Google penalising my site? Ranking now outside top 50
-
Hey there,
Was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/help on my current problems with my Google ranking.
I used to be on page one this time last year (still am on yahoo and bing) but Google has pushed me out of the top 50. Since then I built a new site on wordpress with new content but it hasn't made any real difference.
This is my site address: www.elvisimpersonator4u.co.uk
I also have a separate blog here: www.thisiselvis.tv
The blog did have some duplicate writing on it which I removed a few months back but it still hasn't improved my Google ranking. Would a 301 redirect fix this problem properly?
I've done quite a lot of SEO on several pages on the new site to try and improve it but no luck so far. In fact I hope I haven't over optimised! No tools seem to indicate this though.
I have no messages in webmaster tools so there's no obvious penalty, my web hosts keep saying I just need to buy more link builds and content writing from them but I've already done a lot of this and it's made no discernible difference.
If someone could have a look and give me some advice I would be most grateful!
Thanks,
Jim -
Thanks William, I will send a reconsideration request and sort out the anchor text as you've suggested, this is all very useful and I'm learning all the time.
-
If this happened so dramatically and in April it is very likely a Panda/Penguin problem. You should definitely send a reconsideration request to see if you are in penalty.
If it comes back there is no penalty, it may be that Google devalued a lot of the links that you may have.
Your internal linking has a lot of no anchor text, you should use some anchor text for your internal links and using alt="" for your images to describe what is being shown.
-
The main search term is 'elvis impersonator', but also 'elvis impersonators' and 'elvis tribute'.
I first became aware of a significant change last spring (which is when I believe a big google change occured) hence why I was worried it was a penalty of some kind. I wasn't monitoring the situation closely at the time as there didn't appear to be a problem with where I was.
It seemed to just drop from page 1 to something like page 10 if i recall correctly so definitely not a good sign! That was with the previous site design however, i was hoping for better luck with the word press site.
-
Thank you for the heads up and advice on CSS, I'm not nearly an expert in these areas so will have to look up some guides on how to change that in word press.
Do you happen to know of an easy guide that is available to explain this process?
-
Jim,
What Richard said is 100% accurate, when I view your website with CSS, Javascript, and cookies disabled the majority of the important text on your homepage is lost. Your header is an image, "Special package deals" section is an image, your endorsements are in an image, your list that starts with "don't be cruel" is an image. None of the information on these images is crawl-able, and the alt text just has your name and the sections label.
I would recommend using CSS to place live text over the images so the pertinent information is crawl-able.
-
It would be best to let us know what search term you are referring to. Also would help if you know exactly when this dropped, was it sudden or gradually?
-
Hey Richard,
Thanks for your response, the text is highlight-able as I've tried copying and pasting it into word and can do so and edit the text, should I be formatting it differently though? Is google not reading the main paragraphs regardless?
I have a couple of images this is true with text on the main page but that's not a major portion of the writing.
Cheers,
Jim -
I can't see any reason why you would have a link penalty so it must be something else.
You do have one immediately obvious issue on your site. 95% of the text is an image so it cannot be read by Google. You have to fix this!
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
-
WMT "Index Status" vs Google search site:mydomain.com
Hi - I'm working for a client with a manual penalty. In their WMT account they have 2 pages indexed.If I search for "site:myclientsdomain.com" I get 175 results which is about right. I'm not sure what to make of the 2 indexed pages - any thoughts would be very appreciated. google-1.png google-2.png
Technical SEO | | JohnBolyard0 -
Lost ranking for top keyword
For the last 3 months we've been working on www.UneekJewelry.com to get it rank for "unique engagement rings" and got it to position 14 but since September 18th, 2012 that all changed. The website no longer ranks for our money keyword not even in the top 500. We haven't been building exact match keywords but using more phrase match and I can't tell if its because we don't have enough exact match or something else. We have been working on trying to figure out what the issue is as they still rank for other keywords like "unique engagement rings in los angeles", therefore we don't know if this is a keyword penalty or glitch in Google, can anyone give us any insight on what could cause such a drop in those specific keywords for our site. Most of the link building we have done for this client is from in content blogs. The only blog we were suspicious of we removed the article from that blog two days ago. The ranking have not come back. This was the last blog that the exact match keyword was used where we removed the article from: http://colorfuljewelry.blogspot.com/ Thanks,
Technical SEO | | harrykabadaian0 -
SIte cloned my entire website and is now outranking me
My site is http://www.medic8.com and http://www.mealldubh.org has cloned my site and is now outranking my site. I have submitted DMCA requests to Google with no response. I do not know what to do now but surely it should be obvoius that this site has cloned me and there must be a way to have this scraper removed from the index? Im lost in terms of what I can do next so any help would be greatly appreacited.
Technical SEO | | thefresh0 -
What do we do now?
OK where do we start? Lets go back to June 2011So in June 2011 we left an SEO company that was looking after our account, after a year of being with them and not moving 1 place in the SERPS we decided to cut ties with them and move to a new SEO company... Over the first 6 months things seemed to be going well, for our main keyword "car warranty" we started to climb up the rankings from #6 - #4 - #2, we also moved up for other keywords. One thing that I did notice when we were with the new SEO Company not much on-site optimisation was completed.Move forward to January 2012So over the Christmas period the usual happened, our rankings stayed the same put traffic dropped which is obviously normal for this specific time of year... But on the 7th of Jan 2012 our rankings dropped from #2 - #10, we contacted the SEO company in question and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.3 Weeks later we were still in the exactly the same position, the good thing was because we run a very good Adwords campaign the traffic to our site didn't drop.The SEO company then came back and said it looks like we have been placed in a 60day filter by Google and once the 60day filter had been reached we should pop back up - 65days came and went and we were still in the exact same position. After us waiting around for months to see if the rankings improved we decided to leave the SEO company and move all our SEO work back in-house.Move forward to February 2012Once we had full control over the account again we made some changes to the on-site optimisation of the site, we improved page titles, descriptions, tags and also our content was re-written - we then waited for Google to pickup the changes and re-index our site. YesterdaySo yesterday we checked our rankings - some of our longer tail keywords had improved but our main big traffic keywords had dropped even further - we had gone from #10 to #16, with the update to the algorithm yesterday targeting spammy websites we feared that we had been hit by the new update. We then cleaned up some links that looked spammy and asked for a reconsideration request. Now looking deeper into our backlinks we still have some spammy non-relevant links as well as a few big sitewide links - 1 sitewide link provides 732,667 links to our homepage and our total links indexed by Google is only 759,144.What do you think we should do...Wait for Google to come back to us after the reconsideration request?Remove more and backlinks?Build more high value links?If anyone can provide me with more information it would be great.Thanks,
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
Scott0 -
Site description on Google has changed to a very outdated description
When I googled my top keyword today, my site on google showed a description of my site from YEARS ago. It is completely irrevelant and misleading to visitors. Why would this have happened and is there anything I can do about it? Thanks!!! Betsy
Technical SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
Technical SEO | | JeanieWalker0 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0 -
Moving Site with #1 Ranking to New Domain
I want to move a site of mine that ranks #1 for many keywords to a new domain name. I have already redirected many smaller less important sites to the new domain, but have held off on my most popular site. If I redirect the entire site with a 301 redirect, what can I expect with my number one ranking, particular for coveted search terms..thanks for the input.
Technical SEO | | insync0