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
-
Moz Crawled My Site. Now What?
Hey everyone! So Moz crawled my site and I passed it over to my dev team who's curious about what they should prioritize. Curious what everyone's thoughts are. Here are the issue types: Duplicate Content - Missing Title - Duplicate Title Tag - Redirect Chain - Title too long - Description too short - Missing Description - Missing h1 - Thin Content - URL Too Long - Has meta noindex Would love any assistance! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | inksoft_mm0 -
Help! added WWW to wordpress site and now lost SEO ranking
Hi there Everyone! I have recently added a www to my wordpress website by going to settings>general and adding "www" to the wordpress address and the site address. After i did that i lost my SEO ranking, and also that MOZ is detecting that im getting site crawl issues stating that i have duplicate pages. an example is below: http://www.mefco.co.nz/news http://mefco.co.nz/news any ideas on how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | jfactor0 -
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 -
Goolge: Mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor on Mobile
John Mueller from Google has just confirmed: Google has just confirmed that mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor for people on smartphones. The date it goes live is 24th April 2015. There is a great presentation on the hangout - which will be available later to watch and once its available I will update with a link - but I would make sure your checking webmaster tools for any alerts / messages if you care about smartphone users. What do people recommend, regarding responsive vs mobile site vs dynamic serving. Is your site ready? What are you planning on doing since the update has been announced.
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Our stage site got crawled and we got an unnatural inbound links warning. What now?
live site: www.mybarnwoodframes.com stage site: www.methodseo.net We recently finished a redesign of our site to improve our navigation. Our developer insisted on hosting the stage site on her own server with a separate domain while she worked on it. However, somebody left the site turned on one day and Google crawled the entire thing. Now we have 4,320 pages of 100% identical duplicate content with this other site. We were upset but didn't think that it would have any serious repercussions until we got two orders from customers from the stage site one day. Turns out that the second site was ranking pretty decently for a duplicate site with 0 links, the worst was yet to come however. During the 3 months of the redesign our rankings on our live site dropped and we suffered a 60% drop in organic search traffic. On May 22, 2013 day of the Penguin 2.0 release we received an unnatural inbound links warning. Google webmaster tools shows 4,320 of our 8,000 links coming from the stage site domain to our live site, we figure that was the cause of the warning. We finished the redesign around May 14th and we took down the stage site, but it is still showing up in the search results and the 4,320 links are still showing up in our webmaster tools. 1. Are we correct to assume that it was the stage site that caused the unnatural links warning? 2. Do you think that it was the stage site that caused the drop in traffic? After doing a link audit I can't find any large amount of horrendously bad links coming to the site. 3. Now that the stage site has been taken down, how do we get it out of Google's indexes? Will it be taken out over time or do we need to do something on our end for it to be delisted? 4. Once it's delisted the links coming from it should go away, in the meantime however, should we disavow all of the links from the stage site? Do we need to file a reconsideration request or should we just be patient and let them go away naturally? 5. Do you think that our rankings will ever recover?
Technical SEO | | gallreddy0 -
Hit hard by EMD update, used to be #1 now not in top 50, what can I do?
We have what I think is a pretty good site, unique articles a few widgets, lots of reviews, decent enough bounce rates and user times (60% and 2:15) based on drupal. Previous updates haven't touched us and an almost identical duplicate (same site compltely different content) of the site targetting a different but related EMD is unaffected which provides a control. I have seen some discussion on it having to do with link profiles. We did pay some backlinkers to link to us, much more on the site that has dropped, and quite a few for a partial match keyword. I'm supposing this is a lot of the issue. If we try and delete these backlinks will it make the situation better or worse? I have also notice some duplicate content warnings in seomoz that weren't there previously. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | btrr690 -
Domain that ranked 4 has now disappeared from search results
Hi Guys, I have a website for a realestate property, it use to rank 4 but has now suddenly disappeared from search results altogether, a search for the domain 1boydstreetalbertpark.com will bring it up (so I assume it has not been blacklisted), but if I search for '1 boyd street albert park' (it use to come up at 4) it doesn't seem to come up at all anymore. I know the content is not original and it is the same on other sites (it is the same content the real estate agents send to everyone) but why it suddenly disappear and I would of thought having the actual search term in the domain would help it at least appear in the results. Any Idea?
Technical SEO | | mypropertyaddress0 -
Very well established blog, new posts now being indexed very late
I have an established blog.We update it on daily basis. In the past, when I would publish a new post, it would get indexed within a minute or so. But since a month or so, its taking hours. Sometimes like 10-12 hours for new posts to get indexed. Only thing I have changed is robots.txt. This is the current robots file. User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-content/plugins Disallow: /wp-content/cache Disallow: /wp-content/themes Disallow: /wp-login.php Disallow: /*wp-login.php* Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /feed Disallow: /comments Disallow: /author Disallow: /category Disallow: */trackback Disallow: */feed Disallow: */comments Disallow: /login/ Disallow: /wget/ Disallow: /httpd/ Disallow: /*.php$ Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*.js$ Disallow: /*.inc$ Disallow: /*.css$ Disallow: /*.gz$ Disallow: /*.wmv$ Disallow: /*.cgi$ Disallow: /*.xhtml$ Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*? Allow: /wp-content/uploads User-agent: TechnoratiBot/8.1 Disallow: # ia_archiver User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / # disable duggmirror User-agent: duggmirror Disallow: / # allow google image bot to search all images User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /wp-includes/ Allow: /* # allow adsense bot on entire site User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow: Allow: /* Sitemap: http://www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.gz Site has tons of backlinks. Just wondering if something is wrong with the robots file or if it could be something else.
Technical SEO | | rookie1230