Abandon Ship! Or do I stay aboard like a good captain?
-
Hey SEOmoz people. I need your advice.
I have a site that was entrusted to an SEO company last year to help me rank better. I didn't put any marketing effort into it myself (dumb), though I did spend lots of time on the web design & courseware preparation.
It was hammed during Panda and the first Penguin changes. I decided to fight for the site and spent lots of time learning about internet marketing and trying to get the dodgy links removed and disavowed. Plus I've started to create lots of quality content.
But after last weeks algorithm changes it's plummeted again. Dropping below rank 50 is a few cases.
My Question: How do you know if it's time to bail water or abandon ship and start up a fresh site?
Check out my Moz Ranking attached.
-
Hola Natan,
Thanks for your reply. Site speed and responsive design seem to be very important changes I can make. Thanks.
Plus I need to look more into Rich snippets.
Thanks for the advice brother!
-
Thanks Moosa,
You're right. I've only just started my quality linking. I guess I was a quite disheartened after the latest set backs. Onwards and upwards I guess!
-
Thanks Cesar, After panda and the various Penguin updates I've learnt a crazy amount about solid SEO practices. You're right, you learn nothing from getting it right all the time!
-
Mobile responsiveness, publisher markup, schema coding and hyperlocal all are things I can impliment relatively easily. I'll do some research into them all and see if I can implement them asap. Thanks Tim for your advice and time.
-
Thanks for advice. I'll run through all my on page errors and see if there is something wrong there. An easy thing to check and fix.
-
You must no abandon because you still ranking on 1st and 2nd page for some hard keywords.
1- Make your site faster
2- Make it responsive
3- Improve your social media (specialy your circles and +1's) and clean your toxic backliks (if is the case)
4- Look for long tail keywords. For example, follow not only "photoshop course sydney"; set in the dashboard "photoshop courses at sydney" "learn photoshop at sydney"... and many more... Use the Adwords keyword tool to discover more usefull kwords
5- Rich your snippets! Being at 6th and 8th on the ranks, you could get more traffic and improve your CTR if your snipet were showing 5 stars ratings, your face (Authorship) or something special chars in the description (that in a lot of cases is taken from meta description)
-
Witness, I've been in and out
clean up your back links
-
I agree with Tim! You are not kicked out of the search engines although I have witnessed websites who have gone in the penguin 1.0 and are back in rankings after cleaning links and doing some active inbound marketing the ethical way!
As far as your website is concern I think you have played half the battle! Link removal and disavow is one thing but in order to come back in rankings you should actively participate in inbound marketing, and get quality links, social shares and build branding in the digital world!
It is difficult but results will take you back in rankings from the desired key phrases and continuous effort will make you stay there for a longer period of time.
-
You are never going to learn unless you fail, fix your issues and it will make you a better SEO
-
I would not abandon ship. You are still ranking, even if it has dropped some. Seems like you have a great business and you have put some time into your site marketing. Based on what I am seeing, I would start bailing water. No reason to abandon ship until you have actually put some effort into it first. I think you are in better shape than you realize, but you need to take care of some basics right away:
- Make your site mobile responsive - MC just stated that this mobile usability was going to be a factor in Penguin. Last summer Google even said it prefers responsive sites
- Add publisher markup and authorship to your site
- Use Schema coding
- Focus on your local SEO efforts and hyperlocal authority
You have some pretty tough competitors, including the university on a very strong .EDU site, so you have to get your expectations aligned properly. Despite this, I think you can do have success.
-
I noticed similar drops in the latest report too (same date). That's really frustrating. However after digging a little deeper, I noticed that one of the modules we use with our CMS had a problematic update and it caused hundreds of duplicate pages, removing the NOINDEX tags from some pages. (pagination problem)
You should do the same and try to understand what may have caused the drop in rankings.
I looked at your attachment. Those are some very difficult keywords to rank for. That's not going to be easy if you start from scratch. By the way, I think Google is making some unfortunate changes again. I see irrelevant webpages outranking us all of a sudden because they have domain authority. Domain Authority is probably getting stronger again. It will make everything harder for new sites no matter what kind of content you have on 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
-
I would like opinions on Brian Dean's training courses and his advice -- is it useful?
I would like opinions on Brian Dean's training courses and his advice -- has anyone used it successfully? Is it worth the cost? And useful?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | marketingdepartment.ch1 -
Looking for service like one load
Hi,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | corn2015
I used to utilize the One Load service and noticed that it no longer exists. Can you please make some recommendations on video marketing platforms that are similar?0 -
Strange referral site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com would like some insights from the community
Hello Mozzers! I've noticed that our site has been receiving a significant amount of referral traffic from a rather suspect looking site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com Can anyone shed any light on this beast. Stopped receiving traffic around 11th November, but was getting 20K sessions over a 4 week period. The traffic was of poor quality, but would be good to know how or why they were linking to my site (fejobs dot com). Looks very suspicious. Thanks Justin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Does Ezine articles still make any good?
In the past many of the articles we posted in our blog we post on Ezine articles. After Penguin still make any sense to post on Ezine? Can the post on Ezine make any bad or Good to our ranking? What kind of tactics are guys using to promote articles/post in your blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Felip30 -
Press Release SEO. More than 90 press released in prweb. How good for seo
One of a competition sites known to us has published 90 press releases of all upcoming car models with PRWEB, PR7, DA 97 in last 4 months. All with different anchor based keywords and links. The page authority too is very high in some of them around 70 Though they might have had spent a sum, does this really influence from SEO perspective. If yes, can 10 press releases with PR Newswire which has PR8 and DA as 95 can be good if we consider doing this with all unique anchor text & links
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
Good link networks?
Hey Mozzers, quick question about link networks. I've identified quite a few, like these: Build My Rank Unique Article Wizard Authority Link Network Article Ranks EZ Article Link Socialadr Linkvana SEO LinkVine Does anyone have experience using any of these? The basic premise is they own or their members own tons of different blogs. You write an article, give it to them, they publish it one one of those blogs. You include a link in your article. Done. They charge a monthly fee to use and all that, so is it worth it? Anyone had any success with them? Finding mixed things on forums online, and since many of their websites like awfully spammy, wanted to poll the Mozzers and get your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
What are good sources to buy traffic and video views?
I am looking into buying traffic for a website and I'd like to know if anyone has had a positive experience doing so. What are the best companies that sell traffic? I also want to buy video views. This is a trickier question. I upload the videos to YouTube and use the embed code on my website. I want the paid video views on my site so I get the traffic and YT gets the video view. Any suggestions? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Storitz0 -
Is a directory like this white hat? Useful?
This is one of my competitor's backlinks: http://bit.ly/mMPhmn Prices for inclusion on this page go from $50 for 6 months to $300 for a permanent listing. Do most of you guys do paid directories like this for your SEO Clients? My gut is telling me to run away...but I don't want to miss a good opportunity if I should be taking it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarieHaynes0