Dramatic drop after rapid rise for new site
-
just launched a new site edenprairieexperts.com. The site jumped to the first page on yahoo and bing within a couple of days then fell off a cliff and isnt in the top 10 pages. Any reason for this? seems really strange for me. The only think I can think of is I got some really poor quality back links from someone screwing with me. If someone could take a glance at the site or give me some general direction I would appreciate it.
-
There is not any direct actin you can take other then to contact the source of any spammy links and request their removal.
Indirectly, you can earn quality links to dilute the bad ones in your profile. Most sites will have some spammy links to them. It is perfectly natural. The question is what percent of the links to a given site are spammy.
-
There are an infinite number of ideas for link generation. You are in real estate so I'll share a few examples:
-
create a mortgage calculator or other tool which is helpful to clients and agents alike. Take a look at other tools on the market and try to make your tool better, offer more features, have a cleaner interface, etc.
-
write articles people want to read and link to. Some examples would be: Top 5 things to look for in your next home, 10 reasons to find a new real estate agent, How the 2012 tax law changes will affect your next home purchase, etc.
-
write about any scams or issues home buyers want to avoid
-
tie into any recent news items
-
share a success story, or a failure story and how others can avoid the same pitfall
I view SEO as a straight line. Build a solid platform (i.e. website) you can use to share your message. Offer your message (i.e. articles) in the highest quality manner possible, and talk about subjects readers want to learn about. Then let the world know about your site (i.e. link build).
The problem most sites face with link building is the sites are poorly built, or the site doesn't present the company in the best possible view. The next challenge is either the site has great content written about topics which are not of interest to people, or they have average content which is available on a hundred other websites. Be current, be relevant, be exceptional and your results will follow.
-
-
as a follow, how do I remove the backlinks on my own? Is there a way to do that, without waiting for someone at the spammy directory site to respond to me?
-
Thanks a million for the good advice. I appreciate your time, any good recommendations for seo professionals would be appreciated. Also any advice once the content is approved for getting some links other than directories would also be helpful.
-
Dan, I agree with your thought process about the bad links. If a new site grabs a bunch of "bad" links such as low quality directories and such, it can directly damage the site. It's a case that absolutely can show the idea "links can never hurt you" is not correct.
I don't agree it's a problem for the snippet you used showing the article rather then the home page. The text you copied is an article snippet with proper anchor text on the home page linking to the article, telling Google the article itself would be the best result.I tried searching for a bit of text unique to the home page "As Eden Prairie Realtors and Certified Community Experts(sm)". It was returned as the #1 result in Google.com.
Overall the site has a lot of issues. The more I look at the site, the more I see. The article you quoted is titled "Eden Prairie Homes Still in Demad" Mis-spellings on the home page is really bad and a sign of a lower quality site.
In short, there are a variety of issues which need to be resolved. My suggestion would be to fix the site, try to remove as many of the spam backlinks, earn authentic links to offset the spammy links, and then wait 30 days at which point rankings should improve IF the site has good content.
-
Also, this google webmaster tools video is interesting too: what steps can I take to diagnose a drop in rankings?
-
Hi Ryan
Yes, you're absolutely correct to question that, good call. What I saw in Majestic (which I hadn't time to share before) was all of those sitewides were coming from "bestdirectory4you.com" (see screenshot). What do you think? Not a very high value site, including the others from the screenshot. It was all exact match keyword anchor text, on pages with tons of other links etc.
Secondly, check out the next screenshot - text cut and paste from the homepage and put into a search with quotes, but we're only getting two inner pages in the results. Seems like there's something going on with the homepage not showing (although it is in the index).
In fact a site: search doesn't show the homepage first, but it brings up all the inner MLS pages.
It would seem the drop in rankings has something to do with the homepage losing a lot of its juice, in google anyway?
Thoughts?
-Dan
-
Hi Dan.
I have not used the Majestic backlink tool so perhaps I am misreading the graph you provided. It seems on Oct 24th about 50 links were created. According to the 2nd graph, it appears all of those links came from a single domain. I would initially guess it is a site wide link on a smaller website, and not an issue. Would you agree?
-
Your last month of backlink history does look very suspect (see screenshot from Majestic SEO) See the giant spike about a week ago?
I took a quick look at the site of the company who designed your site, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was something that they were involved with, although I can't say that conclusively without further research.
I would HIGHLY suggest doing what Ryan says, especially the part about finding a reputable professional SEO, not a designer who happens to "do SEO" on the side.
-Dan
-
From a SEO perspective your site requires numerous changes. My suggestion would be to start with the Beginner's Guide to SEO and apply what you read to your site. The guide is short and easy to read. If you decide you would prefer someone else to do the work, reach out to others in your industry and locate someone who loves their SEO provider, the same way you might want someone to find a good realtor. You don't want someone who designs sites and does SEO on the side, nor do you want someone who does an "ok" job. Whatever standards you use in your business should apply to those who directly support your business.
A few examples of items which should be addressed:
-
your logo has a link to your home page URL as http://edenprairieexperts.com/index.php. Each time someone uses that link they are redirected to your actual home page link, http://edenprairieexperts.com/. The logo link should match your actual URL and not require a redirect.
-
your footer links also have an issue where they are redirected. For example your anchor text "Eden Prarie Foreclusures" link is to http://edenprairieexperts.com/?page_id=122, but it is redirected to another URL http://edenprairieexperts.com/eden-prairie-foreclosures. Any time a redirect occurs there is a loss of PR within your site. All internal links should be direct links.
-
your site lacks trust symbols. I imagine there are realtor organizations you belong to, certifications you have earned, etc. which provide a value to your clients. Advertise them! The only trust symbol you display is "Certified Community Expert". I have no idea what that means. The badge in your footer is not a link but simply an image which says those words. A trust badge should be a link which confirms the badge is authentic, and explains what it means.
-
every image on your site should use an ALT tag description to explain to search engines and visually impaired visitors what the image represents.
-
there are other issues such as you lack a meta description tag on your home page, and your title is targeting three phrases.
With respect to the question you asked about your site's appearance in search engines, your site is well indexed by Google. Bing/Yahoo both are using the same crawler and they are much more selective about indexing web pages. The only page I see from your site indexed by Bing is your home page. If I search for "Eden Prarie Experts" your home page shows as the 4th result in Bing.com.
If you wish more of your pages indexed with Bing and Yahoo, create a Bing Webmaster Tools account. You can submit up to 10 pages per day, 50 pages per month, to Bing manually. A better method would be to improve the quality of your site and earn authentic links to where they will naturally index your site and rank your pages better.
-
-
May I ask what keywords you are hoping to rank for?
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
-
Ranking drop after image compression across website.
Hi all, Just checked my website in Google pagespeed insights and most of our website pages were required to reduce the images file size for better page loading. So I have compressed the images using https://compressor.io/ and https://tinypng.com/ and replaced the images. Then surprisingly ranking dropped even score improved for all pages with image optimisation. What would be the reason? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Optimizing Site for Multiple Business Services
I am currently optimizing for a site that does a ton of services:
Algorithm Updates | | ccdispoto
Web Development
Logo Design
SEO
Copywriting
Social Media
Email Marketing
PPC Marketing Is it better practice to optimize one "Services" page for multiple keywords or to break each service onto its own unique URL and optimize each page individually?0 -
Drop in Organic Traffic
Hi all, last Thursday (1/31) our organic traffic and conversions fell off the map, going from 15% of our traffic to just over 5%. We've started creeping back up, we were nearly 7% yesterday, but I'm wondering if anyone else experienced an extreme drop in traffic or any advice on what we should be doing next. We are currently building links from University and government organizations and are always creating fresh content on our blog and website pages. One thing that we thought of is this timeline corresponds with when we created a Google + local listing for our company. Is there any possibility we stopped appearing in as many national search results since we have a local listing? Our domain is www.dishcostsless.com. Any advice would be very helpful. Thank!
Algorithm Updates | | PlanetDISH0 -
New .TLD domains - SEO Value?
Hi all, I see that a new wave of domains are to be released soon. We are not talking or 1 or 2 new extensions, but more like 700 new extensions on a TLD level. What's your views on their SEO value? thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | bjs20100 -
Optimized site-wide internal links in footer - a problem?
Hello all - I am looking at a website with 8 heavily keyword optimized site-wide links in the footer. Yes, there are only 8 but it looks a bit spammy and I'm tempted to remove them. I imagine there's some possibility of a Google penalty too? What would your advice be? Thanks, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Google site links on sub pages
Hi all Had a look for info on this one but couldn't find much. I know these days that if you have a decent domain good will often automatically put site links on for your home if someone searches for your company name, however has anyone seen these links appear for sub pages? For example, lets say I had a .com domain with /en /fr /de sub folders, each seoed for their location. If I were to then have domain.com/en/ as no1 in Google for my company in the UK would I be able to get site links under this or does it only work on the 'proper' homepage domain.com/ A client of mine wants to reorganise their website so they have different location sections ranking in different markets but they also want to keep having sitewide links as they like the look of it Thanks Carl
Algorithm Updates | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Organic Search dropped 50% Wednesday and has not recovered
I've included two charts below. 1. Our organic search results for the last year and, 2. Results for the last 6 weeks. We were up to about 350 visits per day in June 2011. In late june we added affiliate links to our site and took a hit down to about 120 a day. At the end of august we moved the affiliate links behind a login. Only registered users saw them. And we started moving back up. Last week January 8-14 we were averaging about 550 per day. Then this Wednesday we dropped to 287. Thursday 268. And today is under 100. We have not updated our website at all. No changes. Does anyone have any idea what might have caused this plunge. Has anyone else seen their traffic drop in half. Thanks for your help. dash_month.jpg dash_year.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | openspan0 -
High bounce rates from content articles influencing our rankings for rest of site
We have a large content article section on our e-commerce site that receives a lot of visits but also have very high bounce rates. We are wondering if this is hurting the rest of our site's rankings. **When I say bounce rates I mean what ever metrics Google is using to determine quality content (specifically after the Panda update). ** We are trying to determine if having the content articles on our domain hurts us. We only have the content articles for link building.
Algorithm Updates | | seozachz0