Page position dropped on Google
-
Hey Guys,
My web designer has recommended this forum to use, the reason being: my google position has been dropped from page 1 to page 10 in the last week.
The site is weloveschoolsigns.co.uk, but our main business site is textstyles.co.uk
the school signs are a product of text styles.
I have been told off my SEO company, that because I have changed the school logo to the text styles logo, Google have penalised me for it, and dropped us from page 1 for numerous keywords, to page 10 or more.
They have also said that duplicate content within the school site http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/school-signs-made-easy/ has also a contributed to the drop in positions. (this content is not on the textstyles site)
Lastly they said, that having the same telephone number is a definate no no. They said that I have been penalised, because google see the above as trying to monopolise on the market.
I don’t know if all this is true, as the SEO is way above my head, but they have quoted me £1250 to repair all the errors, when the site only cost £750.
They have also mentioned that because of the above changes, the main text styles site will also be punished.
Any thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated as I don't know whether to pay them to crack on, or accept the new positions.
Either way I'm very confused.
Thanks
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas
Did you agree with the SEO people a list of KW to rank on?. I just ran a simple search with some kw on google.co.uk and the rankings I found were
aluminium school signs 5
safety signs 50+
school sign company 7
school signs 50+
school signs in aluminium 5
we love school designs 50+So you are at least on first page for some of the KW in your title tags and that describe your business. This is not what you expect to see if your website drops to the 10th page of Google's results.
Try downloading a program called "free google monitor" from cleverstat, Use it to find your ranking for the KW that are important for you. You probably still rank well enough on them.
In my opinion the SEO company is giving you a vague list of what they will do. The activities they list are not wrong, but since they lack detail I would not be comfortable with giving my business to them. I think they are not being straightforward with you on what happened, why it did and what is it exactly that they will do about it.
You should probably get a quote from some other (quality) SEO companies.
Cheers
Jorge
-
Hi Thomas
Firstly, i would suggest having two sites is not you trying to monopolies the market. There are many companies out there that have several sites all connected to each other and who are selling various types of products. Have one page about a product you sell and then developing a website within that niche to sell that one product shouldn't be an issue. I have worked with websites before that have done what you have done.
However, i am assuming they designed your other site as well as your main site? At which point this didn't point out their "concerns"?
The last Penguin 2.1 update was around October and the one before that in May. The Penguin update is meant to improve the search results by targeting spam website. Those that have bought links or who have been adding their website to websites specifically boost Google Rankings. This article should explain it better. http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-penguin-update
I noticed that you said there is no Google Analytic in place? This is very odd for a company that is meant to be doing your SEO. How do they track anything or even see what keywords your customers are coming in onto your site.
I would suggest that they have dropped the ball, if they ever had it. Now your site is suffering and they are blaming Google for it. If they had always been doing your SEO and correctly then there shouldn't have been such a massive dip in your listings. Yes sometimes you can be unlucky. However, from what you have said and the way that Penguin works it shouldn't have affected you this much because of one page and one website.
I would advise you not to pay the £1250 plus VAT. Firstly that is a large amount of money. I would also suggest that you consider shopping around for a new SEO company. That would be my personal thoughts after doing SEO for a few years.
Bex
-
Thanks Jorge,This is what they emailed me. (sorry it's long)
below would be best route to take, but this would mean you losing http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/- this would stop the possibility of a ban being sanction too www.textstyles.co.uk and give you the best chance to regain rankings quickly and cost free.
If however you really want to salvage www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk we can help but it will take time and a lot of hard work, there will be costs but we will not add on mark-ups and you would only pay for time and back link building costs involved.
£1250 + vat would help cover the onsite work, rewriting the content, template coding enhancements for inner pages, and a targeted high value back links programme run over 8 weeks. We would normally charge around £1750 + vat for this, has it is a lot of work and will take up much time and resources.
We have shown you we can rank a website, and we maintained rankings for many months, we really want to help you regain rankings to help you out and continue the business relationship and has we suggested above there is a quick and free fix by pushing this website into your main one, but if you want to go with this second choice, I would advise acting fast, or you run a risk of your main website getting a google ban for a web ring.
From our side we will need to do the following.
1 – Re-optimise the website sitewide.
A – Where possible split the content up, to show a little at the top of a page and the rest at the bottom.
B – Some pages may need rewriting from new, has google has taken away the content credits from them.
C – Work on high value back links to help regain google trust.
D – Work with google webmaster tools to ensure any tweaks are corrected.
E – Help regain content credits to your top level homepage - https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Using+the+best+materials+to+create+vivid+and+imaginative+signs+that+can+easily+be+tailored+to+match+any+particular+schools+preferences,+here+at+weloveschoolsigns.co.uk,+our+attention+is+purely%22&hl=en-GB&rlz=1T4ADRA_enGB440GB440&filter=0&biw=1680&bih=884
You can help out by ..
1 - Replacing the phone number with a new one.
2 – Replacing the logo and any reference to text styles from the website.
2a: An example here is http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/about-us/ you mention “Text Styles UK Ltd” in the first and end sections.
Thanks Thomas
-
This is very odd.
I propose the following: ask your SEO company to put into writing what they told you by phone and to send it to you. I can give you and unbiased opinion if you send me their reply by private message. Please note that while I'm not an authority in SEO and I do not do consulting, at least I think I can help you determine if your SEO company is telling you something that makes sense or not.
Also ask them to give you a detailed quote on this 1250 quid job to "fix" your site's position. I agree with Bex when he writes that the amount is extremely high for such a job.
Cheers
Jorge
-
Hi Bex,
Thanks for your reply.
The duplicate content has been in place since day 1 and I agree they should have spotted this.
We are a printing company, who supply anything from promotional pens, polo shirts, signs etc,
The school signs is a product of ours, which has a simple page on our main site textstyles.co.uk, our new site is designed especially for the school sign market. weloveschoolsigns.co.uk
This is what they are saying about me trying to monopolis eteh market, they said google hate this, and as a result dropped me to page 10.
The penalty they say, comes under the last penguin 2-1 update, but this is way over my head...haha
Thanks for your email, and I appreciate your feedback
Thanks Thomas
-
Hi Masoko,
Thanks for your feedback,Yes, pretty much. They just mentioned that my recent editing in wordpress, change of logo etc, allowed google to spot that it is a micro site from our main company.
As a result, they said I'm now on page 10.
I didn't notice the drop myself, and I also hadn't checked my position recently.
There is no google webmaster in place or google analytics, and I have had no message from google, only the phone call from my SEO team, informing me of the drop.
Thanks again
Thomas
-
Hello
I worked for an agency for a little while in SEO and i can tell you the people getting in the business weren't always good at explaining the full truth to customers when it came to SEO. Which upset me greatly.
Can you maybe explain more where this duplicate content in? I am a bit confused by your link. I would also agree with the other person who has answered. Simply changing your logo shouldn't result in such a drop in positions. What i would suggest it could be is bad backlinking. The reason i say this is because the Agency i left had no SEO person for 6 months after me. All sites were doing well then after i left they just anyone to just do the SEO. This resulted in people constantly link building to sites that were no good. Then one company crumbled in the SERPS their traffic dropping for 10,000 a month to about 2,000 a month in what should be their busiest time. A friend of mine who worked there still kept me up to date on the situation told me their rankings went from page 1 all the way back to page 5 for keywords they had ranked highly on for a long time.
I believe their only option in the end was to take down the site and relaunch on a new domain to break the links with the old bad sites. I believe they seemed to have picked up in traffic slightly.
So in answer to your question this could be the problem. Duplicate content shouldn't cause such a drop. However, surely your SEO company should be making sure there is no duplicate content? As for the phone number i haven't heard that before. If it is in the header or the footer, i shouldn't think it will make much difference. AS there are plenty of companies out there that have the same registered address but are different companies. This info is on the website in the footer normally and their websites are being penalised.
They want to charge you £1250! When i worked in an Agency it was about £40per hour. When i do freelance i charge 20 per hour. Based on those figures they say it is going to take 31 hours to fix!! As i assume you will have to pay VAT on top. I am not sure how they can say 31 hours is the amount of time it will take to fix. What are they going to be doing on it? I would demand a breakdown of exactly what they are doing for that money.
Also can you confirm if both sites are selling the same products or to the same market place?
Hope this helps.
-
Hello
What was the developer's argument exactly? I mean, did they give you more information or just told you: "hey, you changed the logo and now you're on page 10"?. I think it is preposterous and unprofessional to say such a thing. A simple change of a logo should not wipe out your rankings.
