Seo advice / plan ? penalized ?
-
I built an ecommerce site for a client of mine just over 9 months ago now. To begin with the serps were great, everything was listed in the results but for some reason a few weeks in all the results vanished from google and now we're lucky to find anything. I've been as far as page 200 and havent found any results. Its been like this for a solid 8 months so i can only presume that the site has been penalised in some form. Searching for unique phrases from the site doesnt even return results.
The website in question is = http://goo.gl/A6Gz2
keywords we're aiming for = coloured contact lenses, fashion contact lenses
Target = Google UKNow im not really an seo guy but regardless of this my client has hired me to see whats going on and correct it. I've been scratching my head thinking all sorts of things but none of which im certain about so i'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction before i do anything drastic.
So to begin with here are some of my suspicions which i personally think are affecting ranking and possible penalisation.
#1 - Too many links on the page
#2 - Possibly over optimised
#3 - Lack of content on the product and category pages
#4 - Lack of backlinks and links in general coming from other sitesMy main concern is the lack of links from other sites and the odd link coming from low quality sites. I've also just found out that my client has been using an automatic link submitter which i've always thought of as a big no no. Some of the sites these links have been submitted to have nothing to do with the keyword we are targetting and are sort of spammy sites containing all sorts of links. Im wondering if these poor quality links could have caused the site to be penalised, google may be seeing it as a spammy site due to this.
Whats your opinions on the above, are my suspicions correct and can this be recovered ?
My planned course of action is to be as follows:
#1 - Re write the content currently on the site so that it is better written and include more keywords, especially long tails since i think these will help bring the serps up.
#2 - Write detailed category and product descriptions as well as making sure every page has some well written content with links and keywords.
#3 - Keep the above pages to one main subject / keyword so that google doesnt get confused.
#4 - Get some links on popular and relevant sites, the only problem here is the lack of fashion contact lens sites. Does anyone have any advice on how to find these or where i should be getting links placed. Are directories worth while ?
#5 - Get more involved in the social side ie facebook, twitterI will be building on the above over time, aswell as running google ads moderately for our chosen keywords.
Is there anything i have missed, anything i shouldnt be doing. Please advise.
Thanks.
-
Cool
I hope it keeps heading in that direction then... and now you know all about link juice too
-
Thanks again,
The search results have vastly improved since reducing the number of links, the majority of phrases on the site now show up in the search results so this is a major improvement.
I do agree with you on the page quality as there isnt exactly alot of content on there and as you have suggested the amount of links way out numbers those not linked. With this in mind im going to have some quality content wrote up, a couple small paragraphs for the homepage as we dont want to over do it. I'm sure the other pages would benefit from this also so i'll have something wrote up there too.
The crawl error tool did find a few issues but nothing serious, its warning about the too many on page links and the odd long url and title.
-
I would certainly think it will help what you've done already but looking at the site again, I'm swayed to suggest that some of the links come out of the body as well... I can't say for sure that I'm correct but intuitively I just have a sense that Google wouldn't be too keen. It's almost like there's more linked content in there than there is non-linked content. So to an extent, it's not even about the link juice in this case but Google's view on page quality. Hopefully somebody else will chime in here as I'm far from sure.
Aside from that, I'd still look at other possible factors too.
Have you used the crawl error report tool on here? If not, certainly check that out: Crawl Tool
-
Thanks Steve.
So what your saying is that the fewer links on page x the more equity or juice is passed onto page z etc. I can see the point in this now, more so after watching the video explaining the water.
So what i've now done is reduce the category dropdowns to just 2 levels, overall this has reduced the number of links by around 100 so compared to the 238 before theres now around 138 links on the page. Would you say this is a more reasonable figure or should i aim at reducing more links ?
-
Google can do better than 100 links per page now, but it's not about the crawling that I'm referring to, it's the spread of equity.
Your homepage has x amount of equity, which it passes through to other pages via links. Due to the sheer number of pages linked to, that x amount is only able to pass y amount to page a, where-as if there were less links then page a would get z amount of equity.
Look at this:
Disregard the stuff on that page about NoFollow helping to retain linkjuice though, that turned out not to work that way and you still lose that link juice anyway even if it is nofollow.
-
Im having second thoughts on reducing the links, is it really such a big factor ?
At the moment we have approx 238 links on the site, more a less all of which are coming from the category dropdowns. Now from my understanding the number of links doesnt affecting ranking directly but google can only index around 100 links per page so they may be missing the other 138 links.
However, with the above in mind how does google index a page, is it from top to bottom ? If this is the case it really shouldnt be too much of a problem as the category dropdowns are absolute positioned so there right at the bottom and google should be getting to those last.
I could easily reduce the dropdown categories to show only 2 levels but i personally feel the dropdowns add to an overall better user experience. Also, just looking at the competition that is ranking on page 1 the majority have a similar number of links, that is around 200.
