Abandon Ship! Or do I stay aboard like a good captain?
-
Hey SEOmoz people. I need your advice.
I have a site that was entrusted to an SEO company last year to help me rank better. I didn't put any marketing effort into it myself (dumb), though I did spend lots of time on the web design & courseware preparation.
It was hammed during Panda and the first Penguin changes. I decided to fight for the site and spent lots of time learning about internet marketing and trying to get the dodgy links removed and disavowed. Plus I've started to create lots of quality content.
But after last weeks algorithm changes it's plummeted again. Dropping below rank 50 is a few cases.
My Question: How do you know if it's time to bail water or abandon ship and start up a fresh site?
Check out my Moz Ranking attached.
-
Hola Natan,
Thanks for your reply. Site speed and responsive design seem to be very important changes I can make. Thanks.
Plus I need to look more into Rich snippets.
Thanks for the advice brother!
-
Thanks Moosa,
You're right. I've only just started my quality linking. I guess I was a quite disheartened after the latest set backs. Onwards and upwards I guess!
-
Thanks Cesar, After panda and the various Penguin updates I've learnt a crazy amount about solid SEO practices. You're right, you learn nothing from getting it right all the time!
-
Mobile responsiveness, publisher markup, schema coding and hyperlocal all are things I can impliment relatively easily. I'll do some research into them all and see if I can implement them asap. Thanks Tim for your advice and time.
-
Thanks for advice. I'll run through all my on page errors and see if there is something wrong there. An easy thing to check and fix.
-
You must no abandon because you still ranking on 1st and 2nd page for some hard keywords.
1- Make your site faster
2- Make it responsive
3- Improve your social media (specialy your circles and +1's) and clean your toxic backliks (if is the case)
4- Look for long tail keywords. For example, follow not only "photoshop course sydney"; set in the dashboard "photoshop courses at sydney" "learn photoshop at sydney"... and many more... Use the Adwords keyword tool to discover more usefull kwords
5- Rich your snippets! Being at 6th and 8th on the ranks, you could get more traffic and improve your CTR if your snipet were showing 5 stars ratings, your face (Authorship) or something special chars in the description (that in a lot of cases is taken from meta description)
-
Witness, I've been in and out
clean up your back links
-
I agree with Tim! You are not kicked out of the search engines although I have witnessed websites who have gone in the penguin 1.0 and are back in rankings after cleaning links and doing some active inbound marketing the ethical way!
As far as your website is concern I think you have played half the battle! Link removal and disavow is one thing but in order to come back in rankings you should actively participate in inbound marketing, and get quality links, social shares and build branding in the digital world!
It is difficult but results will take you back in rankings from the desired key phrases and continuous effort will make you stay there for a longer period of time.
-
You are never going to learn unless you fail, fix your issues and it will make you a better SEO
-
I would not abandon ship. You are still ranking, even if it has dropped some. Seems like you have a great business and you have put some time into your site marketing. Based on what I am seeing, I would start bailing water. No reason to abandon ship until you have actually put some effort into it first. I think you are in better shape than you realize, but you need to take care of some basics right away:
- Make your site mobile responsive - MC just stated that this mobile usability was going to be a factor in Penguin. Last summer Google even said it prefers responsive sites
- Add publisher markup and authorship to your site
- Use Schema coding
- Focus on your local SEO efforts and hyperlocal authority
You have some pretty tough competitors, including the university on a very strong .EDU site, so you have to get your expectations aligned properly. Despite this, I think you can do have success.
-
I noticed similar drops in the latest report too (same date). That's really frustrating. However after digging a little deeper, I noticed that one of the modules we use with our CMS had a problematic update and it caused hundreds of duplicate pages, removing the NOINDEX tags from some pages. (pagination problem)
You should do the same and try to understand what may have caused the drop in rankings.
I looked at your attachment. Those are some very difficult keywords to rank for. That's not going to be easy if you start from scratch. By the way, I think Google is making some unfortunate changes again. I see irrelevant webpages outranking us all of a sudden because they have domain authority. Domain Authority is probably getting stronger again. It will make everything harder for new sites no matter what kind of content you have on your site.
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
-
Meta Description Length is Doubling (Like Twitter)
Just saw this: https://imgur.com/a/KQ0Hf This is the first time I have ever seen a meta description that long. Ever. I haven't seen any other sites covering this. That's a 275-character-length description that is not being truncated. Thoughts? I'm freakin' out.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TaylorRHawkins1 -
Backlinks from customers' websites. Good or bad? Violation?
Hi all, Let's say a company holds 100 customers and somehow getting a backlink from all of their websites. Usually we see "powered by xyz", etc. Is something wrong with this? Is this right backlinks strategy? Or violation of Google guidelines? Generally most of the customers's websites do not have good DA; will it beneficial getting a backlinks from such average below DA websites? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Does this graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit?
Hello,Does the attached graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit? Keep in mind that on our eCommerce site most purchases are from return customers. I forgot to add here that we cut a bunch of paid links in May 2013 as well. We quit cutting paid links when our rankings dropped - we thought it was the paid links. We currently have 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was on May 22. ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Guest post linking only to good content
Hello, We're thinking of doing guest posting of the following type: 1. The only link is in the body of the guest post pointing to our most valuable article. 2. It is not a guest posting site - we approached them to help with content, they don't advertise guest posting. They sometimes use guest posting if it's good content. 3. It is a clean site - clean design, clean anchor text profile, etc. We have 70 linking root domains. We want to use the above tactics to add 30 more links. Is this going to help us on into the future of Google (We're only interested in long term)? Is 30 too many? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Link Audit: How do I decide what is a good or bad link?
I am conducting a link audit for one of my formerly high-ranking pages. But despite reading quite a bit on the issue, I am still quite confused as to how to decide whether to keep or remove a link. Some links come from directories and social bookmarking sites. I know that generally speaking, you do not want to be on these types of sites, but what if their domain authorities, pageranks, and mozTrusts scores are good? For example, here is one of my links for "envelopes": http://www.folkd.com/detail/www.jampaper.com%2FEnvelopes The page itself has no MozRank, MozTrust, or links but the domain has an authority of 88, a MozRank of 6.41, a mozTrust of 6.31. Should I be looking on a page level or domain level basis? It also has over 5 million links, with over two million of those being external followed links. Is the high quantity of links a warning sign? I also used a free online tool (thesitevalue.com) to determine how much traffic the domain gets. Apparently it receives over 350,000 unique visits daily, so it must be useful to people. This, combined with the fact that we've received 5 visits from the link over the last year (not a lot, but something), makes me believe that the link's intent wasn't purely to "trick" Google. Despite this, I still have a feeling the link could be considered low-quality based on the domain's appearance. Similarly, some of our links are coming from domains named linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com. Is it safe to assume these are harmful links strictly because of their names? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jampaper0 -
Google rankings dropped like a stone
I've heard of this happening many times, but never to me. My client was Page 1 or 2 for 20 phrases, and they ALL dropped like a rock overnight. The site hasn't been banned by Google, as it's still indexed and the company name is returning results.There were no major changes done to tags or the code, and nothing black hat has been done. The only phrases that didn't drop contain the company name, and the results in Bing and Yahoo either stayed the same or moved up slightly since last week for all the terms. There's also no threat of spam, and it's very search engine friendly. The URL is http://www.universalaccounting.com. Help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesBSEO0