Dtox showing 64% of backlinks are TOX1 but still ranking
-
A local business has been smashing the SERPs for a while now, but since May (updates) it has been sliding and search visibility has plummeted.
They came to me for help, so I ran a Dtox report and it's showing a lot of bad links (2,863 links in total). TOX1 are deindexed website so it was being linked to from a huge private blog network.
MY question is, with only 209 decent links pointing to them, are they ranking because Google hasn't picked up all the shitty links or DESPITE them?
I assume that after Google deindexes a domain, that link is wiped out in their index? Which is the reason for the huge drop in rankings and visibility. However, they are still there or there abouts for 40% of their keywords.
Whats the best course of action here, do you think? They haven't had a penalty (as far as I know). Should I proceed to disavow? Leave them to drop away and juts build quality links? I don't want to disrupt anything at the moment, they still do well in bing. They say their rankings are slowly sliding.
Any ideas would be good!
-
Check their analytics, see how far they've fallen. Monitor the rankings first and study it.
If you see dancing URL's (changing urls, dropping to 50-200 then to the original ranking) etc then that's an obvious penalty.
You might want to start with cleaning out and ironing out the existing links, try to improve those.
Get new strong links, all the while analysing and creating a spreadsheet for the bad links to submit.
Since this is local, it might just be because of the local changes, the business listings ,etc that hurt their visibility. You might want to optimise their local seo process + links first and see if they improve. If they do, then that makes things easier.
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
-
Brand name not ranking in Google
Hi Moz'ers, Could you help me with something I cannot seem to figure out by myself. In June 2017 my company started a rebranding campaign. We've changed our brand name and launched a new website: https://spotler.com. Everything is going fine, but if you Google our brand name "Spotler" our website doesn't show up. How can it be? Our domain authority is 38. It would be wonderful if you could help me. Let me know if you need more information. Best, Simone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spotler0 -
Ranking of Travel Sites in SERPs
Hello, I have noticed that some travel sites rank for almost all the keywords but when I click the page, it has no relevant content and often no content at all. I remember Google once updated its algorithm to do away with such sites but I still found some. The question is - if they don't have relevant content or if they don't have content at all, how do they even rank? Secondly, how come they have pages for all keyword combination? How is this achieved? Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
Does having shorter URLs help with rankings?
Hello here.I own an e-commerce website (virtualsheetmusic.com), and some of our most important category pages have pretty long URLs. Here is an example: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html I am evaluating the possibility to shorten URLs like the above to something like: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/violin/ But since it is going to pretty hard and time consuming (considering the custom system we have in place on that site), I am trying to find out if it really matters and worth doing it from a SEO stand point. I am aware that from a user prospective shorter URLs are preferable, and we plan to pursue a better URL architecture on our website in the near future just for that, but this question, at the moment, should be strictly related to SEO. Any thoughts on this topic are very welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
2tier backlinks + internal pages backlinks
Hi What kind of 2 tier backlinks is good to add in my 1 tier of backlinks? (forum profiles+static html links + guest posts) Also what kind of backlinks are good to add in inner pages, images of my site or categories? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Advice on Getting this site ranking?
Hi there I'm looking to optimise this site for SEO -> Gets about 3,000 visits per day but all from branded searches. Gets virtually no 'keyword searches' It's just a landing page at the moment. Would you recommend I integrate a blog with it, so we can start targeting more long tail keywords (free football game etc) Any thoughts/advice appreciated 🙂 Thanks Howard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HowardK0 -
Does: Heading still count as H1?
Title says it all really... if a site has a normal H1 and a bunch of: class="h1">...... tags as well, does this count as more than one H1 tag even though it's not really an H1 tag??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveOllington0 -
Key page of site not ranking at all
Our site has the largest selection of dog clothes on the Internet. We're been (every so slowly) creeping up in the rankings for the "dog clothes" term, but for some reason only rank for our home page. Even though the home page (and every page on the domain) has links pointing to our specific Dog Clothes page, that page doesn't even rank anywhere when searching Google with "dog clothes site:baxterboo.com". http://www.google.com/webhp?source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f4efcaa1b8c328f Pages 2+ of product results from that page rank, but not the base page. It's not excluded in robots.txt, All on site links to that page use the same URL. That page is loaded with more text that includes the keywords. I don't believe there's duplicated content. What am I missing? Has the page somehow been penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBPets0