What happened with Hayneedle's rankings?
-
Hayneedle is an e-commerce company that operates 200 niche sites selling indoor and outdoor home products. They were ranking at the top of the first page for most terms related to their sites (fire pits, fountains, benches, etc.), but all of a sudden at the end of April they lost their rankings, getting dropped to page 4 or lower for tons of their sites (barstools.com, patiofurnitureusa.com, adirondackchairs.com, benches.com, etc.).
Does anybody know what caused this? Other than one thread on an SEO forum, we haven't been able to find any discussion about it online. It seems like cross-linking between the sites could have been a problem here, but we'd love to hear thoughts from the experts here on this. Our company is using the same business model of one brand with niche sites and we want to avoid anything like this happening to us.
-
Seeing Hayneedle sites back in the SERPs today. Looks like they removed the heavy crosslinking.
Strange that they seem to be at full previous rankings. Maybe this is old data?
I would have expected them to have lost some power without cross linking or something else devalued.
-
Very possible, I've never even seen one of their sites before so am completely unfamiliar with them.
Fell into the same trap I've seen others fall into before and attribute everything to a known change if it occurs around the same time and not think whether it could have been something different.
Glad you're keeping me honest
This is interesting though - http://www.jobmagic.com/job/Internet-Marketing-Internship-SEO-Job-Omaha-NE-68114-US-6904531.html -
-
Hayneedle's drop didn't occur on one of the dates of a Panda update. Unrelated to Panda is my bet.
-
Doh, apologies, I didn't read the question right.
Never the less, looks like it could be Panda.
Hard to pinpoint exactly what Google doesn't like about it. Their main site does look a massive link farm with that many domains and links on it.
I think they've just been caught in the cross-fire rather than having done anything wrong, but as the main sign of a link farm is the interlinking of sites I would guess that, though can't be sure (doesn't seem to be anything dodgy in their code, not looked into their link profile and there's not too much else they could really do to be more authoratative with content).
If you have a similar site then I'm not sure what I would do to demonstrate that it was simply a directory of your other sites.
Sorry I couldn't be more help.
-
Nothing has happened to our sites - we're not Hayneedle. Our sites are fine (currently). We're trying to figure out what happened to Hayneedle so we can avoid the same thing happening to us.
-
All I can say is that the seem to have been smacked by google. The sites that compete in my SERPs dropped from #1 or #2 rankings down to fourth or fifth page.
They had lots of heavy cross linking on their site. For years I have felt that it was for SERP manipulation rather than cross-selling because lots of the cross-linked sites were irrelevant.
But, I honestly don't know what happened... they lost rankings on all of their estores so Google must have caught them in some type of sin and demoted all of their sites.
-
Sounds like Panda got you - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html - It's designed to get rid of content farm style sites and thin affiliates.
It seemed to get a 3rd update towards the end of last week (or a little before) which may be what caught you.
Good news is Google tells you what they want you to do about it - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
Bad news is there are very few success stories and you're at the mercy of Google as to when they'll run the check again (the update is not part of the main algorithm but a supplemental one run intermittently).
The fact it's hit all of your sites suggests that you're not recognised as high quality sites or appeared to be a farm. Did all your sites link to each other in some way?
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
-
8th October - anything drastic happen?
Hi all, So, I have done nothing SEO heavy on my site for a couple of months, I deleted a page and moved the content to the homepage, but thats about it. Anyway, for our main keyword we have dropped from a pretty regular 20-30th position we have enjoyed for the past 4-5 months right down to 95th. Other keywords have also dropped by a few pages but not as drastic. I got hit by some spammy 'forex' links on the UK Business Forums clones appearing (as per my other post), but they started AFTER the 8th October. Something happened on that day which very rapidly ruined my rankings. Has anyone else seen this happen? Or could it be Penguin 4 checked out my site on that date? I have not dropped at all for my Brand Name or other keywords, it seems to be the higher searched keywords I have taken a plummet on. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phero0 -
Click Through's for ranking
Back in April of 2014, Rand performed an experiment to determine if Google clicks-throughs made a difference on rankings. He Tweeted and asked people to search on a specific term, and then click on a specific listing, to determine if the immediate clicks made a difference. Within 2.5 hours, his search listing went from #10 position to #1 position. My question is this: If this experiment still works today, could you right click, copy link address of the SERP listing from Google's page and put it in a Facebook or Twitter post, and receive the same results? Or would this be gaming the system? Here is an example of the link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiaqZD9-cXLAhUKyWMKHfFID70QFghYMAk&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbuzzy4shots.com%2Ffocus-pain-relief%2F&usg=AFQjCNElHaso_vXP4rWQdsaX1JdP8IItMQ&sig2=Sg9r6zSbW0pZQtb4ZbzJqg&bvm=bv.117218890,d.cGc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tdawson090 -
Macrae's Blue Book Directory LIsting
Does anyone know more information about this directory? Is it a good quality directory that I should pay to get listed on?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
If our site hasn't been hit with the Phantom Update, are we clear?
Our SEO provider created a bunch of "unique url" websites that have direct match domain names. The content is pretty much the same for over 130 websites (city name is different) that link directly to our main site. For me this was a huge red flag, but when I questioned them and they said it was fine. We haven't seen a drop in traffic, but concerned that Google just hasn't gotten to us. DA for each of these sites are 1 after several months. Should we be worried? I think yes, but I am an SEO newbie.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Buddys0 -
What's the right way to gain the benefits of an EMD but avoid cramming the title?
Hi Guys, Say I'm (completely hypothetically) building weddingvenuesnewyork.com and right now I'm organizing the tags for each page. What's the best layout so that I can optimize for "wedding venues new york" as much as possible without it becoming spammy. Right now I'm looking at something like "Wedding Venues New York: Wedding Receptions and Ceremony Venues" for the title.. To get other strong keywords in there too. Is there a better layout/structure?.. And is having the first words of the title on the homepage the same as the domain name going to strengthen the ranking for that term, or look spammy to Google and be a bad move? This is a new site being built
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xcyte0 -
Does the Traffic boost SEO/SERP ranks?
Hello, I know a guy that sells Organic traffic, bought 10k from him, will this help me to bost google seo ranks? Attached a screenshoot thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 7liberty0 -
How The HELL Is This Site Ranking So Well In Google Places?
When I do a search for this site it ranks number 2 on Google just below the official federation of master builders website for the keyword phase "builders in london" this is the site http://bit.ly/Lypo8E which is a nasty looking blog which has nothing to do with builders and they don't even have an address anywhere on the site. The only thing I can see is that they are sharing there address with a lot of other businesses and all of the citations from those other businesses are causing them to rank higher on Google places, but surely Google can't be that stupid right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | penn730 -
Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?
Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully. I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both. I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smckenzie750