Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why?
-
Hi,
We have had a Google action against us for over a year. After many "SEO Company's" we found someone who help us remove (December 2013) the action. Which was due to our bad back link profile.
We have 100% improved our content for our website, as Google has requested. We are active within social media, we add relevant content to our blog and we clean up our desk after we finish work
After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic, if anything its decreasing.
Is anyone else in the same position? or has anyone recovered from a similar situation?
Josh
-
I dont know if you think this would be a big factor, but iv noticed on moz that we have 'keyword stuffing' on quite a few pages. This is just a result of the category names on those pages etc.
would this be the cause?
-
Id say the main features that our main competitor has done better than ourselves are:
- get people to share category and product pages via social media
- Their homepage content changes more often because of the new products features
- their urls are shorter than ours
- They added content to the category pages a long time before us
But then they have negative things that i would say should harm their site, which are:
- The navigation has to many links which is bad practice for internal linking
- The footer has a spam page which just targets a particular keyword
- The footer also use keywords which would be classed as a site link. Spam again.
- They also have duplicated content in the products pages like ourselves
and im going to check to see if i can see any changes to their rankings
Also could you expand on your comment above about user engagement?
Thanks
-
Since you have updated your website, have your competitors done the same? It may not be tied directly to a Google update, or all of the changes you have made, but also if your competition has made updates and improvements. Use the moz tools to check for updates to your competitors ranking changes, and visually look at their sites to see if there is an area or particular area of their site that works better for users.
-
Hi, could you explain your thoughts on this some more. Thanks
-
We recently changed the descriptions to the bottom as we didn't want all the text to distract from people seeing the products
-
Thank you all for answering my question.
Im going to try and answer all your queries as best as I can. Iv scanned through our analytics's
- Last year we jumped by 40% after Google lifted the ban in December
- Then this year our organic has dropped from January to May by 50%. There has been no report from Google saying we have had ban etc...
So our thoughts are that its to do with a Google update, but all our main pages have new unique relevant content etc
Yes we are/have removed many of our back links which which understand would effect our rankings, but like the Silkstream says, we are ranking for important keywords. In fact our main keyword beads has jumped from page 3 back to page1 (we used to be no1 for this keyword) So there has been a massive important, but our rankings are still falling.
This would then mean that a lot of our long tail keywords that only get 1 - 10 session have completely dropped off the map. Maybe this is problem?
In one comparison from March this year to 3years ago. there is a
- 40% higher bounce rate
- 35% high conversion rate
- 30% Higher sessions
Its difficult to check everything because we have changed website since then, which was in March 2012 and that is about the same time Google gave us our ban.
I can see that a the main pages that we got our traffic from are still in the top 10, just less volume.
As Mark Ainsworth says, we need to build up our link profile again, agree this is something that we will be looking at and treating with more care. But its confusing when things are looking to be moving forward with our traffic to be improving, but then to drop off again.
Let me know all your thoughts?
-
"After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic"
It was an assumption of what he meant, as multiple items are mentioned. I think you know as well as I do that the questions are sometimes not clear on here
From another member in this thread:
"I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.
"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9"Seems his ranking is doing ok. What we really need to see would be the before and after rankings, which is why I stated he should look at his analytics, and compare time periods. Keywords, entry paths, exit pages, referring sites, root domains, ranking position, all that can be found there, and used to make an assessment of where they went wrong.
-
The title is "Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why" So I would take that their rankings are not well
When they said looking at "Moz tools we have great results" I took that to mean PA/DA, Domain trust etc.
-
He stated that they are ranking well, but traffic is lower. I'm thinking that links are not his issue, but rather some other factor ie lack of engagement, listings not standing out, products not marked up, etc.
-
I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.
"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9Seeing the usual ebay, amazon big brand domain clusters for these queries so I'd say your doing OK. You might want to consider moving your category descriptions above the fold to improve further rather than below your products on the landing page.
-
You need to think about why the website was performing well before the penalty. If it was spammy artificial links that were boosting your site, then removing the penalty means that they no longer help you. Therefore, your website is receiving considerably less link juice than before.
You may need to face facts that your link building efforts will probably need to start again from scratch.
