Shoemaker with ugly shoes : Agency site performing badly, what's our best bet?
-
Hi everyone,
We're a web agency and our site www.axialdev.com is not performing well. We have very little traffic from relevant keywords.Local competitors with worse On-page Grader scores and very few backlinks outrank us. For example, we're 17th for the keyword "agence web sherbrooke" in Google.ca in French.
Background info:
- In the past, we included 3 keywords-rich in the footer of every site we made (hundreds of sites by now). We're working to remove those links on poor sites and to use a single nofollow link on our best sites.
- Since this is on-going and we know we won't be able to remove everything, our link profile sucks (OSE).
- We have a lot of sites on our C-Block, some of poor quality.
- We've never received a manual penalty. Still, we've disavowed links as a precaution after running Link D-Tox.
- We receive a lot of trafic via our blog where we used to post technical articles about Drupal, Node js, plugins, etc. These visits don't drive business.
- Only a third of our organic visits come from Canada.
What are our options?
- Change domain and delete the current one?
- Disallow the blog except for a few good articles, hoping it helps Google understand what we really do.
- Keep donating to Adwords?
Any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks! -
Ahh I get it now, redirect every URL from the old site to its homepage. Makes sense!
For point 2) I meant the URL Removal tool to de-index the whole site but this would no longer be needed if I apply the above suggestion.
Thanks a bunch!
-
Yep. The site isn't done. Every time we try to finish it, another couple of referrals come in.
Regarding "non-google sanction duplicate content" that's just my way with words. You have a French version of the site and an English version of the site. Without proper hreflang usage, that is duplicate content.
-
Well spotted, Travis!
-
ABSOLUTELY do NOT 301 anything from the old site to the new site...or you risk transferring the penalty!
I'm not sure what Google will do if you disallow via robots.txt AND 301. Most likely, this is safe, Google will remove the old site from the index and ignore the 301s. But I think there's some risk here that Google will read the pages anyway, see the 301s, and perhaps transfer the penalty.
Deleting the domain in webmaster tools will have no effect, other than to prevent you from seeing what Google thinks about the old domain :-/. Google will continue to index the old domain, follow redirected links, see duplicate content, etc.
-
Hello / Bonjour.
It looks like you might have an awful lot of duplicate content (e.g. category pages, date archives) on the site. I'd try getting rid of that before deciding to switch domains.
-
Hi Travis, thanks for your response.
I swear those hreflangs were OK not long ago! We'll fix them up, thanks!
Can you give an example of "non-google sanctioned duplicate content"?
The robots.txt file seems OK even though it's a bit heavy in verbatim. I'll ask to shrink it a bit. (By the way, I was curious about PhysVisible's robots.txt but looks like you're disallowing everything. Thought I'd let you know!)
Thanks again!
-
Merci Michael!
Can you elaborate on "Keep the old site running, but 301 redirect all of the pages to the home page..." ? Should any URL on www.oldsite.com redirect to the homepage of www.newsite.com?
We had these options in mind. What do you think of those?
-
robots.txt disallow the old site and map every URL with a 301 to help our users get to the right page while Googlebot won't follow those links (to be tested but seems logical), and/or...
-
Delete the whole old domain in GWT.
Thanks for your time!
-
-
Full disclosure: I've been studying hreflang/rel=alternate for the glorious day when someone wants, and will pay for, a solid Spanish translation. That day has not come. But I wanted to be prepared. So here goes:
Your English pages are pointing the canonical at the French pages. No nationalized form of English is mentioned in the hfrelang alternate. If your English speaking audience is Canadian, put en-ca in the empty quotes after hreflang=. Example from /en:
rel="alternate" hreflang="" href="http://www.axialdev.com/en/" />
All of your canonicals point to the fr-ca version of the pages. For the en-ca pages, they should point to the en-ca pages.
I grew up in Michigan. I have quite a few Canadian friends. The only thing that's different about spoken Canadian English is the pronunciation of 'about' and they tend toward en-gb in spelling. But you should use en-ca anyway.
Yep, you have a lot of site-wide links. That is true. That may be part of the problem. But right now, you have a lot of non-google sanctioned duplicate content.
The site also has one of the most involved robots.txt pages I've seen in a month or so. It may not be a good idea to call any old user agent, *, and not give them a directive. Check the end of the file.
A site should not nose dive within the space of a couple weeks without extensive search engine manipulation, or serious on-page issues. Your site has been live for seven years. It's better to doubt on-page first though.
