Pages plummeting in ranking

[rasmusbang]

Hi all,

I have a question, which i hope you can answer for me. I have a site www.betxpert.com (a danish betting site) and we have tried to do some SEO to improve conversions.

One of the steps we have taken was to link to all of our bookmaker reviews in our menu (a mega menu). All of our bookmakers have an img and text link in the menu. The menu is shown on every page of the site.

Since we have made this change we have been plumeting down the SERPs. For the search "betsafe" this page http://www.betxpert.com/bookmakere/betsafe is no longer in the top 50.

We also added the "stars" so that the google result will show our over all review for the bookmaker, in order to stand out in the SERPs.

Can anyone explain to me what the problem might be? Over extensive internal linking or?

[RobertFisher]

Rasmus,

First, not knowing when the changes were made and assuming the only changes made are described above, here are some possibilities:

If the change is in the last few weeks, it may be a temporary fluctuation in the rankings and you may need to wait 3 to 6 weeks to see if there is a bounce back.

If that is not the case, in my opinion with the number of links you have, you have two issues: First, from GWMT:

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

There are other issues beyond this, your H1 is picking up the articles in the middle of the page (makes it unclear). The load time is long (D or F in YSlow depending on which test version). etc.

However, I would look at it from the standpoint of what did you change given the site itself. Again, if the only change was the links you described, it would be easy enough to delink them and see if you come back.

I understand with a betting site you want to show all a person can bet on and that you are trying to get people to look at info on their favorite sport, but to me the site is way over busy and could use some simplification. I cannot tell you whether or not Google sees it as spammy. I do believe there are too many links. Without testing it and just looking at it cursorily, I came up with close to 200.

Hope this helps,

[rasmusbang]

Hi,

Thanks for the fast answer.

One thing i did not mention, but could be of relevance. A year ago the site was rebuilt and therefore a lot of URLs were redirected with 301 redirection. However a lot of links in a section of the site did not redirect due to settings on the new server. This issue was fixed last month, so now all the old URLs are being processed by Google and the pages which they redirect to have a lot of links (it is a statistics section) and i have received a warning in webmaster tools about an extreme high amount of links in the web site. I have today set rel="nofollow" on the larger part of the links on these pages (since i really do not want them all indexed).

Can this warning have anything to do with the fall in ranking? I am thinking if we are punished by having pages with too many links - all with links to the bookmaker pages on them?

In general we have a lot of links on the site. Is this really a problem? Is it a known fact that Google punisheds for having too many links in pages?

Regards,

Rasmus

[RobertFisher]

Yes, absolutely, it can and likely does have something to do with the fall in rankings. The rel= "no follow" should help. What is happening, is that they are seeing way too many links and that is considered "spammy."

What I would suggest is to take off links where they are not really needed. This should assist you immediately. If you make a big enough dent in unlinking (I suggest no more than 100 internal links per page...but, not on every single page if you can avoid it.) you should then consider submitting for reconsideration. A question is: Are any of your pages showing up in search?

The other thing you should consider is backing up a step and looking at the overall mapping of the site: Does it make sense? (remember, I am in the US, speak passable Spanish and no Danish..sorry) Using Google translation, I think some of it could be streamlined to provide a better experience for your bettors. Take off the articles if they are not needed. (Do people spend time on them? Do they migrate to betting from them?) There is a lot to look at and that, even for a bettor, may be too much.

Hope it helps,

[rasmusbang]

Will it help me in getting fewer links if i set "nofollow" for some of them? Will google regard this as fewer links?

[RobertFisher]

Based on GWMT, the links still count toward the total. I am not sure, if it would reduce the likelihood of a penalty though or if it would negate a penalty in place. I did a quick in WMT and could not find an answer to that portion.

[rasmusbang]

Okay. Thanks a lot for the effort and answer. I hope it helps me...lets see when the changes take effect. I will post back here in a couple of weeks if i see improvements.

I have removed the links from the menu, apart from on the frontpage. Also i have added nofollow to the links in the section which caused the "extreme linking" warning. This should stop the fall in ranking if this in fact is the issue.

I will try and reduce the number of links on the page. In general we have a lot of links on every page. But if that is a crime i will try to avoid it

[RobertFisher]

You can always private message me thru moz as well. 
Best of luck.