Also, as another sub question what would be the best strategy for writing good content for the homepage. Baring in mind that the sites main focus is to sell fashion contact lenses but with the odd other bits in there too. Should i keep the homepage stricty to contact lenses or is it worth mentioning and linking to the other products. How indepth should i be about these other products ?
Any advice anyone can give would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
-
I think you're right about too many on-page links, I'd address that first for sure... spreading that link juice way too thinly
And yeah it's a little shy on links & link diversity, etc... and of what it has got, there's no deeplinks.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Looking for an SEO Mentor
I do in-house marketing for a medium sized luxury architectural design firm. I have a good understanding of the moz platform and general SEO but would like to findsomeone to provide regular guidance and answer some specific questions regarding our SEO. Specifically, we want advising on keywords, blog content, and link building. Ideally we'd like to engage a consultant (remotely) on an hourly basis. We'v have had very poor experiences with big SEO firms so that’s definitely not something we’re looking for. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorkshopAPD
Caio0 -
Advice for structuring hotel website
Hey guys, I am currently setting up a hotel booking website and I'm not so sure how to structure it. I have landing pages for: 1. Cities
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baresound
2. Sights
3. States The main keywords are mainly "Hotels in Cityname" or "Hotels near Sightname". What would be the best SEO friendly way of structuring the url? https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cities/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sights/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/states/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels/cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels/statename or https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-cityname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-sightname
https://hotels-example.com/hotels-in-statename Or are there better ways of structuring it or am I just overthinking it? I would greatly appreciate any advice and suggestions 🙂 Best, Max0 -
Few question about SEO
HI guys, I have few questions and I always find good answer here. I tried many SEO companies some very expensive and well known some with medium prices and some from India. I’m not an SEO expert but I always get the same things from SEO companies. They're saying you have to stay with us for few months before you’ll see any results. I completely understand however I don’t see the result on the end.1. What exactly Do I need SEO company for, after I do on page optimisation if they don’t work on proper backlinks. Just letting you know I’m getting content from other people.2. Is there something else which is really important after your page is optimised than backlinks? Or we should fully focus on get backlinks from customers, guest post, sharing on social media etc. to increase our DA and PA?3. Any advice about some individual or company who is good in backlink services?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukas-ST
Thank youLukasThanks a lot.Lukas0 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making : ![Red ford truck](2554.jpg) changed to ![Red ford truck](6842.jpg)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
SEO advice with having a blog on sub domain.
Righto, so: I've been working on our company website www.nursesfornurses.com.au which is built on .asp which is a real pain because the site is built so messy and on a very dated CMS which means I have to go back to the dev every time I want to make a change. We've made the decision to move the site over to Wordpress in stages. So, (and I hope logically), i've started by making them a proper blog with better architecture to start targeting industry related keywords. I had to put it on a sub domain as the current hosting does not support Wordpress http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9868john
The previous blog is here: http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blog Its not live yet, so I'm just looking for SEO advice or issues I might encounter by having the blog on a sub domain. In terms of user experience, I realise that there needs a clearer link back to the main website, I'm just trying to work out the best way to do it... Any advice / criticism is greatly welcomed. Thanks0 -
Https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/ setting tag pages as blog corner stone article?
We do not have enough content rich page to target all of our keywords. Because of that My SEO guy wants to set some corner stone blog articles in order to rank them for certain key words on Google. He is asking me to use the following rule in our article writing(We have blog on our website):
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian
For example in our articles when we use keyword "wolf", link them to the blog page:
https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/wolf/
It seems like a good idea because in the tag page there are lots of material with the Keyword "wolf" . But the problem is when I search for keyword "wolf" for example on the Google, some other blog pages are ranked higher than this tag page. But he tells me in long run it is a better strategy. Any idea on this?0 -
How to know if your site has been penalized by Google
Hello, One of my clients ranking drop dramatically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ogdcorp
We believe it was due to an upgrade to his site. While the site was live www.clientdomain.com
Work was being done on the new site www.clientdomain.com/new (1 month) I think google crawled the /new link and took as a content duplication since both sites had the same content. Is there a MOZ tool to see if a site has been penalized or any online tool? Thanks0 -
How to be a good SEO optimizer while competing with a good ranked Bad SEO optimizer?
My keywords are very competitive. My on page optimization report gives A grade for all the keywords I want to target to my Root domain. But my root domain does not show up on search engines for those same keywords. So thanks to SEOmoz i have managed to understand the place I lack is good link building. My competitors have done lot of link building through spamming, commenting on blogs, directories etc. Now according to good seo, this is not right. What do i do? I get digging more in it, i realized that i am getting traffic mostly for less globally searched keywords. But my competitors get high traffic from well searched keywords. How do i cope with such competition? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0