Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it my back link profile that is affecting my rankings ?
-
my website www.funktiongolf.co.uk had been ranking well until January and i'm nearly sure its due to low quality links and poor back-link profile i.e over-optimized money keywords
can someone guide me?
thanks for anyone that replies. I really do appreciate the
help. -
What I'm seeing is the overwhelming primacy of relevance. I've seen sites with links from a mere 10-12 websites get top 4/5 positions (beating sites with 50 times as many links) -- because those few links are deemed highly relevant.
A key metric appears (from what I've seen) the referring sites/pages having part or all of the referring keyword (or a variation of it) in their url.
-
Your rankings may have dropped because of the Panda update in January.
Did you start to lose traffic around the 17th January?
The Panda update is based on page content so your backlinks may not be the problem.
-
I think you're right - your link profile is definitely not up to where you'd like to see it.
The thing is, you own control of almost all your links. They are directory submissions, minisites, etc. You aren't getting a lot of natural links, social linking or anyone talking about you. You need to generate that "word of mouse" that will get links to you that are out of your control.
-
Do you have Google Webmaster Tools installed? Generally you will receive a warning from Google before your site is penalized, unless you are talking about just specific keywords. If you can pinpoint the exact dates of the drops, you should be able to see if they coincide with Penguin updates or not.
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
-
Massive unexplained organic traffic drop; disappeared from Google
Hi there,
Search Behavior | Apr 15, 2024, 3:28 PM | katelynroberts
Our site has experienced a huge organic traffic drop, specifically from Google. The drop occurred on Feb 19 and I've got no clue why it happened. We have not made any significant changes to the website and it doesn't look like there was an algorithm update last week. We don't have any Google penalties or indexing issues noted, and the drop isn't specific to any particular segment/region/keyword. What am I missing? Any advice or insight is super duper appreciated. Our site is a Wordpress/WooCommerice e-commerce site with a blog and long-standing #1 ranks for keywords related to our main product offering. Screen Shot 2024-02-26 at 3.12.25 PM.png
Screen Shot 2024-02-26 at 3.07.52 PM.png0 -
Strange Traffic Movements
Hi there, I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on this... I'm working with a client whose website is experiencing some odd organic traffic patterns. See screenshot attached. As you can see, there was a sudden cliff fall about a month ago, and then it recovered (almost) entirely. Then, a month to the day later, the same thing happened again. What is the likelihood that this is a data glitch vs an algorithm thing? Any light you can shed on this would be appreciated. Thanks,
Search Behavior | Oct 17, 2023, 7:44 AM | mhenshall
Marc
Screenshot 2023-08-18 at 09.37.26.png image url)0 -
Where are these "phantom visitors" and are they dangerous?
My Google Analytics always shows visitors on my site that do not show up with a location. They are always shown as being referred from "ads.google.com". Our service is exclusively domestic in the U.S., yet my user location map will show 1 domestic visitor, but 19 total visitors. PLease see attached linked image. Is there some sort of malware that is being exploited on my pages somewhere that these people are accessing? Is there some way of blocking them from my site? Should I? Aren't they skewing my Google Analytics results? Are they potentially dangerous? Thanks in advance for all replies. mKEjs2H.jpg
Search Behavior | Apr 1, 2019, 5:17 AM | TTR10 -
My e-commerce competes with my own wholesalers
Hi guys, I run a wholesale program, frequently my e-commerce competes with my own wholesalers on many websites like Etsy for example. Usually, the wholesaler displays the exact same picture of my website. May Google find that I have duplicate content? Is there any alternative solution for this instead of asking the wholesaler to make their own pictures? Thanks
Search Behavior | Apr 25, 2017, 6:18 AM | Tiedemann_Anselm1 -
Blocking links from being crawled
For my blog, should I block category, "read more" and author links from being crawled by search engine robots? Is it good for SEO? Thanks
Search Behavior | Jun 24, 2013, 10:04 AM | uesat0 -
Trailing slash at end of URLs?
Hi, I'm just about to put up a new site and I need to decide between having no trailing slash at the end of the all the URLs, or putting one in there. I think Matt Cutts has a slight preference for them, as stated here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more "Matt says he would slightly advocate for using a trailing slash simply because it clearly indicates that a URL is a folder and not a document." However, I'm really wondering. I mean, if people link to my site, they'll tend not to insert a trailing slash, I'm thinking... Your thoughts would be welcome on this one! Cheers, Luke
Search Behavior | Mar 26, 2018, 7:12 PM | McTaggart0 -
Need to rank xxx.com to 2 locations
Hi, I have a voip service, currently my keywords are ranking good in US. But i would like to rank them for India too. As i am selling India based voip services. I have a single domain .COM and no country specific domain. Here what i am planning to do. I would change the setting in Google webmasters central to change the target country to USA. And then i will do on page seo to match keywords related to India. Is there anyother suggestions? please let me know.
Search Behavior | Apr 12, 2012, 3:40 PM | Dexx220 -
Multiple keyword rankings declined dramitically. Why??
SEO Moz has reported 7 of my keywords declined dramatically overnight. One word even went down 18 positions in Google. I have a few ideas on why, but none of them really make sence. 1.) The night before the decline I deleted around 6 "test pages" from our website. None of them could be reached through our website but they could be found by typing in the url. Most of these pages only said things like "test", but one of them was a draft of a keyword rich page within my website that only included some of the keywords that went down in ranking. Could the fact that I deleted this page be the cause of the ranking decline? 2.) About two weeks ago I purchased a url volusion-store-design.com which is one of my keywords and forward the address to an internal page within my website http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Store-Design. Could have this hurt my rankings, like Google is considering it duplicate content or something? If anyone has some ideas please help. Here are the keywords that I lost ranking for: volusion developers ---- down 18 volusion features ----- down 5 volusion store design ----- down 2 volusion templates ------ down 11 volusion designers ------ down 4 free volusion templates ------ down 4 ecommerce volusion features ------ down 3 Here are the pages these keyword were pointing to: http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Store-Design http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Features http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Templates
Search Behavior | Dec 2, 2011, 5:46 PM | DTOSI0