Any way to make my page on top of results again?

[HispaZone]

Hello Everyone,

For a long time now I've had many of my website pages ranked on first page of results for some popular searches. On friday I noticed the traffic coming from google dropped dramatically and I realized that I was not on first page anymore.

My SEO is focused for Google Spain. Here are some examples:

http://msn-messenger.hispazone.com/ This page was on position 9 (first page) if we perform the search "Descargar msn" on Google. Now it's on page 3.

http://http://adobe-acrobat-reader.hispazone.com/ This was position 5 (first page) for the search "descargar adobe". Now it's also page 3.

Any suggestions?

Best Regards.

[Nick_Ker]

That is a pretty general question, and there are many possible reasons your site has dropped in rankings.

Here is a good place to start: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

[HispaZone]

I bet there are, but i'm out of ideas.

I may be not a very good SEO but i'm definitely not new to this. I've been the whole weekend trying hard to figure it out and I still don't understand what went wrong, so i'm just asking for some few suggestions before i give up doing SEO on my own and get a proper SEO service from some company.

Thanks.

[RyanKent]

Mikel, your page has far too many ads. I understand you probably run the site for the ad revenue, but the way I would look at it, each advertisement devalues your ranking, especially when they are thrown together in the manner on your site.

Ads:

• ad in header

• a strip of text ads below the header

• ads at the top of the left sidebar

• ads at the top of the right sidebar

• ad above content at the top of the page

• a second ad at the top of the right sidebar

• ad in the footer

Besides the ads your site is a jumble of links. You have 16 internal links and 83 external links. That ratio is reversed. Your PR is flowing to other sites and not your own.

Try an experiment. Recreate this one page and pretend your goal was solely to provide the best MSN Messenger page on the internet. Pretend you sincerely wanted to help people. No ads, and only links that were truly helpful to people. Provide links to the main category of your site along with "what's hot" and perhaps links to "Download FireFox", etc. A page like that would rank much better.

It seems like you have been panda-whacked, and it will only get worse.

[Nick_Ker]

OK to save you the trouble of reading Google's official guide that would very likely point you in the right direction, here are a few things to check that could explain a sudden drop:

Content quality and originality - are these pages 100% original? Have you examined the technical side of your SEO with a tool like SEOMoz's On-Page grader?

Also, are the links to your site from good quality sites or are they from link farms, low quality directories, auto-blogs, etc.  As Google continues to adjust Panda, many sites have dropped in the last week or so. Even if you are not directly hit by those changes, sites that link to you may have been which means those links have less value now.

BTW - everyone should re-read Google's SEO starter guide. It is remarkable how many people think they understand SEO, but have gotten their information from bad sources.

[RyanKent]

BTW - everyone should re-read Google's SEO starter guide. It is remarkable how many people think they understand SEO, but have gotten their information from bad sources.

Thumbs up from me for this statement alone. It is so true.

Two short but incredible sources of information. Google's SEO starter guide which can be obtained from your link above, and the Beginner's Guide to SEO. If everyone understood those two guides their website performance would improve dramatically.

[HispaZone]

Yeah, I've read about Google Panda, I thought I was going to survive that as until last friday I didn't feel any drop.

I can remove the strip of text ads from google AdSense below the header, I don't know if it will be of help but it's worth a shot. Unfortunately I can't remove the rest, they don't come from adsense nor any other add network, they are direct customers and we cannot simply refuse them.

With the external links thing, I will give it a try as well but it's not easy as those external links are all part of the same website, different hostname in the same domain name for different program downloads on our database.

I agree with what you say and we do provide what people come looking for, but it's not easy to get rid of the rest of the things that let me and my colleagues get our salary to feed our family.

Let's see how I manage to remove as many outbound links as possible.

Thanks for your helpful reply.

[HispaZone]

I definitely agree with Google's SEO starter guide, I read it like 5 years ago for the first time and I read it a couple of times more since then. Together with it I also read many documents and whatched many videos appearing here at SEOmoz, but when it comes to apply it in real working websites it's not that easy because SEO, being a important part, it's not the only to take into account when running an internet business.

I hope I get over this Google Panda thing and find my way back to the good indexing.

Thanks for the help.

[RyanKent]

I understand Mikel but you are in a catch-22 situation.

If you don't remove the links and the ads, you will not receive any traffic and therefore you will not earn the revenue. In your own words, your traffic has "dropped dramatically" and that wont change.

If you do make the proper adjustments, your traffic will return but you wont receive the money from your ads and links. There needs to be a balance. A couple, well placed tasteful ads can replace the many ads you currently offer. The same idea applies to links.

Like many other site owners you will likely resist this idea. In the end, you will likely have no choice but to make the adjustments. You cannot offer a spammy site with flashing ads and 83 external links and have high rankings for competitive keywords. Your site doesn't offer anything unique that a user cannot easily obtain elsewhere from another site without the ads and links.

[HispaZone]

Well, with no visitors, no point for the customers to pay for the adds, so I will follow your advice.

I already started removing outbound links, adsense ads and with time I will probably do more.

I know there is nothing certain but, just looking at other sites cases you may know, how long should it take since I improve the site until Google Panda let's me rank better?

Thanks for everything.

[RyanKent]

It depends if Google did not like just one page, or your site in general. If all your site pages look similar to the one example, then it is likely your site was algorithmically penalized in which case you need to wait a month for your entire site to be crawled.

[Esigns.com]

Research google panda. Many sites are in the same situation a you. Time + cleanup usually somewhat helps, according to rumors