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
-
Our webpage has been embedded in others website using iframe. Does this hurts us in rankings?
Hi all, One of our partners have embedded our webpage in their website using iframe such a way that anybody can browse to any page of our website from their website. It's said that content in iframes will not get indexed. But when I Google for h1 tag of our embedded webpage, I can see their website in SERP but not ours which is original. How it's been indexed? Is this hurting us in rankings? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Want to Remove numbers from Old Post URL - Will it effect its Ranking?
Hi. I have a number of posts that are ranking in google for several keywords. However the URLs contain numbers, for example 2011, 2014 and 35. I want to remove these numbers to make the URLs more updated. If I use the 301 redirect for old URL to the new one, will I retain the same ranking for these blogposts Or it can effect the ranking. Does anyone have tried this in the past? I would like to get your opinion on this. Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | techmaish0 -
Diminishing Returns for Links to an Unrelated Page
Suppose I have a new website about cars and I had created a page about something completely not-related - like cupcakes. However, I found that it was very easy to get high quality sites to link to the cupcakes page where as it was very difficult to get people to link to the homepage about cars. If my goal is to increase the SEO for the homepage (which again is related to cars), is there a point where additional high quality links to my cupcakes page is not useful for it anymore? What if I created another page - about frosted cupcakes - which was also easy to get high quality links to?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wlingke10 -
Substantial drop in organic traffic and keyword rankings
My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information. KDc8dMp fyVtrYo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kheberger0 -
New Service/Product SEO and rankings
Hello, fellow MOZers. We are a web design company, and we had SEO as secondary service for years. Due to changes in the company we started pushing SEO as one of our main services about 6 monhs ago. We have separate page , targeting that service, as well as case studies, supportive information pages, even SEO Center, which is like a blog about SEO only. We are not using black hat SEO, doing honest link earning and building, don't use keyword stuffing, everything is by the book. I understand that SEO takes time, especially for a company which has a footprint as web design company, not as SEO company. We are ranking very good for web design related keyphrases, however, we don't see any improvements for SEO related keywords. It always was and is between 25-30 SERP. At the same time, competitors, who are ranking on first page for SEO related phrases are pretty bad looking. Design-wise as well as blackhat-SEO-wise. Everything is keyword stuffed, UX is horrible, prices are ridiculous. So, do you guys have any thought/advise on how we can see results / why we are not seeing results. Links: Google search result: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=seo%20houston Competitors: www.seohouston.com, www.graphicsbycindy.com Our pages: https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston.php, https://www.hyperlinksmedia.com/seo-houston/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Site dropping in rank even through there are more backlinks being added
Hello, One of my client's sites is ranking lower than he should. This happened when we took off backlinks (20 little blogs, several site-wide paid links. It really dropped the site, but it had to be done. Since then we've increased his # of root domains by 10% through white hat link building in his non-competitive niche, and rankings are still poor. I know that's not much in the way of added backlink value, but we're working on it. My question is, how have the recent (and coming) updates possibly effected us. We want to take the remaining problem areas off right away, but another drop in traffic is not a good idea. Even though the blogs (see below) have no backlinks of themselves, they cause drops when taken off) He still has -20 little blog backlinks w/ a quarter of them being exact match anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW
-1 sitewide paid link - an image, exact match alt tag anchor text
-1 non-site-wide paid links that is an image near the footer, exact match alt tag anchor text.
-3 links on a domain, this one looks fairly editorial, but there are a bunch of paid links on that page. Changing to non-exact-match anchor text
-2 links on two domains that look completely editorial with no other paid links on that page. non-exact-match anchor text -70 backlinks total with about 1/3 being problematic. How does this site look in regards to updates and when to take links off without tanking our site even more? Thanks.0 -
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?
Does the proximity to the center of the city have anything to do with higher rankings in local results ?? If yes then how ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
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