-
Bonjour! (I lived in Montreal for 6 years :-).
I do a lot of penalty recovery work, and you're in the same situation as a number of my clients: algorithmic penalty (probably), and you've disavowed links, but....no Penguin update for a year.
The next Penguin data update is mostly likely very soon, from mutterings from Matt at SMX Advanced. It's been almost a year since the last one. Your disavows won't take effect until there IS a data update.
I would wait for the data update, and see if you recover on rankings for the 3 terms you had in your footer links from client sites. If you do, then great, continue on...
If not, then I'd be inclined to start a new domain, and move your content from your old site (and blog) to the new site, WITHOUT 301 redirecting. Keep the old site running, but 301 redirect all of the pages to the home page....you want Google to successfully fetch all of those blog pages with the great content, but find it's permanently moved to your home page, where that content no longer exists. This way your new site's content will not be seen as duplicate by Google (if you just 404 the pages, Google will presume the content is still as it was before it 404'd....FOR MONTHS).
It's worth going through all of the backlinks for the old site, seeing which ones are from healthy sites, and manually asking those webmasters if they'd kindly update their links to point to your new 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
-
What's the average rank update time after site and/or backlink changes?
What's currently the typical time, ON AVERAGE, it takes to see ranking changes when significant improvements are made to significant ranking signals on a long-established (as opposed to brand new) website? Does the rank update associated with on-page optimization happen sooner than addition of quality backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCCMoz0 -
What's the best way to A/B test new version of your website having different URL structure?
Hi Mozzers, Hope you're doing good. Well, we have a website, up and running for a decent tenure with millions of pages indexed in search engines. We're planning to go live with a new version of it i.e a new experience for our users, some changes in site architecture which includes change in URL structure for existing URLs and introduction of some new URLs as well. Now, my question is, what's the best way to do a A/B test with the new version? We can't launch it for a part of users (say, we'll make it live for 50% of the users, an remaining 50% of the users will see old/existing site only) because the URL structure is changed now and bots will get confused if they start landing on different versions. Will this work if I reduce crawl rate to ZERO during this A/B tenure? How will this impact us from SEO perspective? How will those old to new 301 URL redirects will affect our users? Have you ever faced/handled this kind of scenario? If yes, please share how you handled this along with the impact. If this is something new to you, would love to know your recommendations before taking the final call on this. Note: We're taking care of all existing URLs, properly 301 redirecting them to their newer versions but there are some new URLs which are supported only on newer version (architectural changes I mentioned above), and these URLs aren't backward compatible, can't redirect them to a valid URL on old version.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
E-commerce site blog creating bad signals?
I have an e-commerce site with quite a large (subdirectory) blog attached. The blog is very successful, having attracted about 2 million visitors last year - almost 4 times that of our actual e-commerce pages. Although all content is tangentially relevant, the blog does not convert well directly (mostly because it attracts people at the wrong point in the funnel). Our average bounce rate on e-commerce pages is around 40%, while the blog is about 90% (it answers questions directly with some outbound links); and average page visits to e-commerce pages is 4, compared to 1.3 on the blog. I am concerned that this 80% of my traffic that does not often convert and leaves the site quickly, is costing me in rankings on the pages that do perform well. We recently re-released the e-commerce section of the site and despite cleaning up our structure and content, fixing bad URL structure etc., we saw little benefit. I am therefore considering taking the blog OFF our site and moving it elsewhere, linking back to the e-commerce site and allowing it to stand on its own two feet. Is this a bad idea? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | redtalons10 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
Do links from twitter count in SEOMoz's Toolbar link count?
I am using the Chrome extension and looking at a SERP, when a page is said to have 2000 incoming links, does that include tweets with a link back to this page? What about retweets. Are those counted separately or as one? And what about independent tweets that have exactly the same content (tweet text + link)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davhad0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Include Cross Domain Canonical URL's in Sitemap - Yes or No?
I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages. I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap. My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed. On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version. I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this. I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file. I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WEB-IRS0 -
How long a domain's bad reputation last?
I catched a dropped domain with a nice keyword, but poor reputation. It used to have some malware on the site and WOT (site review tool available at Chrome among others) has very negative reviews tied to the site. I guess that Google has to have records about that as well, because Chrome used to prompt a warning when I entered the site. My question is: how long will the bad reputation last if I build a legitimate website there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zapalka0