Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help
-
Hello Mozzers.
We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site.
examples -
site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london
site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester
These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked.
We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do.
It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc.
Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8
thanks
Pete
-
Thanks Craig,
We are basically a tool hire website but previously as also had a number of mini sites which just specialised in one aspect of what we hired, so for instance, we had a carpet cleaner hire website and a generator hire website as well. This helped to give us a larger SEO footprint and until the start of 2014 was proving very successful. By we got a penalty(due to some links from myguest blog which an seo freelancer did for us ) and this took a few months to clean up and we also then stopped the microsites for saftey as well.
I will check the traffic from the 301 domains and see if I can remove them.
thanks
pete
-
Hi Peter, quite a history you have.
It looks like you have a lot of good advice above, but I want to add a little to what Josh said. I think you are correct to clean up the site, these things will bite you eventually, but it would probably make sense to do it in a staged approach. By cutting off a bunch of pages that rank, you are unfortunately going to lose a lot of traffic, that doesn't mean it isn't the correct long term solution, but the situation you've found yourself in now is as bad as a penalty.
If you are not getting a lot of traffic from the redirected domains I would recommend removing the 301s too, eve with the disavow file I would be concerned that it could be causing issues, especially as such scale and such a variety of topics. I don't see how redirecting a generator hire website to a cleaning website is relevant at all, I suspect Google see it the same way.
To summarise, if this change is costing you money, I'd reverse it, but start planning to get to the point where you can remove the pages asap without the same level of drop, at the moment you've essentially given yourself a penalty.
Best of luck
-
SO much easier to understand now - thanks.
When you get rid of links or tidy up things to clear up a penalty you have a situation where you used links that shouldn't have ranked you to rank higher than you actually would have. You remove those links and fall down to where you really sit.
We think by cleaning those, we've now "improved" the site - and you have - but at the cost of all the old link juice you had. Now you need to go about doing things like "link earning" and better link strategies than you've had in the past. I'm not going to give away everything we do here in Q&A on Moz but let's just say there're enough ways to build links and earn links that your site will rank again if that's the part of the equation you focus on most.
-
Thanks Dirk for taking a look,
Sorry my fault (typo) , The urls are actually case sensitive so it needs to be done in lower case.
So for example , site.co.uk/cleaning-enquipment-manchester would 301 back to cleaning-equipment
thanks
pete
-
Hello Matt,
Many thanks for taking a look at our site.
-
The other sites which are 301'd to our site used to be separate microsites we had . We closed these down last year and just 301'd the links to our homepage.
-
The links from Motorhomes etc are all in our disavow file . We used to hire everything but then just concentrated on tools so the seo agency we used at the time spent alot of time cleaning up our link profile and disavowing whatever we couldnt get removed ourselves
-
The links from leedssearch.co.uk and similar are from citations and these link to our branch pages
We did have doorway pages but we 301'd them back to the main category page (the urls are in lower case)
example - http://www.website.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-manchester will 301 back to http://www.website.co.uk/cleaning-equipment
How would we rebuild some authority ?.. We did get a manual penalty last year which we recovered from for unnatural links and it took along time to sort out and get it removed. We are naturally quite scared with regards to link building after what the last freelancer did and got us links from a blog network which got penalized. The seo agency we use to use only provided a few links from poor quality domains and it wasn't worth the money we were paying them every month ?
What would you recommend ?
thanks
pete
-
-
In addition to Matt's reply - you state that you redirected the doorway pages type site.co.uk/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester - however if I try this with the url you provided it returns a 404 - rather than redirecting to branches/manchester-tool-hire-shop or /cleaning-equipment
Dirk
-
Lots of wild goose chasing later...
Exactly how many sites are 301'd into bestathire.co.uk?
10? 20?
These have a couple thousand links and redirect 301 to your site:
bestathire.com
londononlinehire.co.uk
jetwashhire.co.uk
woodchipperhireuk.co.uk
chainsaw-hire.co.uk
platformhireuk.co.uk
nationalgeneratorhire.co.uk
scarifierhire.co.uk
carpetcleanerhireuk.co.uk
patioheater-hire.co.uk
rotavatorhireuk.co.ukThese are the most obvious link networks in the world:
motorhoming.eu
a272.co.uk
motorhoming.org
motorhoming.net
motorhoming.com
motorhoming.biz
motorhoming.co.uk
motorhoming.mobi
motorhoming.info
motorhoming.me.uk
motorhoming.org.ukThen there's .info spam
iclanky.info
schoolpay.info
0b0b.info
2fashion.info
freestockphotography.info
toptravellingtips.com
vidysporta.info
kivis.info
schoolhide.info
weddingdesignideas.co
syerasale.comAnd a local UK network
leedssearch.co.uk
nottinghamsearch.co.uk
plymouthsearch.co.uk
leicestersearch.co.uk
bristolsearch.co.uk
norwichsearch.co.uk
edinburghsearch.co.uk
derbysearch.co.uk
sheffieldsearch.co.uk
cardiffsearch.co.uk
london-search.co.ukNearly 60% of the rest of your backlinks come from multiple subdomains on either blogspot or opendi.com
I'm assuming everything listed above is in your disavow? You may need to rebuild some authority having given up 80% of your link juice. And if they're not in a disavow, the link profile isn't nearly clean.
