HomePage Stopped Ranking For Brand on Aged Site
-
I've got an odd issue (that I've never encountered in 27 years in SEO). Our home page stopped ranking for our brand "BlowFish SEO" and is no place to be seen when searching our brand. I do get the knowledge panel on the right-hand side of the page. and our about page now comes up number #1. Technically the on-page SEO is correct This page has ranked for many years for our Brand. If I search blowfish SEO west palm beach I get the home page and all the nice site links. And other various variations of branded search. Our company has lots of mentions across the web and branded backlinks. No manual penalty has been placed on us. Im starting to think some type of negative SEO attack but I can't find it. I do know someone is using my name and brand along with many other companies in cloaked doorway redirected pages to gain SEO leads.. Yeah I know I've complained about it to Google they do nothing about it..
Other things I've checked:
- No one else seems to be using my brand
- Home page canonical tag points to itself
- Title tag contains brand name at the front (rest of site it's at the end)
- No manual penalty
- XML sitemap contains home page (and accurate for other pages)
To make this even more confusing, if you search the brand name the physical location appears on the right rail with an accurate URL.
Ive added an image of the search result when I search BlowFish SEO
Please note the top result is PPC the about page is 1st organc
Any other ideas that I may be missing?
-
I think Google might actually have a problem with my site title.. I just googled BlowFish SEO west palm Beach and this is the result I got.
-
Thank you so very much for taking all that time out to help me. From what I'm seeing here it's looking like a combo 2, 3 and 4 and I am annoyed I'm going to have to go through all these links and add to the disavow file I guess. Once again I thank you. Besides handling the Day to Day here sometimes makes it difficult to get to the technical stuff lately personally. I guess its time to get this ship under control myself.
-
I get you at position #6 on Google. You are there but admittedly it's not great:
- https://d.pr/i/XS14Cn.png (screenshot)
The site is ranking, just very badly which makes me think it's NOT technical SEO related
Let's look at that first though:
- https://d.pr/i/5a7y8D.png (screenshot)
By the way you can grab that Chrome extension here, it's quite handy. DeepCrawl is actually a very powerful SEO crawling suite (they make their own crawler, and also this handy Chrome extension); many find it superior to Screaming Frog - the main reason it's not that talked about is the pricing which is pretty steep (IMO)
To confirm, there's nothing majorly wrong with your robots.txt file either:
- https://d.pr/i/7ZuIlf.png (screenshot)
On simple and relatively trustworthy one-page scanners, the site doesn't seem to have any massive technical SEO issues (at least at the homepage level): https://seositecheckup.com/seo-audit/blowfishseo.com
So let's look at links I guess?
https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target=blowfishseo.com
- https://d.pr/i/eH0GKc.png (screenshot)
That looks like it could be doing some damage. Massive spike in linking URLs May 2018, followed by a massive spike in referring domains July 2019. Doesn't look natural AT ALL
So what about anchor texts?
- https://d.pr/i/GagQUI.png (screenshot)
- https://d.pr/f/jPWNPr.csv (data)
In green you have partially branded or branded anchor texts, Google usually has no problem with these. In blue you have part keyword part geo terms, Google can have a problem with these if they begin to feel your backlink profile looks unnatural. In red you have exact-match anchor keywords, Google doesn't really like people link-building in this way any-more (most SEO firms would say EMA links are a no-no)
That spike in referring domains which we saw earlier really interests me. It seems to be concentrated... mostly between... 28th June 2019 and ... 6th August 2019
Let's take a look at new links specifically from within that time period (remember it's actually the time when Ahrefs discovered them, they may have gone live slightly earlier - but Ahrefs are pretty supreme for any kind of proper backlink research)
https://d.pr/i/Wi7p8S.png (screenshot)
https://d.pr/f/RhbuDv.csv (data)
... highlighted some stuff there that looks odd. Links from unrelated markets (languages) or locked regions (CN / Chinese firewall) and links from weird looking subdomain sites that look spam-made and mass produced
Yup, I'd say it's the backlink profile being too oldschool and full of crap, with recent spikes and anchor-text balancing problems. You unfortunately 'just' tipped the scales in a bad way and now you're suffering
Four possibilities:
1) You have been doing some bad backlink work, or had previously done so and never took the time to do a big disavow / link removals project when standards changed. Legacy is hitting you now, because of recent spiking link movements, which tipped you over the scales (has happened to many people, doesn't mean you're a terrible SEO or anything of the sort - was actually quite impressed with your on-site architecture and stuff)
2) One of your subordinates has gotten slack and done some bad backlink work (you'd need to find out who is playing you for a mug ASAP and sack them). If it's someone extremely junior show leniency I guess. But if you looked at the data I had supplied and found a bad network of shallow content links from no-name sites, and then found a paper-trail saying you had actively paid for those... I'd personally be pretty annoyed
3) Some scraper site has started scraping your posts onto their sh*tty network of sites, in the hopes of making their sites less terrible, but actually now it's hurting you as well
4) Deliberate negative-SEO intervention (we have seen a few of these lately on here, it seems to be a very 2019 thing IMO)
... hope that helps!
