Pages plummeting in ranking
-
Hi all,
I have a question, which i hope you can answer for me. I have a site www.betxpert.com (a danish betting site) and we have tried to do some SEO to improve conversions.
One of the steps we have taken was to link to all of our bookmaker reviews in our menu (a mega menu). All of our bookmakers have an img and text link in the menu. The menu is shown on every page of the site.
Since we have made this change we have been plumeting down the SERPs. For the search "betsafe" this page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe is no longer in the top 50.
We also added the "stars" so that the google result will show our over all review for the bookmaker, in order to stand out in the SERPs.
Can anyone explain to me what the problem might be? Over extensive internal linking or?
-
You can always private message me thru moz as well.
Best of luck. -
Okay. Thanks a lot for the effort and answer. I hope it helps me...lets see when the changes take effect. I will post back here in a couple of weeks if i see improvements.
I have removed the links from the menu, apart from on the frontpage. Also i have added nofollow to the links in the section which caused the "extreme linking" warning. This should stop the fall in ranking if this in fact is the issue.
I will try and reduce the number of links on the page. In general we have a lot of links on every page. But if that is a crime i will try to avoid it
-
Based on GWMT, the links still count toward the total. I am not sure, if it would reduce the likelihood of a penalty though or if it would negate a penalty in place. I did a quick in WMT and could not find an answer to that portion.
-
Will it help me in getting fewer links if i set "nofollow" for some of them? Will google regard this as fewer links?
-
Yes, absolutely, it can and likely does have something to do with the fall in rankings. The rel= "no follow" should help. What is happening, is that they are seeing way too many links and that is considered "spammy."
What I would suggest is to take off links where they are not really needed. This should assist you immediately. If you make a big enough dent in unlinking (I suggest no more than 100 internal links per page...but, not on every single page if you can avoid it.) you should then consider submitting for reconsideration. A question is: Are any of your pages showing up in search?
The other thing you should consider is backing up a step and looking at the overall mapping of the site: Does it make sense? (remember, I am in the US, speak passable Spanish and no Danish..sorry) Using Google translation, I think some of it could be streamlined to provide a better experience for your bettors. Take off the articles if they are not needed. (Do people spend time on them? Do they migrate to betting from them?) There is a lot to look at and that, even for a bettor, may be too much.
Hope it helps,
-
Hi,
Thanks for the fast answer.
One thing i did not mention, but could be of relevance. A year ago the site was rebuilt and therefore a lot of URLs were redirected with 301 redirection. However a lot of links in a section of the site did not redirect due to settings on the new server. This issue was fixed last month, so now all the old URLs are being processed by Google and the pages which they redirect to have a lot of links (it is a statistics section) and i have received a warning in webmaster tools about an extreme high amount of links in the web site. I have today set rel="nofollow" on the larger part of the links on these pages (since i really do not want them all indexed).
Can this warning have anything to do with the fall in ranking? I am thinking if we are punished by having pages with too many links - all with links to the bookmaker pages on them?
In general we have a lot of links on the site. Is this really a problem? Is it a known fact that Google punisheds for having too many links in pages?
Regards,
Rasmus
-
Rasmus,
First, not knowing when the changes were made and assuming the only changes made are described above, here are some possibilities:
If the change is in the last few weeks, it may be a temporary fluctuation in the rankings and you may need to wait 3 to 6 weeks to see if there is a bounce back.
If that is not the case, in my opinion with the number of links you have, you have two issues: First, from GWMT:
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
There are other issues beyond this, your H1 is picking up the articles in the middle of the page (makes it unclear). The load time is long (D or F in YSlow depending on which test version). etc.
However, I would look at it from the standpoint of what did you change given the site itself. Again, if the only change was the links you described, it would be easy enough to delink them and see if you come back.
I understand with a betting site you want to show all a person can bet on and that you are trying to get people to look at info on their favorite sport, but to me the site is way over busy and could use some simplification. I cannot tell you whether or not Google sees it as spammy. I do believe there are too many links. Without testing it and just looking at it cursorily, I came up with close to 200.
