Recent Algo Change
-
I was wondering if anybody can shed some light on any recent changes to the Google algorithm in Australia. A competitor, www.manwithavan.com.au has always been number 1 for the most competitive search term in our industry "removalists melbourne". However, in the last week, they have fallen out of the the SERPS and are now (according to MOZ) ranking outside the top 50.
As far as l can tell, they have a really well optimized site with good structure, great text and updated content. They are very active within social media circles and have some really good external links.
Can anybody tell me why they would have been hit so badly. The reason l ask is that i want to make sure we don't make the same mistake.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
-
Elementary, my dear Mosley.
-
Good work Holmes
-
Checking Ahrefs it is clear they have been hit by a penalty. They have over 700 exact match anchors for "man with a van" for example from just 30 domains, which makes up 67% of their backlinks!
-
Hi Robert
According to Algaroo, a tool that tracks the level of volatility in Google AU, there doesn't look to be anything out of the ordinary in the last few days.
I jumped into MajesticSEO to have a look at their backlinks, and what struck me was that out of their top 50 links (according to Majestic), around 20 of them have been deleted on the 21st and 22nd of September.
I'm also looking at their links on a whole - there are a lot of blogroll links, which looks quite unnatural, plus a number of directory links (which aren't necessarily bad but may have been devalued). A number of these blogrolls were site wide, so the deleted ones will have resulted in a very sharp fall in the number of links.
I can only speculate as to why those links were removed - whether prompted by Google or not - but it's clear that either removing them has caused the drop, or they have been prompted to remove them by Google after finding out about their link scheme (if it was one). Similarly the massive amount of directory links could be the cause - not because they're penalised, but because they have been devalued.
Hope that helps.
-
Are they in the SERPs what so ever? They may have been hit by panda or penguin, how about any of the other rankings have they changed ? Have you checked outside of Moz to confirm ?
If you go by the webmaster guidelines you can't go far wrong.
It could be they were up to some shady practices and got penalized for as such.
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
-
Does data highlighter changes override the hard coded schema markup?
I hope one liner question explains what I'm looking for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOEnthusiast0 -
Cleaning up backlinks and changing URLs
Currently we are performing very poorly in organic clicks. We are a e-commerce site with over 2000 products. Issues we thought plagued us: Copied Images from competitors Site wide duplicate content duplicate content from competitor site Number of internal links on a page (300+) Bad backlinks (2.3k from 22 domains and ips) being linked to from sites like m.biz URLs URLs are abbreviated, over 50% lack our keywords Lack of meta descriptions, or too long meta descriptions Current State of fixing these issues: 50% images are now our own Site wide duplicate content near 100% completed Internal links have been dealt with Rewrote content for every product 90% of meta descriptions are fixed From all of these changes we have yet to see increase in traffic...10% increase at best in organic clicks. We think we have penalties on certain URLs. My question for the MOZ community is what is the best way to attack the lack of organic clicks. Our main competition is getting 900% more clicks than us. Any more information you need on the topic let me know and will get back to you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Changing old style WP menu built with child pages or not?
Hi Mozzers, the very old theme of my client's site doesn't support the new WP menus, so the menu structure is built in the old way, with parent and child pages. For example the page whose url is www.site.com/rent/ is top level and the sub pages are like www.site.com/rent/cars/ or www.site.com/rent/trucks/ Also there are third generation pages like www.site.com/rent/cars/fiat500/ Since I am changing the theme, I am going to use the new WP menu system and I'd like to know if this parent/child url structure may hurt link equity propagation. My question is: should I detach the child pages from the parents and, according to that, change the urls of the child pages from:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoMiSoL
www.site.com/rent/cars/ to www.site.com/rent-cars/ (and of course 301 redirect them) ? Or is it ok to leave the pages' url in the old parenting way? What is the best practice? Thank you very much! DoMiSoL Rossini0 -
Changing from .net TLD to .com TLD
I have a Fortune 50 serving client that has for a few years been operating their site on a .net domain since the .com was not available. They have just aquired the .com domain for their company name that was unavailable before. However, it was not a transfer of a live domain. In whois it is showing as brand new and "unseasoned" For now I have recommended that they just perm forward the .com to the .net and leave the .net as the TLD But I am sure they want to in the future make the switch. What would my best course of action be as the SEO consultant?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tjkirgin0 -
Domain Name Change - Best Practices?
Good day guys, We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain. However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website). It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties. Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Changing website providers
After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Is it good to change an ecommerce site homepage everyday?
my website is www.theprinterdepo.com but now my boss says that it should change everyday, its en ecommerce site, that the products should change everyday, even some times more than day. Is it good for seo? taking into account that google does not crawl all sites every day I suppose.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | levalencia10 -
Changing URL Structure
We are going to be relaunching our website with a new URL structure. My question is, how is it best to deal with the migration process in terms of old URLS appearing whilst we launch the new ones. How best should we launch the new structure, considering we've in the region of 10,000 pages currently indexed in Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0