-
Its been doing that sporadically playing hide and seek. I'm surprised it showed. I'm more than surprised the about page is coming above the home page since the About has an anchored link for the term pointing at the home page. It should tank the about page under the home page for the term. I'm using an Incognito window not logged in when i search.
-
Over the last two and a half months in GSC, I have watched the branded search for the home page slip nationally from #1 to number three and then not show locally at all for the branded term. This started before the major core update.
-
We just searched "blowfish seo" and see your twitter profile at #1, your about page at #2, and your home page at #3.
How long ago did you notice the change in which page ranks for your branded search? And has the about page consistently been showing up since you first noticed it or does Google switch back and forth between the two from what you have seen?
-
I did a Google search and found the homepage listed. Strange as I checked if you were logged in and displaying something becuase of personalized results. So not sure
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
-
Competitor significantly jumped in SERP rankings
We opened a new location in a new market in early February and eventually tapered off improving SERP rankings when we reached an average rank of #3. As we began increasing in ranking, the competitions' average rankings we're declining. Suddenly, in April, one of our competitors spiked to an average SERP ranking of #1. The site that jumped to the top of SERP was a location page and there was no content changes, or changes to their website. Our competitor's links also decreased during the time of this spike. Does anyone have any ideas as to what caused our competitor to spike so high, so suddenly? Thanks,
Local Website Optimization | | Dions0 -
Local SEO: thoughts on driving users to a homepage or to a local landing page?
I work with a client who is about to launch a local landing page for one of their locations. They're worried that the new local landing page will cannibalize some of the keyword rankings for the homepage. Any advice on how to have a local presence but still drive people to the more valuable homepage?
Local Website Optimization | | jrridley0 -
Site Getting hacked
Hi There, My one Website gets hacked Again and Again, I had Reset Many times ,But again, Also generating unnecessary URLs to My website in Webmaster tools, Can anyone Help Me To Solve This Problem please? please help, thx in advance,
Local Website Optimization | | nupuriepl0 -
How can I migrate a website's content to a new WP theme, delete the old site, and avoid duplication and other issues?
Hey everyone. I recently took on a side project managing a family member's website (www.donaldtlevinemd.com). I don't want to get too into it, but my relative was roped into two shady digital marketing firms that did nothing but a mix of black-hat SEO (and nothing at all). His site currently runs off a custom wordpress theme which is incompatible with important plugins I want to use for local optimization. I'm also unable to implement responsive design for mobile. The silver lining is that these previous "content marketers" did no legitimate link building (I'm auditing the link profile now) so I feel comfortable starting fresh. I'm just not technical enough to understand how to go about migrating his domain to a new theme (or creating a new domain altogether). All advice is appreciated! Thanks for your help!
Local Website Optimization | | jampaper1 -
Why a site just dropped out of ranks
I have a site i am working on link It was ranking fairly well and then I added content to the homepage to better optimize it for the keywords it was already ranking for. Ever since I did that the entire site is no longer ranking well. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Atomicx0 -
Competitor Ranking High with Questionable Backlinks
Happy Friday Mozzers! I wanted to pick your brains this morning, and see what your thoughts were on how Google missed this one. One of our competitors is ranking high in Google, and has been for some time. About 5-6 months ago, his site skyrocketed from page 3-4 to the top of page one. The site meta tag is pulling in logo alt text, content is very messy and sales driven, and after looking at the backlink profile in MOZ tools, it has a ton of links from China, Japan, Korea. Most of the backlinks are from blog pages, about everything under the sun, from UFO's to porn sites. This site has consistantly ranked high at the top of the page for many different competitive keywords. My question is this: HOW? After all the updates done by Google, and their focus on web spam, what is allowing this site to rank high constantly? (5-6 months now, and often in the number one spot). Here is an example of some of the backlinks. There are a LOT of them. http://sundtjek-wp.alexandra.dk/?p=1
Local Website Optimization | | David-Kley
http://ice.anyang.ac.kr/xe/teacher/2095
http://blog.so-net.ne.jp/etsuko_hayashi_ET3/2006-07-02 Don't worry, we are not looking to follow in his footsteps, lol. I was just wondering how this can happen, and for such a long time period.0 -
Google ranking wrong page
I have a client where google is ranking the homepage for a term that I want a specific landing page to rank for. The landing page is filled with great keyword focused content, gets a perfect score on the moz keyword target grader. And the home page is not even about the keyword it is ranking for. Any advice on how to get google to stop ranking the wrong page?
Local Website Optimization | | Atomicx0 -
Ranking after switching to Wordpress
About 2 weeks ago we have switched our website and our blog to Wordpress (our website was about 400 pages) our blog was originally on Sgopify website (the blog was about 800 pages). One of the reasons we transferred all the blogs from our account on Shopify to our domain is because we were told that this will help our ranking. We switched everything in the last 2 weeks to Wordpress under the same domain name. The only thing that was changed are the URLs. We also did a 301 redirect however the dilemma we have now is not ranking at all although before the transfer we were ranking 1st or 2nd for certain keywords on organic search. Does anyone know why is this happening? Thank you
Local Website Optimization | | SinaKashani0