Hope this helps,
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 and Indexing Issue
We have an established site www.getinspired365.com that previously wasn't SEO optimised. We are currently in the process of testing out some new pages to see if we can get them to rank in Google, however we are seeing huge fluctuations in where they rank. Within the first few days we saw our page rank on the first or second page, however it has now dropped out of the top 250 search results. We are wondering if we have made any mistakes with our optimisation ? Example Page : Keyword to target - "If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special." URL : http://www.getinspired365.com/if-you-laugh-you-think-and-you-cry-thats-a-full-day-thats-a-heck-of-a-day-you-do-that-seven-days-a-week-youre-going-to-have-something-special We can see it has been indexed by Google but is now not ranking in the top 250 search engine results. We have run the On Page Grader from SEOMoz and it ranks the page as an "A" so we suspect that we are doing the SEO ok on the page, but can't work out why it isn't ranking, despite ranking on the first or second page after a few days ? We have other pages that aren't SEO optimised that rank better than our newly SEO optimised pages e.g. Keyword - "THE BEST LOVE IS THE KIND THAT AWAKENS THE SOUL AND MAKES US REACH FOR MORE, THAT PLANTS A FIRE IN OUR HEARTS AND BRINGS PEACE TO OUR MINDS. AND THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE GIVEN ME. THAT'S WHAT I'D HOPED TO GIVE YOU FOREVER" URL: http://www.getinspired365.com/20130528 Any advice you could offer would be great. Thanks ! Mike
Technical SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
One page templates
Hi, I have in plan to implement One-page template (http://shapebootstrap.net/wp-content/plugins/shapebootstrap/demo.php?id=380) is someone have experience how this type of page have SEO problems? Best regards
Technical SEO | | komir20040 -
Low page impressions
Hey there MOZ Geniuses; While checking my webmaster data I noticed that almost all my Google impressions are generated by the home page, most other content pages are showing virtually no impression data <50 (the home page is showing around 1500 - a couple of the pages are in the 150-200 range). the site has been up for about 8 months now. Traffic on average is about 500 visitors, but I'm seeing very little entry other then the home page. Checking the number Sitemap section 27 of 30 are index Webmaster tools are not reporting errors Webmaster keyword impressions are also extremely low 164 keywords with the highest impression count of 79 and dropping from there. MOZ is show very few minor issues although it says that it crawled 10k pages? -- we only have 30 or so. The answer seems obvious, Google is not showing my content ... the question is why and what steps can I take to analyze this? Could there be a possibility of some type of penalty? I welcome all your suggestions: The site is www.calibersi.com
Technical SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
When creating parent and child pages should key words be repeated in url and page title?
We are in the direct mail advertising business: PrintLabelAndMail.com Example: Parent:
Technical SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach
Postcard Direct Mail Children:
Postcard Mailings
Postcard Design
Postcard Samples
Postcard Pricing
Postcard Advantages should "postcard" be repeated in the URL and Page Title? and in this example should each of the 5 children link back directly to the parent or would it be better to "daisy chain" them using each as parent for the next?0 -
How do I fix issue regarding near duplicate pages on website associated to city OR local pages?
I am working on one e-commerce website where we have added 300+ pages to target different local cities in USA. We have added quite different paragraphs on 100+ pages to remove internal duplicate issue and save our website from Panda penalty. You can visit following page to know more about it. And, We have added unique paragraphs on few pages. But, I have big concerns with other elements which are available on page like Banner Gallery, Front Banner, Tool and few other attributes which are commonly available on each pages exclude 4 to 5 sentence paragraph. I have compiled one XML sitemap with all local pages and submitted to Google webmaster tools since 1st June 2013. But, I can see only 1 indexed page by Google on Google webmaster tools. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/US/Alabama/Vinyl-Banners http://www.bannerbuzz.com/local/MO/Kansas-City/Vinyl-Banners and so on... Can anyone suggest me best solution for it?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Sudden drop in ranking google.co.uk ranking
Anyone else had any sudden drops in rankings this week? Is there an update going on? One of my primary keywords has dropped from 6th to 49th in the google.co.uk search results. Not in webmaster tools to flag an issue. I have downloaded the links from webmaster and it does look if some content has been scraped and then linked back to us from a large number of sites that we have never sort links from. I have upload the google disavow link tool. Only one keyword appears to be effected not all of them? Any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?
I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy. However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words. I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0