What happened with Hayneedle's rankings?
-
Hayneedle is an e-commerce company that operates 200 niche sites selling indoor and outdoor home products. They were ranking at the top of the first page for most terms related to their sites (fire pits, fountains, benches, etc.), but all of a sudden at the end of April they lost their rankings, getting dropped to page 4 or lower for tons of their sites (barstools.com, patiofurnitureusa.com, adirondackchairs.com, benches.com, etc.).
Does anybody know what caused this? Other than one thread on an SEO forum, we haven't been able to find any discussion about it online. It seems like cross-linking between the sites could have been a problem here, but we'd love to hear thoughts from the experts here on this. Our company is using the same business model of one brand with niche sites and we want to avoid anything like this happening to us.
-
Seeing Hayneedle sites back in the SERPs today. Looks like they removed the heavy crosslinking.
Strange that they seem to be at full previous rankings. Maybe this is old data?
I would have expected them to have lost some power without cross linking or something else devalued.
-
Very possible, I've never even seen one of their sites before so am completely unfamiliar with them.
Fell into the same trap I've seen others fall into before and attribute everything to a known change if it occurs around the same time and not think whether it could have been something different.
Glad you're keeping me honest
This is interesting though - http://www.jobmagic.com/job/Internet-Marketing-Internship-SEO-Job-Omaha-NE-68114-US-6904531.html -
-
Hayneedle's drop didn't occur on one of the dates of a Panda update. Unrelated to Panda is my bet.
-
Doh, apologies, I didn't read the question right.
Never the less, looks like it could be Panda.
Hard to pinpoint exactly what Google doesn't like about it. Their main site does look a massive link farm with that many domains and links on it.
I think they've just been caught in the cross-fire rather than having done anything wrong, but as the main sign of a link farm is the interlinking of sites I would guess that, though can't be sure (doesn't seem to be anything dodgy in their code, not looked into their link profile and there's not too much else they could really do to be more authoratative with content).
If you have a similar site then I'm not sure what I would do to demonstrate that it was simply a directory of your other sites.
Sorry I couldn't be more help.
-
Nothing has happened to our sites - we're not Hayneedle. Our sites are fine (currently). We're trying to figure out what happened to Hayneedle so we can avoid the same thing happening to us.
-
All I can say is that the seem to have been smacked by google. The sites that compete in my SERPs dropped from #1 or #2 rankings down to fourth or fifth page.
They had lots of heavy cross linking on their site. For years I have felt that it was for SERP manipulation rather than cross-selling because lots of the cross-linked sites were irrelevant.
But, I honestly don't know what happened... they lost rankings on all of their estores so Google must have caught them in some type of sin and demoted all of their sites.
-
Sounds like Panda got you - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html - It's designed to get rid of content farm style sites and thin affiliates.
It seemed to get a 3rd update towards the end of last week (or a little before) which may be what caught you.
Good news is Google tells you what they want you to do about it - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
Bad news is there are very few success stories and you're at the mercy of Google as to when they'll run the check again (the update is not part of the main algorithm but a supplemental one run intermittently).
The fact it's hit all of your sites suggests that you're not recognised as high quality sites or appeared to be a farm. Did all your sites link to each other in some way?
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 proof that disavowing backlinks in GSC help to boost rankings in Google?
Hi Guys Let's say you have a website and you got some questionable back links or lower quality ones. Does anyone have proof that after disavowing back links helped in the rankings or had some positive effects? I am concerned that Google will place our website on their radar and instead possibly demote it or smth. Lastly, if disavowing is the way to go what criteria do you use to disavow backlinks? So if you get questionable back links over time, should you disavow ongoing as well? If so how often? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz0 -
Help with ranking
Hi Board users! I have a site that I don't understand why its not ranking. Its called JohnnyJet.com It has great domain authority and plenty of links. Looking at google webmaster tools I don't think there is a penalty. I have not done black hat stuff, so I am puzzled. I have a subdomain that stores some of my old content (some of it is duplicate) http://vintage.johnnyjet.com/home.asp The site has been around for ever, and I need help with a site audit to see what it is that I am missing. I know my long tail should rank much better. 2 questions: 1. Can you guys (board members) send me any insights if you take a peek 2. Can you tell me where to go to get an in-depth audit on my site -- I need a deep dive to get to the bottom of this 🙂 Thanks all!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | coolhand19800 -
Duplication Effects on Page Rank and Domain Authority
Hi Does page rank and domain authority page rank drop due to duplication issues on a web domain or on a web page? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOguy10 -
Homepage not ranking for branded searches after Google penalty removal
Hi all, A site I work on was hit with a manual action penalty some time ago for spammy links built by a former SEO agency. It was a partial match penalty so only affected some pages - most likely the homepage. We carried out a lot of work cleaning up links and disavowed suspicious links which we couldn't get removed. Again, most of these were to the homepage. The disavow file was uploaded to Google last Friday and our penalty was lifted this Tuesday. Since uploading the disavow file, our homepage does not show up at all for branded searches. I've carried out the obvious checks - robots.txt, making sure we're not accidentally noindexing the page or doing anything funky with canonicals etc and it's all good. Have any of you guys had a similar experience? I'm thinking Google simply needs time to catch up due to all the links we've disavowed and sitting tight is the best option but could do with some reassurance! Any past experiences or advice on what I might be missing would be great. Thanks in advance, Brendan.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Brendan-Jackson1 -
Got dropped on Google rank - Tips to discover why please
Hi guys originally my website was poor ranked on Google. So, after sign in on Moz and follow their tips I achieved the 4th position for one of my keywords (amazing!). But a few days ago my page dropped to bellow the first 50th pages for this same keyword, but I didn't make any changes on it. Anybody has some tips of how can I discover/repair what happened? Thank you all in advance. Best regards Paulo
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phlcastro0 -
Drop In Rankings Evaluation
My cousin asked me to look at his site, http://www.gaport.com/ and I'm wondering what his main website flaws are? I looked at his backlinks, and while I don't know enough to exclude penguin being the cause, I don't think it is. I think it has more to do with duplicate content and lack of keyword optimization. However, before I tell him that, I wanted to get the opinion of this forum, please. Thanks! Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
LOCAL SEO / Ranking for the difficult 'service areas' outside of the primary location?
It's generally not too hard to rank in Google Places and organically for your primary location. However if you are a service area business looking to rank for neighboring cities or service areas, Google makes this much tougher. Andrew Shotland mentions the obvious and not so obvious options: Service Area pages ranking organically, getting a real/virtual address, boost geo signals, and using zip codes instead of service area circle. But I am wondering if anyone had success with other methods? Maybe you have used geo-tagging in a creative way? This is a hurdle that many local business are struggling with and any experience or thoughts will be much appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vmialik1 -
Ranking factors: What am I missing here?
I'm trying to understand what techniques might have been used to help the site malime.com.au rank for the term 'boys tops' on Google (AU). It appears to be a new domain, there are hardly any backlinks and basically no social mentions. Internally, the site uses the term 'boys tops' to link to the same page that Google chooses also—so that much makes sense—but other than that (and some weird keyword-stuffed page titles and meta tags) I cannot find much reason for this site to rank as well as it is. Have I missed something? Or is it just a low-enough competition phrase that it can do this with basically internal linking? Any ideas? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathanV19770