If you also had a bunch of doorway pages as well, have you checked WMT for a manual penalty? If not, you're just on the harsh end of some algo issues. Did you also pass the 301s from those old doorway pages to another part of your site?
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
-
Redirecting Pages During Site Migration
Hi everyone, We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land: The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration. For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains. Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nhhernandez0 -
Why rankings dropped from 2 page to 8th page and no penalization?
Dear Sirs, a client of mine for more than 7 years used to have his home page (www.egrecia.es) between 1st and 2nd page in the Google Serps and suddenly went down to 8 page. The keyword in question is "Viajes a Grecia". It has a good link profile as we have built links in good newspapers from Spain, and according to Moz it has a 99% on-page optimization for that keyword, why why why ??? What could I do to solve this? PD: It has more than 20 other keywords in 1st position, so why this one went so far down? Thank you in advance !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Can someone help me understand why this page is ranking so well?
Hi everyone, EDIT: I'm going to link to the actual page, please remove if there are any issues with confidentiality. Here is the page: https://www.legalzoom.com/knowledge/llc/topic/advantages-and-disadvantages-overview It's ranking #2 on Google for "LLC" This page is a couple months old and is substantially heavy in content, but not much more so than all the dozens of other pages online that are competing with it. This is a highly competitive industry and this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry. This new page is suddenly ranking #2 for an extremely competitive head term, arguably the most important/high volume keyword being targeted by the entire site. The page is outranking the home page, as well as the service page that exactly targets the query - the one that you would think would be the ranking page for this head term. However, this new page is somewhat of a spin-off with some additional related content about the subject, some videos, resources, a lot of internal links, etc. The first word of the title tag exactly matches the head term. I did observe that almost no other pages on the site have the exact keyword as the first word of the title tag, but that couldn't be sufficient to bring it up so high in the ranks, could it? Another bizarre thing that is happening is that Google is ignoring the Title Tag in the actual HTML (which is a specific question that is accurate to the content on the page), and re-assigning a title tag that basically looks like this: "Head Term | Brand." Why would it do this on this page? Doesn't it usually prefer more descriptive title tags? There are no external links coming up on Moz or Majestic pointing to this page. It has just a couple social shares. It's not being linked to from the home page or top nav bar on the main site. Can anyone explain how this particular page would outrank the main service page targeting this keyword, as well as other highly authoritative, older pages online targeting the same keyword? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
Please help with creation of slideshare
Just wondering how I would go about creating something like this http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap?from_search=1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Please help with page
We used to use this page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html to rank for the words vinyl banner and PVC banner but we have tried to focus the page only on PVC banners and move the vinyl banners word to http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/ yet for some reason even though they have both been spidered google has now chosen to rank this page http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/stickers/vinyl-stickers.html for the vinyl banner words- how do I stop this from happening I thought the home page would be powerful enough to rank for the word with a title inclusion and a spread of the word on the page. Also if anyone can give their opinion on why they thinkhttp://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html does not rank very well I would be truly appreciative.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Get Duplicate Page content for same page with different extension ?
I have added a campaign like "Bannerbuzz" in SEOMOZ Pro account and before 2 or 3 days i got errors related to duplicate page content . they are showing me same page with different extension. As i mentioned below http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
&
http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor_vinyl_banner.php We checked our whole source files but we didn't define php related urls in our source code. we want to catch only our .html related urls. so, Can you please guide us to solve this issue ? Thanks <colgroup><col width="857"></colgroup>
| http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html |0 -
Home Page Rankings Drop
Hi all we have being working with a small local client in the last few weeks getting good rankings using onsite op, and business listings we have been getting good ranking ie top 15 then today we drop right out the top 50, after completing manual checks i see the keywords as all related | glasgow catering | Not in Top 50 | down > 42 | |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig
| catering glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 41 | |
| glasgow caterers | Not in Top 50 | down > 39 | |
| caterers in glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 37 | |
| caterers glasgow | Not in Top 50 | down > 32 | Also when completing manual checks on the above keywords, the home page is not ranking what so ever, infact its missing i went 300 results deep and cant find it, other inner pages rank but not the home. The only other recent change is that we now have a listing under the Google maps section of the homepage on page 1 any advice www.georgieporgies.co.uk0 -
Our site has been up almost 2 months and no rankings yet?
Our site is www.AkinsSeptic.com. We spent a lot of time on the site and have not received any rankings yet. Can you advise as to what we can do to get this site ranked at all. I know it needs a lot of SEO work and some links, however, it should rank mildly due to the low competition of keywords we are using. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormz0