Rankings have bombed with no obvious reason - help!!!

[danielparry]

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[menachemp]

This post is deleted!

[danielparry]

Hi

No we haven't. The company that builds our links have built them for other pages within the site. We have some very good rankings for highly competitive keywords such as 'courier services' for which we rank two. Since the new design all other rankings have been stable except for the parcel ones which have bombed!

[dean1986]

im guessing that seo company did some sort of link building that got you noticed by google and you just axed. Did you check your google webmaster for any messages?

[danielparry]

No messages from Google and if it was the link building why has it only affected the parcel pages - all other rankings site wide are stable and strong??

[BKSearch]

I think you answered your own question to some extent. The affiliate link additions happened at about the same time as the ranking drop.

It seems that Google thinks affiliate links are a little on the spammy side. They are at times openly anti affiliate.

There was also a Google Panda update at that time and also they rolled out some ads above the fold penalty.

http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

This might also be some affiliate penalty:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4326729.htm

I would consider both of these and see what else you may have done around that time.

When you changed the site did all the urls stay the same? Are there any new pages or sections that are now getting indexed?

I might consider streamlining the site if there are unneeded areas.

[menachemp]

If it's just the one page, then I'd guess it's related to the redesign.  I'm looking at an archived version of your site, it looks like one of the changes was a restructuring of your sitewide footer links.

Previously, it looks like Parcel Delivery was a standalone category, bolded and alone.  After the redesign, it becomes a section head, with five subsections beneath it that don't seem to add much value.  It's possible that it's diluting your results.

That being said, it doesn't sound like a relatively minor internal linking change like this would have that drastic a result on your ranking from 1 to 480.  That sounds more like a penalty (again, THAT being said, losing the rankings of only one page does't sound like a penalty either).

[danielparry]

Hi

Thanks for that. Yes I was aware of the Panda update at the time which is why we removed the affiliate links from the landing page; they are now on another internal page which we're not looking to rank. My query is this: we were top 30, we rolled out the changes (including affiliate links) and we plummeted. We then removed the links yet we have plummeted further?!??

When we made the changes all of the seo - urls, page titles, content etc., remained the same. The only change was the design visuals and with respect to the parcel pages (only) the affiliate links which were removed a long time ago.

[danielparry]

Hi

On the old design we had the same footer links - parcel delivery was a sub folder and remains as such. The only difference with the parcel hub is that when we rolled out the redesign we added affiliate links to the parcel pages only. Rankings plummeted, we removed them yet they've continued to fall!

As all other rankings remained stable I can only assume it's some kind of affiliate penalty which seems a little crazy as we hardly went overboard (we had 3 on the page) and besides they were removed when we noticed the drop, so for the last 6+ weeks we've had no links on them yet the rankings are still woefully low...now approximately 550 compared to top 30 prior to the changes!!

Very baffling!