What do we do now?
-
OK where do we start?
Lets go back to June 2011So in June 2011 we left an SEO company that was looking after our account, after a year of being with them and not moving 1 place in the SERPS we decided to cut ties with them and move to a new SEO company...
Over the first 6 months things seemed to be going well, for our main keyword "car warranty" we started to climb up the rankings from #6 - #4 - #2, we also moved up for other keywords. One thing that I did notice when we were with the new SEO Company not much on-site optimisation was completed.Move forward to January 2012So over the Christmas period the usual happened, our rankings stayed the same put traffic dropped which is obviously normal for this specific time of year... But on the 7th of Jan 2012 our rankings dropped from #2 - #10, we contacted the SEO company in question and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.3 Weeks later we were still in the exactly the same position, the good thing was because we run a very good Adwords campaign the traffic to our site didn't drop.The SEO company then came back and said it looks like we have been placed in a 60day filter by Google and once the 60day filter had been reached we should pop back up - 65days came and went and we were still in the exact same position. After us waiting around for months to see if the rankings improved we decided to leave the SEO company and move all our SEO work back in-house.Move forward to February 2012Once we had full control over the account again we made some changes to the on-site optimisation of the site, we improved page titles, descriptions,
tags and also our content was re-written - we then waited for Google to pickup the changes and re-index our site.
YesterdaySo yesterday we checked our rankings - some of our longer tail keywords had improved but our main big traffic keywords had dropped even further - we had gone from #10 to #16, with the update to the algorithm yesterday targeting spammy websites we feared that we had been hit by the new update. We then cleaned up some links that looked spammy and asked for a reconsideration request. Now looking deeper into our backlinks we still have some spammy non-relevant links as well as a few big sitewide links - 1 sitewide link provides 732,667 links to our homepage and our total links indexed by Google is only 759,144.What do you think we should do...Wait for Google to come back to us after the reconsideration request?Remove more and backlinks?Build more high value links?If anyone can provide me with more information it would be great.Thanks,
Scott -
I have deal with this situation but at that time Google was kind of nice to low quality links or I should say Google was not as harsh as it is right now!
Well the ideal would be to build some quality links and remove low quality links side by side! Keep a balanced between the two activities and this might not hurt much but fluctuation is fairly possible!
As far as the redirection is concern, if the DA of the domain is good and some good natural links are point to it than, IMO its great!
-
Hi Moosa,
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
Yep I think that's what they have done really.
I'm going to remove all the low quality links that we have, the only worrying thing is now if remove alot of these low quality links will we drop even further?
We do also have another good domain that is currently ranking higher than us in the SERPS which has had no SEO completed on it.
Do we 301 our main site to this new domain??
-
WOW! Scott, this is interesting! And here is my take on it!
I am taking some lines from your description! That says,
‘and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.’
I will question that.. if it is exactly what they said then in my opinion they were putting the link on the website that they can control and this can be a site of their network! If lot of links are actually coming from the network sites then I must say that Google was nice to you!
Changing the content improves your long tail but your main keyword dropped even more! In my opinion here is what you should be doing!
Remove as many low quality links as possible!
Get in to your link profile, get your hands dirty and remove it… you don’t have a choice or else the slap can be even harder!
Get more social
Google take social as a way to find the website’s credibility, get yourself active on social media accounts like twitter, facebook and G+
Create Link Baiting Campaigns:
Start the brainstorming process, sit with your marketing team and come up with any idea that is link worthy! Start a Quiz, Contest, Award or Badge! Something that allow your industry bloggers to talk about you and link to you!
Get Press Links!
You can even connect link baiting and press links if you are creative enough! Do something that becomes a story. Journalist likes stories, approach them and get a link from PR and news websites!
Start a Blog!
Share your expertise and start a company blog, it will give you a hard time but you will be able to get some great links, content that will eventually get you SERP benefits!
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 submitted Sitemaps from AIO SEO to google search console, if I now delete the AIO plugin, do my sitemaps become invalid?
