Sudden disappearance from google organic ranking
-
I have been ranked in top 5 for all relevant search terms for years. I have been in business for 25 years and am modestly speaking the best in our field. The name of my company is "Alaska Yacht Charters" and suddenly I have disappeared from Google search. Google "alaska yacht charters" and I am nowhere to be found. This all occured within days of my suspending my adwords account which I felt I didn't need because of my great organic ranking. What has happened?Geoff Wilson www.alaskanyachtcharters.com
-
Have you claimed your site in Webmasters Tools? If so, do you have a manual penalty?
You also have a LOT of duplicate content issues. Google could be choosing not to index your site because (not much) nothing is original. I pulled 10-15 sentences individually off your site and found so much duplication. I would suggest re-doing your whole homepage content while you sort out the link issues. Also, many inner pages need some re-work on content as well.
I agree though, it looks like a link issue. 170+ referring domains with 1700 links in Ahrefs is usually a dead giveaway of 2007-2011 link building. Disavow, reconsideration request & you should be back in the index. Your site needs a LOT more proper SEO work to rank well but that's a start to get you back in the index.
-
I agree with Marie. I see indications that your site has been negatively impacted by Google Penguin 3.0.
Viewing your site on semrush, I see that your loss in traffic occurred in October '14 -- the same timeframe in which Penguin 3.0 was rolled out.
I also see only "money" keywords populating your website's link profile (e.g. "alaska yacht charters," "alaska charter boats," "alaskan yacht charters", etc.). In other words, these links appear to be links that were created by you (or by extension, an SEO company) for the purpose of increasing Google rankings. Google considers this to be a "link scheme" and penalizes this activity: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
To move forward, I would first make sure that your website is verified/connected to Google's Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en). It's 100% free and you can simply upload a verification file to your server to get started. From there, you can review your website's inbound links and anchor texts. I would do a lot of research on DIY link audits before considering doing one yourself, but I can tell you that Google recommends being ruthless. Don't just pick a link or two that come from a Russian site. You have to be objective and honest about the links pointing to your site and whether or not they were created for the sole purpose of improving your ranking for a keyword. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-machete-16844.html
The first step for removing links is to simply reach out to the webmaster of a site/directory containing a dubious backlink and kindly ask them to help you remove it. If you had an SEO company build these links for you, ask them if they can provide you access to the user profiles they created to make these links. Hopefully you can just log in and get rid of the link yourself.
Your success rate in removing links by email solicitation may be very low. Most won't respond. Some may even ask for money. Never do this(!!!). It isn't the end of the world if you can't remove a link. Google has provided us a disavow tool that you can use to simply write off these links instead. They won't count toward your SEO anymore, but they can't count against you either (in theory). https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
If you can clean up your backlinks, then you have a shot at recovery, but this can only happen once Penguin refreshes again. We have no idea when this will be. It took over one year(!) between Penguin 2.1 and Penguin 3.0.
For that reason, you may actually want to consider building a new site in the meantime. More info on whether you should do that or not here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalty-new-site-18200.html
-
If you search the Moz Q&A there are many posts on disavowing. But, if you're not sure what you're doing it may be best to have someone experienced in disavowing take a look.
Also, in 2-3 weeks from now I'll be publishing a Beginner's Guide to Disavowing on Moz.
-
So you're only taking about branded links then otherwise what a link actually is these days is not so clear.
Dude you need to figure out if you even have a poor link profile before you start thinking of disavowing anything. You could have poor content or duplicate content on your domain that caused the drop or as you suggested because you closed PPC... very conspiratorial! Is there a correlation between adwords and google search?
Something the EU anti-trust commision on the break up of Google need to look at that if it's true.
-
A natural link is one that would be there even if links didn't matter for SEO. The best natural link is one where someone really wants to recommend you or to tell their readers about your content and then they link to you. Some industry connection links are ok. For example, if you are a vendor for a certain product and they list you on their vendors page that's good. Also, some directory links are ok.
Here are a some articles that might help:
http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2360254/is-that-directory-link-unnatural
-
Can you give me an example of what a natural link looks like or is these days?
-
Great! How do I disavow and how do I remove?