Did you notice the drop yourself or did the developer inform you of it? Who does the rank tracking usually?. Do you have access to your Google Webmaster tools? If so, have you received a message from Google informing you that your site was being hit by a manual penalty?
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
-
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Reviews not pulling through to Google My Business page
OK, a local SEO question! We are working with a plumbing company. A search for (Google UK) shows the knowledge panel with 20+ reviews. This is good! However, if you search for "plumbers norwich" and look at the map, thecompany is on the third page and has no reviews. I've logged into Google My Business, and it says the profile is not up to date and only 70% complete with no reviews. This is odd, as there was a fully complete profile recently. Any ideas on how best to reconcile the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ad-Rank1 -
Would it work to place H1 (or important page keywords) at the top of your page in HTML and move lower on page with CSS?
I understand that the H1 tag is no longer heavily correlated with stronger ranking signals but it is more important that Keywords or keyphrases are at the top of a page. My question is, if I just put my important keyword (or H1) toward the top of my page in the HTML and move it towards the middle/lower portion with css position elements, will this still be viewed by Googlebot as important keywords toward the top of my page? QCaxMHL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Two Similar Profile Pages: One Ranks 2 in Google - The Other 150
My client's site has a directory of doctors on it's site and they are targeting weight loss surgery patients. The problem is that when searching "weight loss surgeon richmond va" one of the doctor's profiles ranks 2nd in Google organic results while the other is not even in the first 10 pages. Both have very similar link profiles and I have checked all the technical things like noindex tags, canonicals, etc to see if that might be the problem but it all checked out. The second doctor's profile IS indexed in Google, just not ranking. We have done a lot of work to push his profile page up in the rankings but all efforts seem to have fallen short. Here are the profiles: http://advancedsurgicalpartnersofva.com/physicians/profile/Gregory-L-Schroder-MD - ranks 2 in Google http://advancedsurgicalpartnersofva.com/physicians/profile/Matthew-Brengman-MD-FACS - does not rank Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisvogel0 -
Substantial position drop? - Urgent
Have been looking at WMT and discovered that on 10 October there was substantial average position drop, from around 14 to 20.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
Does anyone have any ideas why this may have happened? As far as I know there's nothing that we have done could have impacted.0 -
Google Analytics: how to filter out pages with low bounce rate?
Hello here, I am trying to find out how I can filter out pages in Google Analytics according to their bounce rate. The way I am doing now is the following: 1. I am working inside the Content > Site Content > Landing Pages report 2. Once there, I click the "advanced" link on the right of the filter field. 3. Once there, I define to "include" "Bounce Rate" "Greater than" "0.50" which should show me which pages have a bounce rate higher of 0.50%.... instead I get the following warning on the graph: "Search constraints on metrics can not be applied to this graph" I am afraid I am using the wrong approach... any ideas are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Google + under Google business domain email account
Hello there, I have a quick and straight question and I am hoping to find answer here. What do we do with a G+ profile that was set up through a business domain's email account that is used by more than one person? We want to use the company name, but we can't as it is considered personal email account although it is under business domain verified by Google. Is there a way that we ask Google to change it and allow us to use the name of the company or should we just deactivate it? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | montauto0 -
Dropped 50 places for Page Title Change
Hey Guys, I've got a keyword set that is really annoying me. You see on the 19th July I changed my page title for the home page to what I thought would be something more competitive and instead of climbing from rank 9/10 I dropped out of the top 50. So I waited 2 weeks to see if it changed and it just stayed out of the top 50. After two weeks I changed it back again and I've been out of the top 50 ever since. I havnt made any real significant changes to the site as I've held off waiting for the keyword ranking to return but I dont think it will. I was trying to improve the keyword phrase "bahamas all inclusive" for the website www.smallhope.com. I'd managed to get on to page 1 rank 9/10 depending. I changed the title; from "Bahamas All Inclusive - Andros Bahamas Hotel - Bahamas Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive" to "Bahamas All Inclusive Vacation - Small Hope Bay Lodge All-Inclusive" This is really bad for us and I'm not sure what to do. I had a whole plan in place starting with the Title and moving on to the H1 tags, but now I'm not so sure. I've put everything on hold. If this was you what would you do to get back to page 1? Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0