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May 8, 2014 by Bill Treloar 4 Comments

Why Did Your Nice, New Website Destroy Your Search Rankings?

On May 8, 2014 / canonicalization, domains/URLs, links, redirects, web design / 4 Comments

Loss of Rankings It’s sad to say, but we see this all too often. An old website gets a facelift, and the new site looks great. But it’s not long before the website owner notices that they’re no longer getting any business from people finding them on the web. What happened?
We’ve written before about why good SEO consultants make lousy web designers, and vice versa, and there are just some SEO techniques that great web designers don’t really think much about.

The two mistakes that kill your online visibility

There are two main factors that govern where you rank in the search engines

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There are two main factors that govern where you rank in the search engines: Relevance and Reputation. A significant problem with either one of them will cost you rankings in the search engines.

Relevance

During the website redesign, the text copy on your pages may be updated. Certainly the HTML code behind the pages is changed. It’s not at all uncommon for the new copy to fail to use some of your essential keyword phrases or for them not to be included appropriately in the code. This makes it difficult for search engines to recognize that your page is an appropriate match for those keyword phrases.
The solution to this is to go back to your original optimization recommendations and re-apply them to your webpages. (You do have optimization recommendations to reapply, don’t you?)

Reputation

This accounts for 40-50% of where you rank in Google. It’s important in other search engines as well, but Google weighs it more heavily than the rest of them. Your reputation (sometimes called “authority”) is measured by your link popularity:” the number and quality of other websites that link to yours. Over time, the pages on your website have earned significant link popularity, helping them to rank well in the search engines.

Unfortunately, most website redesign projects result in new URLs for the pages on your website. Without explicit action, all the link popularity earned by you or previous page URLs is simply lost. This is related to the issue of canonicalization we discuss in the SEO portion of our website, as well as in our blog.
The solution is to do the proper kind of “redirect” from the old URL to the new URL so that the new URL can inherit the link popularity and reputation earned by your previous version of the page. There are multiple kinds of redirects that will ensure that anyone who tries to go to your old page will be sent to the new one. But only one kind, the 301 permanent redirect, will also redirect the link popularity value from the old URL to the new one.

Only a 301 permanent redirect, will redirect link popularity from an old URL to the new one.

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Don’t Panic

Obviously, if this happens to you you need to jump on it as quickly as possible and get things fixed. Better still would be to anticipate this potential disaster and deal with it before your redesigned website even goes live.
If this has happened to you and you need help recovering from the loss of search rankings, Rank Magic can help.
Has this happened to you? Share your experience in the Comments below.
WE hope you’ll Like, Tweet or +1 this post if you found it helpful.

February 6, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

How to Disavow Bad Links

On February 6, 2013 / Bing, Google, links / Leave a Comment

Links Web sites suffering a significant loss of rankings as a result of the Penguin Update last spring have been scrambling to correct the factors that have hurt them. One main class of factors is on-page keyword stuffing. The other main factor is a bad inbound link profile.

Bad Backlink Profile

If you’re getting too many links with keyword rich anchor text (the clickable text in the link that points to you) and few or none of the more generic type (your URL, your company or website name, or “click here”) that may be taken as another kind of keyword stuffing. Also, if you’ve engaged a company to get you tons of links from non-relevant websites or participated in link farms, those links can hurt you as well. Some inexpensive off-shore outfits promise hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your site from websites they own and control which were set up just for the purpose of providing those links. Others send comment spam to unrelated blogs, hoping those comments will be accepted and provide links back. Some website owners worry that people might point bad links at their sites in an attempt to harm them with “negative SEO.”
All of these bogus or artificial links carry the risk of earning you a Penguin penalty. You need to try to get those links removed or dis-counted so they don’t continue to weigh down your rankings.

Disavowing Links in Google

Google logo If you’ve contacted the webmasters of sites with bad links to you and have been unsuccessful in getting them to remove those links, Google has a “link disavowal” tool that can tell Google you disapprove of those links and they shouldn’t count toward your link popularity. That will also cause them not to count toward a Penguin penalty as well. Google says this about the tool:

If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.

Search Engine Land wrote about the process a few weeks ago and their article is worth a read. To go straight to the Google tool, click here. I encourage you also to read Google’s instructions.

Caveat from Google

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.

Bing has a Disavowal Tool, Too

To disavow links in Bing, you can do the same thing via Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing’s instructions are here. I’ve seen no sign of a similar tool from Yahoo, but that may be unnecessary as Yahoo and Bing share the same index.
If you’ve suffered a Penguin Penalty, take a look at your incoming links and see if they may be the cause of your trouble. If you need help with that, Rank Magic can help.

January 12, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Press Release Links Don’t Help Your Rankings

On January 12, 2013 / links / Leave a Comment

One of the old standby methods of improving link popularity has been press releases. Maybe not so much anymore. Recently, Google’s Matt Cutts wrote this:

I wouldn’t expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however.

The Open Press Does this mean that press releases are a waste of time? Certainly not. The links from your press release itself no longer seem to confer any link popularity benefit. However, a well crafted press release might catch the eye of a reporter, a blogger, or another interested person who may write about you and the material in your press release. Any link to your website from those secondary sources will almost certainly contribute to your link popularity and, in turn, to your rankings in the search engines.
We’ve been de-emphasizing press releases as a link building tool for some time, and this clarification from Matt Cutts just clarifies what we’ve believed for some time. If you have something compelling to say in a press release, by all means submit it to online press release websites. Just don’t expect an immediate benefit from them until others pick up your story and run with it.

November 15, 2012 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

What Makes a Quality Site? Answers from Google.

On November 15, 2012 / Google, links, page content / Leave a Comment

Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting recently had a conversation with Google’s Matt Cutts about what makes a quality website. One of the essential points they drive home is that having a page that’s simply non-duplicative of other pages isn’t enough to gain good rankings.

Inadvertent non-duplicate content

Many car repair websites, for example, have a page about brake jobs for people looking for brake service and/or information about brake maintenance. Typically they all say pretty much the same thing. In fact, sometimes when creating their web page they look at other car repair websites to get ideas about what to talk about. Usually they put everything in their own words and feel good that they don’t have duplicate content.
But that doesn’t mean that they don’t still have duplicate information.
And quite frankly, search engines don’t do consumers of information any service if they display lots of web pages for a query that all just say basically the same thing.
The trick is to make sure your web pages provide an additional value not found on other similar pages. You have to figure out what makes you special, and then create pages that highlight that.
Mat Cutts also talks about a number of other things that reflect on a website’s quality, including their inbound link structure. It’s a thoughtful conversation and I recommend it to you.

Why Did Your Nice, New Website Destroy Your Search Rankings?