how", "why", "what" etc....that way you can see questions people ask on the internet and capitalise in content opportunities. You can then check which one of these posts converted (for example more than 3 visits and goal conversions from Google analytic) and again write further content.
To start with create advanced segments of the 5Ws, select january-Today 2013 in google analytics, go to organic traffic and keywords and apply the segment. There you go
I can not attach a picture here but your segment should be:
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp Who
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp Why
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp What
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp How
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp When
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp Where
Include Keyword MatchinRegExp Can(I know more than 5 but I like including how and can too :-))
-
Thanks a lot Yiannis, your reply is certainly very helpful and much appreciated. It gives us faith to continue with writing content. Just one quick question, when you mentioned "5 Ws keywords", what do you mean by that?
Cheers,
Tom
-
Yes tom thats correct.
The idea of a press release is that you use it to reach your audience and not for link building. The fact that someone found that press release and decided to post/link it to his blog is totally ethical and you pretty much earned that link due to the "quality content" strategy you decided to implement.
In regards to your original query I jsut did a quick back link profile check on your web site and the term you mention is at 8% of your total link building profile. I checked the domains and they are mainly article directories and link submission web sites. While I understand this is a necessary evil I highly doubt you will rank for such a high profitable and competitive keywords "holiday lettings" by jsut doing that, you will need high authority web sites to link to your content. If you ask me my advise would be to carry on writing quality content, use contexual keywords along with your targeted keyword and things will pick up naturally. For example you must have data from your clients as to how your special works on particular seasons or top countries brining traffic, or high referal sites..You could maybe do a white paper based on this report. use google analytics not for keywords but to drug out intelligence data. 5 Ws keywords that generated good traffic or page depth visits is one example. See which content works best and capitilise on that
Hope I helped a bit!
-
Hi Yiannis,
Thanks for your reply. As far as I know, the links in our press releases are nofollow. I was told that by releasing quality content press releases via sites such as PR Web, it would have a positive impact on our seo. But if the links are nofollow, is it a practice worth pursueing?
I have also noticed that when the releases were picked up by other online outlets, the links have in some cases become "follow". I guess this is a good thing?
Tom
-
please make sure that the links in your press releases are Nofollow as google recently stated that the links on all PR sites should NOT pass any link juice. Check with your agency!
-
Hello,
Thank you for your reply. We are not flagged in Webmaster Tools as having any manual actions placed against the site, really lost as to what is causing the issues.
We are not currently doing any link-building, but have started doing some press release marketing. Not sure how much this would help I guess it will tell in time.
-
Hi,
I'd go into Webmaster tools for the affected site & see if you have any alerts in there. Also I think the quality of the customer content may be as you suspect an issue.
But your still listed so Is suspect you have not been google whacked just merely pushed down by better contnet. You may think about sourcing a cintnet strategist & give up on waiste of time activities like link building ( Not to assume you do this)
Dont worry with a bit of top contnet in there you climb back up!
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
-
Google Analytics Tutorials
Hi, I'm trying to beef up my knowledge of google analytics. Can you pelase tell me where I can find some good Google analytics tutorials?
Reporting & Analytics | | corn20150 -
Traffic Drop Observations: Google UI, Mobilegeddon
Our traffic has dropped 25% in the last 3 weeks while maintaining our keyword rankings. At first, we thought it was due to the simultaneous change in Google UI where they removed the separators between ads and organic results. However, now, we have also noticed that our user devices have gone from ~ 50% desktop/50% mobile to 20% desktop/80% mobile. Just food for thought ...
Reporting & Analytics | | Humanovation0 -
Behavior Flow vs. All Pages report in Google Analytics
In the interest of determining why our ecommerce site isn't converting, I've been spending some quality time with GA. I've suspected that our front page is part of the problem, especially where our organic traffic is concerned (we get a good deal of referral traffic from a link on an OEM's site). According to the Behavior Flow report under the Behavior section of GA, organic traffic to our home page is hemorrhaging (roughly 60% bounce rate). But when I went to the All Pages report (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages) and looked at organic traffic to our home page, then looked at the Medium as a secondary dimension, I'm getting a bounce rate of 35%. Why the massive discrepancy? Can somebody assist?
Reporting & Analytics | | ufmedia0 -
Google Analytics subdomain ecommerce tracking flatlines :-(
Buongiorno from 19 degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 This website http://www.philpotts.co.uk/ contains a shop sub domian @ http://shop.philpotts.co.uk/. I configured the site Ga analytics code to include the subdomain (see below code). I had to do this as i was getting refferal data from the actuall subdomain. But after following the instructions on p117 of cutroni's ga book things have gone wrong, mainly now eCommerce data has dissapeared 😞 So my question is please: "Why has installing the GA code above caused eCommerce tracking to suddenly go dead?" Grazie tanto,
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
David0 -
Using Regex for Goals in Google Analytics
I’ve got a website with 20 different forms; and I’d like to track all 20 form completions with one Goal in Google Analytics. The completion-page URLs follow the pattern below (the website uses Drupal CMS) Form One: www.acme.com/node/2990/done?sid=651 Form Two: www.acme.com /node/2991/done?sid=785 Form Three: www.acme.com /node/2992/done?sid=1021 Form Four: www.acme.com /node/2993/done?sid=459 I believe that there is a way I can use regex so Google Analytics will track if any of these completion URLs appears. Looking for guidance how to format the regex statement.
Reporting & Analytics | | TopFloor0 -
Google Analytics Organic Keyword (Not Provided) Alternative Hacks?
I'm sure everyone is sick of the (Not Provided) keywords because I know I am, and Google reckons that you should only see 10% or less (I'm currently around 13% and growing). I am seeking alternatives or hacks that will help display the keywords? If you have a hack to actually display the keywords, please share it your ideas and thoughts? I recently implemented a hack that will show the landing page of the keywords which is better than nothing. But as an eCommerce site, I have about 10% of my transactions which not provided, knowing the keywords would really help. Would love to hear your thoughts?
Reporting & Analytics | | upick-1623911 -
Where are google analytics stats for iphone4
hi We were looking at the Google Analytics for one of our sites and noticed that there were NO pageviews from device=iphone and resolution=640x960 in the report. Given that iphone4 is supposed to be 640x960, and would be the most popular device (at least in our offices and everyone I know), it seems wierd. I sorted the Mobile Devices report by device and resolution to see what was available. The first 160 results were all device=not set. Finally got to device=iPhone and there were three entries: resolution 0x0 had 11 views resolution 320x396 had 45 views resolution 320x480 had 3,944 views. Hopefully all iphone4 users havent been classified as not set. Or is it possible that iphone4s claim to be 320x480 in browsers, as per http://www.alistapart.com/articles/a-pixel-identity-crisis/ Even worse, if I look at the Samsung Galaxy S II (myown phone), there are over 30 screen resolution combinations. Does anyone have anything to shed on this? I asked about it on the google analytics twitter account last week but havent had a response. Are there other analytics solutions that would distinguish between the iphones? Warning - this is a link to a large image, with the not set stats at the top. 6Sjji
Reporting & Analytics | | ozgeekmum0 -
How Can I Record .zip Traffic in Google Analytics
The company I am with shows traffic coming in to .zip files in Google Analytics. The traffic being recorded stopped a while back, but I know people are still downloading/visiting these .zip ULRs. I'm not sure how they were recording/tracking the .zip URLs (in Analytics) before, but I'd like to track them once again. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | poolguy0