-
Generally the reason is it was the bad links is what was making you rank so well in the first place, now they are removed you don't get the benefit they where giving you.
I had a quick look at you backlink profile with OSE, and I can see some good links there (channel 4), but also aload of junk directories. OSE just does not consider the quality of the back link so in the stats you may have better PA and DA but when you look at the backlinks your competitors might have better qualty links (not spam)
also there is a chance that the "seo company" you used might have disavowed some good links by mistake, but if they are any good they would not have done that.
-
Have you done a comparison month to month, or year over year since you received the penalty and after it was lifted?
Analytics can tell you where your visitors are leaving. Even if the content was revised, or changed completely, that doesn't mean it's connecting with your visitors. Check your exit pages, and on page time comparison with the following period to see if there are any negative changes that were made. I would look at your impressions as well.
Also, look at your competitors ranking closer, not just using tools. Tools only show a portion of data. If your competitors are using rich snippet markup, even if you outrank them, chances are their listing could stand out more and be getting more clicks.
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 There Such Thing as Minor Penalties or Restrictions?
Hello Mozzers So generally its said that when a site receives a penalty from Google - it's obvious - you can't miss it... But does google apply minor penalties (say dropping 5-10 places for one not so great link) One particular campaign we've been working pretty hard - really great stuff - all white hat techniques - but there were a couple of links I wasn't 100% sure on - but got them any way as I guessed that the effect of them, if not positive, would be neutral at worse... (The sites wen't obvious spam sites but just seemed 'not great') Recently after, we dropped around 8 place for our main keyword ranking. It's not a very competitive space. Is this likely just standard inexplicable fluctuation, or is there such thing as minor penalties or restrictions? Cheeers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Steps to Improve Page Rank and Domain Authority
Hi If the quality of web pages is very good I believe rankings should reflect this. My domain is at least 3 years old.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOguy1
What steps would you recommend short term and long term in terms of how to improve page rank and domain authority? Thanks.0 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Hits in H1 will improve ranking by regular crawling ?
Hello ! I was wondering if it's a good idea to keep the "Hits" in the H1 ? http://www.ibremarketing.com/item/netapp-e5400-storage-system.html Will Google come to check regularly the update (new information if I'm right) or if he will not like the idea to come back just for hits update. As I have very good results on this part of the website, I do not want to take any risk. Thanks a lot !
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AymanH0 -
Which SEO companies offer Penalty analysis?
I'm having a hard time finding a (good) SEO company which specializes itself in Penalty analysis? Any recommendations? I only found Bruce Clay, but they charge 8,000$ :)...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Link quality warning from GWT and drop in keyword ranking.
So last December we saw our hard work pay off as our Panda penalty was lifted and our traffic shot back up to pre-Panda levels. Then in February we received this note: We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Since December we've lost position on 80% of our top 100 keywords. I've gone through our links and can't figure out what the problem may be. Maybe I'm not using OSE properly. We don't buy links so I'm not sure what the problem is. If someone can walk me through using OSE to see what the problem may be I would appreciate it. Our domain is http://bit.ly/rbkYkp
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
I am still confused about anchor text and penalties
As I understand in order to rank well for the page in google, the page/site has to have a lot of back links that have an anchor text with the keywords that you want to rank for. At the same time if google finds that your anchor text contains kewords that are in your title or h1 tag, it may penalize your site. So what do i do to rank well for my chosen keywords. Lets say I am only interested in keywords San Francisco widget and Oakland widget The title of my webpage says San Francisco | Oakland widget The anchor text that I usually pick is either San Francisco widget or Oakland widget. I also have plenty of links that have anchor text like "website" or "click here" What should I use for my anchor text in my backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SirMax0 -
What to do about "Penguin" penalties?
What are your suggestions about moving forward with sites hit by the "Penguin" penalties? Wait it out and see if the penalty goes away Try to remove spammy backlinks and resubmit (is this worth the time and effort) Build quality backlinks to offset (will this even work if they have thousands of spammy links) Blog more (I think this is probably a no brainer) Scrap the site and start from scratch (This is last resort and don't want to do this if at all possible) Or any other ideas are greatly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0