I use Yoast as SEO for my new Wordpress website https://www.satisfiedshoes.com/, however I couldn't get the sitemaps with Yoast as it was giving me error 404, and regardless of what I tried, it wasn't working. So I then got the All In One SEO while still having Yoast installed, I easily got the AIO sitemaps and then submitted them successfully to the Google search console. My question is that now I got the sitemaps on Google, since I'd rather use Yoast, If I want to delete AIO, will the sidemaps given to Google become invalid? There is no point keeping both SEO plugins active right? Thank You
Technical SEO | | iamzain160 -
Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?
About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )
Technical SEO | | DanWrightson0 -
How to track my actual traffic source using Google Analytics which are now showing as referral traffic?
Hi Mozzers, I went through many Q&As in the community this morning. I found a solution where I could just remove the referral site in analytics>admin>property>tracking info>referral exclusion list. So I removed paypal.com which was the main referral traffic. I thought the problem is solved. Later today I got another order, now the referral traffic is from eway.com, now what? Yes I know I will add this to the exclusion list but there will be many more referral sites. My main concern is I am not able to track the actual traffic source. How do I do that? 1. Do I need to use google url tracking for all my pages?
Technical SEO | | DebashishB
2. Do I need to add tracking code in each page of the site?
3. Is there a way to track the actual source of this traffic, now that the transaction is already made but reflects as referral traffic in Google Analytics? jZjTN0 -
Changed site to https now GWT and analytics - do I Know have to re-add it
Hi had the previous version (wordpress) site in GWT working just fine - now everything seems to have stopped. Do I have to treat this as an entirely new site and now add a new account for the https version? Many thanks,
Technical SEO | | AndreavanEugen0 -
One page of the site disappeared from serp for a month now
Im working on a clients site and been promoting a specific page to a keyword. started to move up the ranks and exactly a month ago on the 19/5 ( on the same day of the last update) updated the main page im working on with new content and published some other new pages on related subjects that all are linking to the main page im working on ( without the same anchor text in the links ) on the same day i found out that because of a technical error the new content was published on 5 other pages of the site and obviously created a duplicate content issue and i removed all the duplicates on the same day , i assume G caught this thing and punished the site for the duplicate content issue but : when i search the page directly with site:...i can find it. its been a month since i fixed all issues that i thought could impact the page..no duplicate content on the site. no KW stuffing. no spammy links to the page. everything seems fine now my question : why is my page not showing ? how long should i wait before giving up and creating a new page .? how come my site has not lost any organic traffic ( apart from that specific page ) ? is it possible to penalize only one page ? can i recover from this at all ? thanks
Technical SEO | | nira0 -
I went CDN and now Roger is ticked off?
I have optimized my blogs (for speed) and it was a huge success. One site that was loading around the 7-8 second mark now actually has more content including a walk on video and my best load time is a .42 seconds with both sides giving me low to mid 90s. Roger has been pretty quiet lately but now as the CDN requires 302 redirects to function with dynamic content, I have hundreds and hundreds of 302 warnings. I did not realize that site speed was weighted so heavy but 3 of my blogs have gone from PR1 to PR3 overnight without any other changes at all. I know Google will penalize a site with too many 302 but I am pretty sure that until you can afford a memcache system this is standard practice. Just wanted to make sure that I do not have another HARD lesson ahead. Thanks
Technical SEO | | yeagerd0 -
Spam posts indexed, what to do now?
Hi, So we had a staff problem last week and we let some spam posts (cheap nike jerseys etc.) that also got indexed by Google. (We just checked and there are lik 105 already indexed) Of course we have now removed all these spam posts but what is the best practice at this point? Are we supposed to do something else to remove these from Google's index? (maybe through google webmaster tools?) We have already edited robots.txt to disallow those pages as a quick remedy. And finally, could this have done any harm? We were quite slow noticing these posts to remove them. They were there for about 12 days. thanks
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
My site was hammered by this last update -- I'm freaking out -- what now
I looked at my seomoz report yesterday, almost all my money keywords went to hell. When I was looking at the graph for one of my keywords it looked so depressing I don't think I can look at it again. The funny thing is that my competitors have bunch of low quality links on unrelated websites and they haven't been touched. How to approach this problem, I'm scared to do anything at this point.
Technical SEO | | Tolod0