What am i not spotting?

[shr109]

A client i'm working with is desperate to rank top for the term 'wholesale jewellery' (it's a UK company and that's the UK spelling). He previously held the top spot but got hit with a penalty and is now bottom of page 1.

So far nothing I have done has had much of an impact despite this being a relatively low competition term.  We've fluctuated around the first page for the last few months but the highest we got was 4th before dropping again. The site's domain authority is on par with the site ranking top (who have no content to speak of) and is superior to most other sites on the first page.  The site also has similar social metrics to the top ranking site and superior to most others on the first page.

I've focused on building fewer good quality links and some of them have been excellent - DA 80+ and yet, still no movement. On-page optimisation is spot on as well.

A couple of things I have spotted that might be having an impact:

-my client's site has a .com domain where most others have .co.uk

-most sites on the first page have either jewellery, wholesale or both in their domain names

-relevance of linking istes could be playing a part here. My client has links from wholesale sites but few from jewellery-related sites

-within my client's link profile there are very few, if any exact anchor text links for the term 'wholesale jewellery'

-legacy of a penalty could be making ranking progress that much more difficult?

I'd appreciate your input because I've hit a brick wall. The site is http://www.parklaneonline.com

[Hannah_Smith]

Hello there,

Answers to your questions below

1. My client's site has a .com domain where most others have .co.uk

I suspect this isn't the issue. but provided your client is only targeting the UK you might considering setting up geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools - see: http://moz.com/community/q/geographic-target-set-up-in-google-webmaster-tool

2. Most sites on the first page have either jewellery, wholesale or both in their domain names

This is unlikely to be the issue.

3. Relevance of linking sites could be playing a part here. My client has links from wholesale sites but few from jewellery-related sites.

Attracting relevant links is never a bad idea, plus even if you don't see ranking improvements you'd hope that relevant links sent good quality traffic. I'd definitely do this if I were you

4. Within my client's link profile there are very few, if any exact anchor text links for the term 'wholesale jewellery'

I'd suggest it's unlikely that this is the issue - anchor text is not the ranking signal it once was.

5. Legacy of a penalty could be making ranking progress that much more difficult?

I think this is the most likely answer, but I don't quite agree with your phrasing. You mentioned a past penalty - given that you're ranking on the first page I suspect you're not suffering from said penalty any more. However, if you do still have a lot of 'low quality' links, then further clean up might be the way forward.

However, you'll also need to continue to build the sorts of links that Google want to reward (i.e. links which are editorially given from quality sites) in order to improve your rankings.

Incidentally, you mentioned you've disavowed a bunch of links. 3rd party tools (ahrefs, majestic, moz) aren't able to filter these out because they've no access to your disavow files

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[shr109]

Thanks for your response Matt.

A lot of the bad links have been disavowed. Does Ahrefs filter these out?

Perhaps a second round of link cleanup is in order?

[MattAntonino]

It's backlinks holding the site back.

Tons of link spam - check out Majestic historic info.  1926 referring domains, 12,000+ backlinks.  Of the 1926 domains, only 800 different subnets.  That's a pretty high spam ratio.

If Ahrefs is your tool of choice, check out the referring IPs.  Link networks aplenty.

• 36 domains on one IP
• 34 domains on another IP
• 30 domains on another IP
• 29 domains on another IP
• Blogspot spam

As far as onsite, remove the meta keywords, ensure you've geo-targeted in WMT and the onsite should be ok. This is very, very likely backlink network related.

[N1ghteyes]

My Take on this:

-my client's site has a .com domain where most others have .co.uk

Google does rank regionally, .com is great, .co.uk would probably be better for UK specific listings. (301 from .com .co.uk would be your best bet)

-most sites on the first page have either jewellery, wholesale or both in their domain names

This is less of a thing than it used to be. Google seems to be starting to favour brand identity over direct keyword rich domains (EMD) - http://moz.com/blog/are-exact-match-domains-in-decline

-relevance of linking istes could be playing a part here. My client has links from wholesale sites but few from jewellery-related sites

Probably not going to be a penalty from this, but relevance might make a difference to just how much extra juice those links provide.

-within my client's link profile there are very few, if any exact anchor text links for the term 'wholesale jewellery'

Probably some effect from this, how much though im not sure (Exact anchor text isnt something i've had to look into before)

-legacy of a penalty could be making ranking progress that much more difficult?

Depends how long ago this was. So long as whatever caused the penalty is fixed, this is probably not an issue now.

[Andy-Halliday]

I can confirm in Incognito mode you are ranked at the bottom of page 1, but only us SEOs use Incognito mode - not your average Google user.

We had a similar problem and no matter what I did I couldn't get the ranking to change constantly.

The strategy I took, was to look at keywords people we're searching for before the 'money' term and get content to meet the searches needs. Less competition usually so rank higher.

Google will rank sites higher where users have visited before and had a good experience, so if you can get people to your site before they know they are looking for wholesale jewellery, when they come to search the terms as well as you ranking higher, you will also have some brand loyalty so more likely to get clicked.

If we still had keyword data in GA we could prove this theory but I get more organic traffic to the page I was trying to improve.

Hope this helps. While you might not improve in Incognito mode - you will get more organic traffic and more sales.

Hope this is useful.

Thanks

Andy