Client's site dropped completely from Google - AGAIN! Please help...
-
ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there)
Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help
Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research...
in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs...
He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone.
Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened.
We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site. They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon)
There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway.
SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again.
We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did...
AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again.
So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"...
Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -
-
just to update everyone...
just like last time, we're "mysteriously" back in the rankings one week to the day after submitting a reconsideration request...
we know it wasn't a manual action, so maybe the reconsideration request pings someone that can fix the algorithmic mistake? not sure... but it's definitely interesting that both times, we're "back" one week after sending in the request...
-
Just wanted to add one more thing too. I know what you are saying about the process of cataloguing inventory amongst car dealers. We have a real estate site and just about everyone in town uses the MLS description for a house. Most of those individual realtor sites that do that don't rank well at all for the individual houses because they are completely duplicated along with hundreds of other sites.
For our listings I write a unique description that only goes on our website and we almost always rank #1 for our own listings.
It's a lot of work though, but if you can set it up so that an employee can write some type of unique description and title for each new vehicle in the inventory it'll really really help. So, if someone's searching for a "Ford Taurus in [yourcity]" you could potentially rank really well if you've got individual descriptions.
That's not connected to your current issue, really though...just a thought...that is, if your client was willing to put the staff-hours into doing that.
-
It's still a possibility even if it isn't affecting your other sites. Google may be looking at the percentage of duplicate content on a site. So, it's possible that your other sites have enough non duplicate stuff to outweigh the duplicates. If you combine the fact that your homepage is duplicated several times on the site plus the inventory pages are duplicated on other sites that might be enough to trigger a duplicate content issue.
If you've fixed the issue with the homepage duplication then you may jump back to the rankings you had. We'll see!
You may want to go into webmaster tools and tell Google to take the urls that were throwing dupes out of the index. That can speed up the process if indeed this is the issue.
-
Thanks Marie -
As far as the dupe content issue on your attached search, that was an issue with the way our devs built our site system - instead of serving up 404 pages, any URL that was hit that didn't exist lead back to the home page...
we just corrected that last week and now have proper 404s...
BUT - every site we host has this same issue, so if that was penalty-worthy, we'd have a lot more sites penalized...
same thing with the dupe content on other sites - in the auto industry, every dealer feeds his inventory out to other websites, so you usually have anywhere from 100-300+ other websites with the same images and vehicle descriptions... not ideal, obviously, but that's now it works in the industry... but again, this happens to every dealer, so if that's what caused his penalty, it should have affected other dealers as well... so we're still stumped...
-
There still is a possibility that duplicate content could be an issue here. When I searched, in quotes, the first two sentences of your home page, here's what I got:
I did the same with your second paragraph and got the same results. So, that means that in Google's eyes, you've got 4 pages on your site with identical content and this could definitely have an effect on your ranking.
I do see you on a search for your site name and brand name, but you're right, I can't see you on a search for your keyword (which I'm assuming is in your title).
The first thing I would do is change up the text on those pages and see if it makes a difference.
Also, as mentioned before, your inventory pages are duplicated across other sites as evidenced here. I would probably noindex those pages.
It's worth a try!
-
YEAH BABY!
-
Google is constantly tweaking - I do not have a single website where half of the keyword rankings don't fluctuate back and forth as you have described. Especially so are those keywords that don't exist on the first two pages. One week we're on page 3 and then "POOF" and vice versa.
Donnie gives you the right advice. Take it and run.
-
The site is relatively new. Ideally I would not focus on his current rankings, I would just continue to build good relevant helpful and authoritative links. The linking profile should mostly anchor in using a brand name or a URL. The internal linking structure should be built keeping the Panda updates (no duplicate content/no attempts to manipulate the search engines) in mind. Also, be sure that when you are checking for these rankings you are doing so from a browser in which you have cleared your browsing history and that you are not logged into any google accounts.
Add Google + buttons to your site.
Add a blog and post something unique (helpful to your users) every week targeting different pages on your site.
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
-
Is it a good idea to 301 redirect one same niche site towards another site for seo benefit
Hello friends, I have 2 android niche sites, one site is running on a technology dropped domain i catch 1 year ago it has, almost 400+ domains linking to different parts of the site, the other one i established from scratch and both are running from jan 2015. Now i want to redirect first site which already has 400 links pointing towards it to the home page of my 2nd android site. Is it a good idea to do so and does it give any boost in terms of seo?
