Steady decline since Panda 4.0 but struggling to identify cause (and solution!).
-
Hello
I work as an in-house SEO (previously worked for an agency) for the website naturalworldsafaris.com. After a strong start to the year we were seeing really good growth but since Panda 4.0 was released we have been steadily declining.
Our site has, I believe, good, unique content and is largely free of technical issues. I'm struggling to identify what exactly is the issue for the drop. We've had several key terms drop from the top half of page 1 to page 2 of the SERPS, such as the term "Borneo Holiday" (on a Google UK search). I don't believe we have any duplicate content issues.
We've had a few external SEO specialists take a look and none have come up with anything new. Site speed has been flagged as a concern but when compared to our competitors in the SERPS we are consistently one of the faster sites so while we are looking to improve this, I don't feel it can be the only issue.
Any suggestions as to what else we should be investigating next would be much appreciated.
-
You've taken good steps so far and kudos for continuing to put time and effort into the cause. Great collective feedback. Additionally, have you run a keyword density tool on the home page? Your other top level pages are good candidates as well. Check All Text and Headlines. Other SEO's can chime in but rule of thumb has been no higher than 4% keyword density on a page. A high density in Headlines could indicate an issue as Headlines has historically been a key component in Google's algorithm. I haven't studied at this granular level but others may have. All the best.
-
Thanks Pixel by Pixel. We don't operate on a local basis which is why we've not done anything with Google local before.
I'll look into the images, thanks for picking up on that; I think a lot of it is to do with how the site was built, it uses a lot of images for all the styling. While the site is large it holds a lot of good, unique content and on the surface I think we do meet all the requirements that Google recommends for content depth and quality.
Will keep looking through to see if there is another issue we can spot though!
-
Hi Kate,
Unfortunately it's always a guessing game but couple of things i did notice - you've got a Google plus page set up but you seem to have forgotten about Google local (because it's always fun to confuse people by naming all your products Google "something") - https://plus.google.com/113270767742987744992/about it can be helpful to make sure that it is up to date as it can assist any local searches.
You've got a rather large site which is fine just make sure its all optimized so every page is helpful, authoritative etc.
Another oddity is on my quick look you've got a very large volume of images (nearly 90% of your links) which is fine but they all have very similar names (and a lack of lat tags).
Although somewhat controversial don't forget to get people to review you! e.g your Google local is without reviews which can help identify your site as a great place people are using and a reason why you should move up in the SERP.
Hopefully there is some 'Leads' for you to look into from my very brief look (I also noticed you're in Brighton High five)
Just a quick disclaimer all the above is not a garuntee and it's only observations i made I'm sure some of the Moz "recommended" list can come with a very good action place to help your site if you wanted a bit better advice etc.
The last bit of advise is remember Google wants to give the best answer to a search so make your site that, with information that's going to help and then back that up with e.g shares/ reviews etc. show people found it helpful if possible.
Best of luck!
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
-
4-5 New High Quality Links/Month, Enough to Increase Domain Authority?
The link profile on our domain is poor and our domain authority is only 18. In April we migrated domains and our domain authority tumbled from 24 to 8 and as of August had recovered to 18. Since August we have engaged in a link building campaign. We are getting 4-5 new links per month. They are good quality. Can we expect to see see an increase in our domain authority? If so, when? The domain is www.metro-manhattan.com. The new links to date are below: <colgroup><col width="114"><col width="252"><col width="377"><col width="296"><col width="97"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
| Status | Anchor text | Final URL | Terget URL | Live date |
| | | | | |
| Done | office space for rent in Manhattan | | | |
| | | | /commercial-space/office-space | 9/20/2018 |
| Done | medical office for rent | | /commercial-space/medical-space | 9/21/2018 |
| Done | office space for rent in Manhattan | | /commercial-space/office-space | 9/23/2018 |
| Done | office space for rent in NYC | | /commercial-space/medical-space | 9/24/2018 |
| Skipped | | | | |
| | | | /commercial-space/medical-space | 10/8/2018 |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |0 -
Rankings Tanked since new Site redesign land new url Structure ? Anything Glaringly Obvious I need to check ?
Hi All, I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago. My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website. We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore. Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store. Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords. We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right. Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?. I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ? Or is all this expected when doing such changes ? Any advice greatly appreciated .. Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Penguin 3.0 - Very minor drops across the board. Don't think its a penalty, any ideas?
Hey All, I just can't figure this out. My site has been ranking well for years, i've never done anything suspicious with it and since the penguin update, my rankings have dropped across the board but only by about 4 - 8 places each, some terms have went up from nowhere to page 8 etc. I don't think i've been hit with a penalty, so I don't know what the problem is or how to recover from it. Does anybody have any ideas on what could be wrong? Update: Perhaps some sites that were linking to mine have been hit with a penalty? Update 2: I just found myself somehow in some spammy link network for 600 sites that looked identical, I don't know how or why my website is in this! I have disavowed all of these links 5 days ago, no change to rankings. pY80Dzi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Use "If-Modified-Since HTTP header"
I´m working on a online brazilian marketplace ( looks like etsy in US) and we have a huge amount of pages... I´ve been studing a lot about that and I was wondering to use If-Modified-Since so Googlebot could check if the pages have been updated, and if it is not, there is no reason to get a new copy of them since it already has a current copy in the index. It uses a 304 status code, "and If a search engine crawler sees a web page status code of 304 it knows that web page has not been updated and does not need to be accessed again." Someone quoted before me**Since Google spiders billions of pages, there is no real need to use their resources or mine to look at a webpage that has not changed. For very large websites, the crawling process of search engine spiders can consume lots of bandwidth and result in extra cost and Googlebot could spend more time in pages actually changed or new stuff!**However, I´ve checked Amazon, Rakuten, Etsy and few others competitors and no one use it! I´d love to know what you folks think about it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
What may cause a page not to be indexed (be de-indexed)?
Hi All, I have a main category page, a landing page, that does not appear in the SERPS at all (even if I serach for a whole sentence from it). This page once ranked high. What may cause such a punishment for a specific page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Panda Recovery - What is the best way to shrink your index and make Google aware?
We have been hit significantly with Panda and assume that our large index with some pages holding thin/duplicate content being the reason. We have reduced our index size by 95% and have done significant content development on the remaining 5% pages. For the old, removed pages, we have installed 410 responses (Page does not exist any longer) and made sure that they are removed from the sitempa submitted to Google; however after over a month we still see Google spider returning to the same pages and the webmaster tools shows no indicator that Google is shrinking our index size. Are there more effective and automated ways to make Google aware of a smaller index size in hope of Panda recovery? Potentially using the robots.txt file, GWT URL removal tool etc? Thanks /sp80
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sp800 -
Whether our shared articles caused Panda hit to our high quality site
Hello, We are a quality site hit by Panda Our article collection: http://www.nlpca(dot)com/DCweb/NLP_Articles.html is partially articles written by the site owners and partially articles that are elsewhere on them web. We have permission to post every article, but I don't know if Google knows that. Could this be why we were hit by Panda? And if so, what do we do? We've dropped way down in rank but have worked our way half-way back up. Two of our main keywords are: NLP NLP Training Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0