No longer showing for 'money' phrases but long tail combinations rank high?
-
I hope someone can shed some light on this as I've been pulling my hair out so much there's hardly any left!
Background: 12 year old website that for about 10 years had Top 3 rankings for 100's of phrases but rankings first dropped off August 2011. Panda seemed to be the cause but finding the exact issue is hard. We are an online travel agent and every hotel page has duplicate content copied from other websites. This has not been changed although lots of sections in the site still rank well, so do the hotel pages themselves. Lots of internal duplicate issues have been resolved but with no effect.
Our old style link, link, link all day long with our 2-word main key phrase as anchor text has given us an unnatural backlink profile but no message has been left by G about this in WMT (yet).
Internal link structure is poor with all pages linking back to the homepage with our 'money' 2-word phrase in 3 places.
Penguin wiped two thirds of all our backlinks back in May 2012.
Why then, do we still rank for our 'money' phrase on the homepage when it has some extra words included and becomes long tail?
e.g.
CityName Apartments (money phrase) - Now ranks page 2-3
CityName Apartments to rent for the night - Ranks #2 on Google in all countries
To make things more confusing other pages rank really well for similar money phrase
e.g.
CityName Apartments Offers - Ranks 2nd on 185,000,000 results (not homepage)
It seems only the homepage is effected (where 95% of inbound links point) but if the site wide duplicates or unnatural link profile was flagged it would effect more than one page of the site. Wouldn't it?
-
For whatever it's worth, have a site which was also mauled by Panda & Penquin in April, 2012. Probably lost around 30% to Panda and Penguin knocked it down to around 25% of the pre-mauling traffic. The Penguin mauling is algo based and is probably caused by anchor text in manually written comments on relevant blogs or pages. Without doing anything (as in taking an extended vacation from blogging, linking, etc.) traffic is now at 50% of pre-mauling (probably half of the Penguin effect is gone). Seems to benefit from each Penguin update by 10% - 20% per month. I am curious how this compares to "link removal" efforts.
-
Hi Marcus
Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
It's time to bite the bullet and start re-writing all the content!
Simon -
Hey Simon
It's fairly easy to diagnose a panda issue and start by checking the dates you lost traffic. Lets assume you have a panda issue and that has pulled down lots of the rankings for various pages and sections of the site.
Now, that does not mean, that subsequently, you have not picked up a penguin problem as well and looking at your link profile, it would certainly not be surprising:
- No URLs in the top 5 anchors
- Links from low quality sources (http://zurichhotelsweb.com/links/links13.html)
- Links from topically irrelevant sources
- High percentage of keyword anchors
- low percentage of URL anchors
So, if you can check the date you first lost organic traffic in analytics you can pretty much determine if it is a panda problem.
You can read up on the types of thin content here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-contentThen, you need to identify all the thin content pages and either update them or remove them. If you can't remove them or they have a purpose then you can noindex them and ideally nofollow the links to them from the rest of the site.
Once you have done that, and you need to be thorough, then you should see a bounce back from those issues but I am fairly sure you will have accrued some penguin issues as well so I would also then check the penguin dates for further drops.
I have one client that got hit by Panda on the 19th of April and lost around 25% of organic search volume from Google and then by Penguin on the 24th and lost around another 50% of the remaining volume. We have solved a lot of the penguin problems but are now looking at the panda problems which can be larger in scale to diagnose and resolve.
Fact of the matter is, you have to be fastidious in your approach and remove anything that is duplicated or thin and then go after the Penguin problems.
Good luck and keep us posted!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus
I know this sounds like Penguin but this issue kicked in nearly a year before Penguin was announced which is why I'm thinking Panda.
Thanks for taking a look Simon
-
Hi Simon,
Can you drop a link? A quick look at the backlink profile would really help here as it certainly looks like a penguin problem for the 'money keyword' from the description but without checking, it's hard to tell.
My thinking would be that the longer search keywords are not competitive so you still rank for these terms. That said, if you have internal / external duplicate pages that are not ranking, if you can't or won't change the content, then maybe they could be worth noindexing as a test at least.
Re the links, I have been working with various sites with a bad link profile and subsequently done a bit of research about what constitutes a safe and natural (or super natural) link profile and the basics seem to be:
- 50% of links should be from topically relevant sites
- keep keyword anchors below 50% and ideally around 30%
- aim to have at least two of the top 5 anchors as branded URLs
- aim for around 70% of the link profile as branded url links
- link to a wide variety of documents with a wide variety of terms
- keyword anchors for product pages should be below 45% of total anchors
- keyword anchors to category pages should be below 25% of total anchors
More details here:
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/This is possibly a little conservative but is the approach we are using to repair link profiles and for future link building efforts.
Hope this helps
Marcus
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
-
Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?
Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout. So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of? Any assistance is much appreciated. Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke_Proctor0 -
What to do with PDFs that rank well?
Looking at some reports, I found that a client's site has PDFs that are ranking well for niche terms and getting some traffic. What can I do to get more out of them from a marketing standpoint? The obvious issue is that a PDF doesn't have the interactivity of a site visit, where we have analytics and CTAs. Someone has to follow a link back from the PDF to the site for us to even register a visit, let alone try to get their email or have them otherwise convert. My first guess is to make landing page summaries of the PDF content that link to the PDF, and canonical the PDF to the respective landing page. Has anyone tried this, or done something else that they would recommend again in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JFA0 -
Does location of my VPS and IP adress matter to Google's ranking?
We're busy with adding a German version of our webshop. Right now we're quit successful in The Netherlands with our webshop and SEO. I wonder if Google minds the location of the website (VPS) and IP address concerning SEO for our German webshop. If I Google on this subject I can not find a clear answer. Can somebody help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Makelmail0 -
High Quality Domains and what to do with them
Hi, I rus a travel photography business. The primary function of the website is to sell prints, though I blog about my travels on the same domain name as well as a few pieces of content that are helpful to users interested in some of the places I travel to. I do okay with it, but obviously, I am always looking for a way to increase visibility and sales of prints. I own a couple of high quality keyword domain names, that I've been trying to figure out what to do with. One of which is for a city that my prints of my photography are probably best known for. The domains I'm really trying to decide what to do with are basically a www.citystatephotography.com and www.citystatephotos.com, where the city and state are the ones I'm targeting. The question is, what do I do with it? I've seen various ideas from other photographers that have various levels of success. Here are the options I'm considering: Just redirect it to the photo gallery of photos that I'm trying to rank highly for. From what I read on various blogs, this doesn't really do much of anything, but maybe I've read wrong? Create a website or microsite with some quality content related to the city that also links back to my photography website on various places and possibly once in the navigation. I do have quality content I could put up that would be helpful to people from the city besides just trying to get sales. But there's always a chance this will cannibalize my original domain without helping sales, I assume? Spam my photo galleries across two domains. Most of my photography galleries would stay on my main domain that I already run, but the photo galleries that are key to that city would be hosted on that citystatephotography.com domain name. I've seen a photographer from Colorado do quite well with this method. (www.imagesofrmnp.com and www.morninglight.us) He's heavily known for his images of Rocky Mountain National Park and that seems to be his main brand, but all of his non-RMNP travel photography goes on the other site. The two sites look almost identical, though they link back and forth fairly extensively. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of duplicate content either. I've considered this method, but I'm nervous I'll kill what I've already built up if this were to fail. Do nothing with the domains. Seems wasteful, as these domains, particularly the citystatephotography.com domain seems useful in some way. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg10 -
Value in creating an 'All listings' sitemap?
Hello, I work for the Theater discovery website, theatermania.com. Users can browse current shows on a city-by-city basis, such as New York: http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/shows/ My question is, is there any SEO benefit in us creating a single page that lists all shows (both current and non-current) across the US? My boss mentioned that this could help our long tail results, but I'm not so sure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Dilemma: Should we use pagination or 'Load More' Function
In the interest of pleasing Google with their recent updates and clamping down on duplicate content and giving a higher preference to pages with rich data, we had a tiny dilemma that might help others too. We have a directory like site, very similar to Tripadvisor or Yelp, would it be best to: A) have paginated content with almost 40 pages deep of data < OR > B) display 20 results per page and at the bottom have "Load More" function which would feed more data only once its clicked. The problem we are having now is that deep pages are getting indexed and its doing us no good, most of the juice and page value is on the 1st one, not the inner pages. Wondering what are the schools of thought on this one. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi0 -
Pagination Question: Google's 'rel=prev & rel=next' vs Javascript Re-fresh
We currently have all content on one URL and use # and Javascript refresh to paginate pages, and we are wondering if we transition to the Google's recommended pagination if we will see an improvement in traffic. Has anyone gone though a similar transition? What was the result? Did you see an improvement in traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Deep Page is Ranking for Main Keyword, But I Want the Home Page to Rank
A deep page is ranking for a competitive and essential keyword, I'd like the home page to rank. The main reasons are probably: This specific page is optimized for just that keyword. Contains keyword in URL I've optimized the home page for this keyword as much as possible without sacrificing the integrity of the home page and the other keywords I need to maintain. My main question is: If I use a 301 redirect on this deep page to the home page, am I risking my current ranking, or will my home page replace it on the SERPs? Thanks so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClarityVentures0