Site rankings down
-
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases.
Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now.
Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board.
We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this?
Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms.
In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly.
Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com
Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now!
Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice.
Best Regards,
Stephen
-
Our rankings on the two main keywords have recovered slightly. We've gone from page 5 to page 3 on 'nuts and bolts', and are page 2 on 'bolts and nuts'.
I think what's happened is that, rather than us being penalised directly, sites that link to us have been penalised, resulting in a knock on effect. Does this sound reasonable? I don't think we'd be page 2 on such a competitive term if we had been penalised.
I've been slowly building relevant links with prospective customers (ie a few classic car sites have linked to us, our old imperial bolts are very useful for them) and kept up a very basic social media profile - just the odd blog post and sharing on Facebook and Twitter.
Regarding links, looking through my link profile
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a>
we do have links from directories that don't look fantastic, more are shown in Webmaster Tools than are listed here. Some of the directories no longer seem to exist, I take it I don't need to do anything and Google will catch up in those cases. For the others, should I attempt to remove (or disavow) all links with names like best-directory etc? Are most directories bad these days? Or should I just concentrate on building better links?
Again, any advice is greatly appreciated.
Best Regards,
Stephen
-
Hi Jesse, thanks for your response.
Your advice is sensible, and I will keep building links with relevant sites. I've read a bit about disavowing now and I'm not sure that's the answer either.
What confuses me though is sites have leapfrogged us who have very few links and little on-page optimisation. I've optimised for 'nuts and bolts' - title, h1 tags, body text - hopefully without going overboard. Some of the sites above us are simply not relevant / have no links. So is linkbuilding still the answer?
Would you get rid of the dropdown navigation? With that, every page has 107 internal links. Ditching the dropdown would mean 2 clicks to get to the item you want rather than 1, but I don't think that's too bad. For example, it'd be 'Bolts and Setscrews > BSF Bolts'. I even had static pages rather than dynamic to help with SEO, and that's some major upkeep when I want to make changes! I think I'm going to move to a responsive design, I've been experimenting with other sites.
Best Regards,
Stephen
-
I'm still thinking about this.. I'd continue building links myself and see what happens.
The one thing I definitely wouldn't do is start disavowing. Make an attempt to remove the links yourself by contacting webmasters before doing this. And then still be sure you actually have been penalized before using the disavow tool. That thing makes me nervous...
-
Thanks for your response, much appreciated. I have thought along those lines, now I'm a little unsure.
I'd be happy if it wasn't a penalty, but I'm not sure. I downloaded the list from Google Webmaster Tools and there are quite a lot of directories there - most I don't remember building which is odd but possible over the years.
I've deleted a videogame forum profile I'm a member of I had which linked to my site, I'm looking at things like that.
I did think similar about other sites gaining links, but so many at once is odd. And there are now sites above us with zero links and hardly any on-page SEO, and hastily cobbled together pages with exact match domains - one of which if you do a Google search for 'nuts and bolts' is called 'bolts-nuts-washers', I won't link to them fully. That gives a good example, complete with flashing text(!). Very frustrating!
Google and SEOMOZ tell me I have 12 pages with duplicate titles and 80 with duplicate meta descriptions. I'll remove those also, other than that I'm not sure whether to start disavowing links.
Any ideas where I go from here? Any help appreciated!
Best Regards,
Stephen
-
Hmmm... glancing briefly at your link profile I'm not sure I could classify this as a Penguin Penalty. Especially with the SERPs dropping back in April. I understand it got worse post-penguin but still... Your link profile isn't too deep and you don't have thousands of weird bizarro-links coming in. Relevant blog commenting and social media will definitely not affect your site negatively.
There's a chance you just need to pick up your SEO efforts. Maybe the algo updates bumped up other sites that have been gaining more links than you recently or something of the sort. I'm not sure but I feel like you just need to get back on top of your link building efforts in a truly white-hat fashion and see what happens.
Sorry I'm not sure I'm being very helpful here.
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
-
Can Someone explain why this site ranks #1 and #2? I am confused.
Hi everyone, Here is my problem. This site: https://247ride.com/town-cars/ ranks for bunch of really good keywords. Such as lax car service, car service to lax etc. The keyword does not appear in Title tag, and only partially on meta description. The site's DA is 23 and PA is 22. Less than 29 links overall, and linking domains 8. Why in your opinion Google is ranking this page #1 and #2 for many competitive keywords. I know it's a hard question to ask but any input would be greatly appreciated. I am working really hard to rank for same keywords and so far i am at #11 position. Thanks in advance, Davit
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19851 -
How can a site rank high without any visible SEO tactics?
Hi SEO specialists, I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but there is something bugging me for awhile now, so I thought let's give it a try. I work for several clients and one of them works in the Psychic business. Since a few months we see that site from Psychicvop.com is taking over all kinds of top rankings in Google. The strange thing is that I can't detect anything that I always learned which is basic material for SEO. There isn't much content and there link profile isn't really spectacular either. Does any of you have an idea what it is about this sites that makes them outrank every other site in the business?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiveFootballTickets0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Can converting a site to HTTPS impact ranking?
We have a client with a very large site that would like to put a login on each page; however, that would require the entire site be put behind a secure connection (changing http:// to https:// on every page). They rank for a ton of keywords and rank well. Would the change impact their rankings at all? Could it possibly help them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dknewmedia0 -
Rankings Issue
Hey guys, and gals, So our site http://www.motorcyclecenter.com/ is having the hardest time ranking in the big G. We've built links, optimized, and all the other basics. If you guys have a chance, could you take a glance, and tell us what you think, as to why this site is having such a hard time. Much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leatherupseo0 -
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 -
Migrating a site
Hello, I have what a I think it's a noob question.. I have a medium size website and need to put it into maintenance for the next 2 months, and afterwards activate a completly new site. My client asked me to do this, cause the same people whoe run the constant flow of information on the site, are the ones who are going to develop the new site, so he wants to just close it out So... what are the steps for doing this with minimum impact on any SEO advances made this past months?.. How do I tell the search engines, Hey, just under maintenance for a while....then... i'm back in the game but this is my new structure. and the old one should go here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0