-
Can you pinpoint the date of your drop? Was it October 17 of this year?
Your backlink profile looks pretty typical for sites that were affected by the Penguin algorithm. Penguin was designed to demote sites that have gained an unfair advantage by creating links for the purpose of SEO.
Look at your anchor text profile...this is not natural:
You have many unnatural links such as these:
http://buysellin.co.uk/travel-c17-p1.html
http://gostylascott.blogspot.ca/2010/12/scott-gostylas-story.html
http://dollarlinksdirectory.com/business/Travel/
The reason why links matter for SEO is because Google thinks that if someone else recommended you (by linking to you) then you are probably a good site to show to searchers. But, if those links are self made, then these are not links that Google wants to count.
Can you recover? It depends on whether you've actually got truly natural links in your link profile. If so, then you can try to remove the unnatural links, disavow those that you can't remove and then wait until Google reruns the Penguin algorithm. Once this happens, provided you have done a good cleanup, then you will have escaped the Penguin filter and will be ranking where you should rank according to the good links you have and the quality of your content.
-
That appearance is from "google plus" not from my url...You will not find my url on top 100
-
You seem to be appearing at the bottom of page 1 when i search for your suggested phrase
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
-
There is a copy of our website that is ranking. How can I let Google know our website is the authentic site?
I just found another copy of my old website and have no way to take it down. Unfortunately, it's ranking so he didn't place it as a nofollow. (My boss hired someone to redevelop our website before I came on board and never finished the project). So, could this be hurting us? I tried to look to see if we were being penalized and couldn't find that we were. Also, ever since we migrated to a new domain name, our ranking is tumbling. I've redirected properly and tested to make sure they're resolving correctly and they are. I have no idea what is going on. We've virtually lost all ranking. Any help would be much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | npuffer790 -
Organization Schema on Interior Pages
What is everyone doing regarding organization schema markup on interior pages? The following article on Moz states that Organization schema should only appear on pages that are about the company (homepage, about page, contact page, etc.): https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/structured-data-for-seo-2 The Yoast SEO plug-in adds the Organization schema to every page of the site. I am trying to determine what to do with this conflicting information.
On-Page Optimization | | lexomatic1 -
Is there a benefit to hiding words from Google on ecommerce sites?
I think we all know that ecommerce sites have a lot of repeating functional texts on them. Is there a benefit from hiding this text from Google's crawler? Take this page for example, http://storage3.static.itmages.com/i/16/0805/h_1470425505_1090542_224cc344d4.png Some of the most dense words on the page are "Add to cart", "Add to Wishlist", "New", and "Sale". Is there any benefit to hiding those words from Google? The method of hiding I am talking about is not cloaking, but this, https://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/gsa_doc_set/admin_crawl/preparing.html#1076243 using the google:off index tag. So the content will be there still, but it will not be indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | LesleyPaone0 -
Ranking for a word when your image is showing up as #2?
I'm trying to rank for several specific words in my industry. I've noticed that many of the pages I'm trying to rank for the specific words, the main image of the page is being ranked. So my question is should I still try to rank my page even though the image is ranking as the first image displayed in the google results. Will this count against me by Google if I do? Or should I try to make the image being ranked more enticing for google searchers to try to increase traffic? Right now the images are not generating many clicks.
On-Page Optimization | | mr_w0 -
How Google differentiates web sites like directories?
Hi, I want to ask how google differentiates web sites like directories or company listing websites? How it understands that is a normal thing to have many links in a directory site? Are there some guides links about what to do and avoid and how to make SEO optimization for a directory web site.
On-Page Optimization | | vladokan0 -
Google Maps API as primary navigation
Is it okay for SEO to have a google maps api as the primary source of navigation? For example, have people find locations on a map instead of links to them. I'm wondering how/if Google views this method, kinda like how Google can't read images. Will Google realize that these pages are linked to from the homepage gmaps API?
On-Page Optimization | | terran0 -
Where does Google say this?
Just came across this article: http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/tips-for-avoiding-thin-content And, it states, "Google says that it will ignore pages with less than 200 words of body text " I submitted a comment to the author, but was wondering in the meantime if anyone knows where Google says this?
On-Page Optimization | | nicole.healthline0