Algorithm Updates | | RizwanAkbar0 -
Ecommerce sites 30% drop in organic since the spring
I help manage SEO for a number of large retail websites and we've seen a significant drop in organic traffic (upwards of 30%) since around May 2015. It's likely we were hit my Google's Phantom Quality update, but I don't understand why it had such a big impact. Can anyone explain that Google update in more depth and advise on steps to take to recover from it? Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | JimLynch0 -
Do Explainer Videos Help SEO?
My company makes explainer videos. I often come across a lot of (seemingly) inflated & unprovable stats, pertaining to explainer videos, from other companies. This article claims that "Having an explainer video on your web page makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google search results" Is there any real data to back up such a claim? Do explainer videos really help SEO? How?
Algorithm Updates | | WickVideo0 -
My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br
My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br mented in the key word, how can I find out why at and what to do to get back? He fell after he put the google analytic code on all pages of the site, it may have acid? Meu site caiu da 1º para a 5º Pagna do google br em tadas as palavra chaves, como posso descobrir o motivo e oque fazer para voltar ? Ele caiu depois que coloquei o codigo do google analytic em todas as paginas do site, pode ter cido isso ?
Algorithm Updates | | Guedes0 -
What are the most trusted SEO sites?
Other then SEOmoz what sites can you trust for SEO? Is there some type of formula I can use to find out if any site is trustworthy?
Algorithm Updates | | uofmiamiguy0 -
How to show your ratings in the Google SERP
I've noticed that some organic search results are showing ratings just above the meta tag. How are these sites doing this? Example: If you search "cash advance", there is a result between #4 and #6 in the organic results. The site is "goldcashadvance.com". It's showing a 5-star rating in the result.
Algorithm Updates | | sparagi0 -
Site-wide Footer Link on Client/Friend Website - Dangerous?
Hi Guys, I've got a friend / client / business associate who's website I helped develop. It's a three letter dot-com, so good trust, and an eCommerce site, so lot's of pages. When I launched my new site about 6 weeks ago I put "Official IT Partner of MySite.com" in the footer. No keywords in the anchor text, just the domain URL... There are no other external links like that on the site whatsoever, and I haven't been hit by Penguin. I'm ranking well for local targeted keywords a few weeks after launch, and traffic continues to increase... I am worried that Google will see this is unnatural, but I've received no warning or experienced any decline in rankings. There's about 2800 pages linking from the site to my site, all in the footer of course. Would it be better to remove the link from the footer and add it just to the home page and a couple of other high authority pages, or should I leave it be. It's not "unnatural", I am affiliated with the site and work in partnership with the site, but it does fit that profile. I'm thinking about removing the footer link and adding a small graphic on the home page of the linking site which links to my root domain, with a couple of broad keyword anchored links in a description underneath that also link to relevant pages on my site... What do you think? 2800 links w/ my URL as anchor text from high Domain Authority / Low Page Authority pages (the homepage and a few other pages have decent authority) to my root domain OR Three different links from one High DA/ High PA homepage (one image alt, two anchored w/ broad keywords) to three different pages on my site. Again, there are no other site-wide external links on the domain, and I'm pretty sure I escaped the Penguin. Looking forward to hearing the different points of view. Thanks, Anthony
Algorithm Updates | | Anthony_NorthSEO2 -
Bounce rate help?
I'm trying to get to the bottom of the bounce rates of a few of the keyword results on my site. I think I'm getting traffic to an informative page and visitors are reading it then hopping back to Google to search for the terms I've just given them and I'm getting high bounce rates for this. I'll use an example to make it clear. A Google search for "hp 3050 ink" gets my HP 3050 printer page (A page that lists all the cartridges that will work in a HP 3050 printer) as a pretty good result. So far so good, right? My problem comes when I look in analytics and see that this page has a massive 80% bounce rate. The only reason I can think of is that people are using my site to find out what cartridge a printer will take and then using that information to refine their search. Am I over looking something? Is there anything I can do? Does it even matter? If it does is it really fair that my site is being punished for being a useful resource? Thanks in advance
Algorithm Updates | | Stinkyink0