Big Rank Drop - Is My Site Spammy?

[smckenzie75]

Like many others one of our niche sites - aluminumeyewear.com got slammed in the recent algo updates (4/18). All of our pages dropped at least 40/50 places which seems like a penalty to me. The site still ranks for its name thankfully.

I'm trying to figure out if this is an over-optimization penalty, or a devaluing of back links or both.

I would be grateful if I could get some feedback as to whether you feel the site is over optimized and how I could check if sources of back links have been penalized which in turn has effected us?

Thanks in advance!

[loopyal]

Hello Mac. Nice looking site Spelling error in sentence 3 You really have overdone your keywords on the front page On the interior pages you did the same and the content is thin. Get advice from people who are doing well in ecommerce Look at your competitors for ideas

[bradkrussell]

Hi,

Agree with Alan. On the homepage, you try too hard to rank for 'Aluminum Sunglasses' - it's mentioned 6 times just in that short group of text. Except for the Gatorz and Liquid Eyewear pages, there is very little content on the site overall (even these pages still have very little content). I'd develop some more content; be it a blog, a series of 'how-to' type posts (how to clean your sunglasses, how to take proper care of your sunglasses, what types of sunglasses are best for certain situations/environments etc) or more information on product types, brands etc.

According to OSE, your site has very low inbound links as well. I'd work on getting some links from some really good sources (official brand websites as an official retailer for instance).

Hope that helps!

[stubby]

Hi,

I agree you have overoptimized.  I also think you may have a different problem, or at least you did.

Your redirect of gatorzwarehouse is working today, but did not work yesterday for me.

Maybe a fluke, but something to look into.

[smckenzie75]

I agree I can tone down keyword usage - up until the algo change we ranked #1 for aluminum sunglasses and always top 3-5 for the two brand names.

We are the leading online account for Gatorz, so really it was people looking at us for ideas rather than the other way around.

[smckenzie75]

At first glance content may appear thin but it isn't. All of our copy is unique and there are other useful  interior pages such as this and this. In addition our product shots are unique and we produced custom videos (see attached). Every other dealer use stock copy and photos.

I've been selling sunglasses online for 7 years and as a product there is only so much you can write about them unless they have standout features which in our case is something we have already covered in our copy.

I would love inbound links from both brands, however neither offer an online dealer list on their site.

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=b4-OAGQC4xw

[smckenzie75]

I should also mention we did receive an 'un-natural links' message in GWT right at the time of the drop.

The top 3 entries are:

bbb.org - 103

northstarheadgasket.com - 46

4homebuilder.info - 43

At first I thought Google was referring to the bbb links as there should only be one inbound from them for our business listing. However the reason there is more is due to the way the BBB display results for each city. For example we are located in Tigard OR but will still come up for businesses in Boring OR - its because by default they return results for any distance from that particular location - if you use the pages distance filter then we'll disappear!

The other two are article directories I believe. A third party was doing link building for us and spinning some articles.

Is it possible this is the more likely cause?

[stubby]

those articles as northstarheadgasket and 4homebuilder look like they were written for search engines (as in, nobody would normally post an article there for any other reason than to get links - because nobody actually goes to those sites to find articles on sunglasses).

I don't have any idea if the Search Engines do it, but they ought to value a link from how much real traffic the source page has.  Therefore, a page that has a lot of traffic, is likely to only put on only good quality links relevant to the market - and real users might actually use those links.  Or perhaps they could value a link based on how often it is used.  Of course perhaps this could be manipulated by bots, but it would be another step in the right direction (instead of just knowing how to insert links, spammers would have to know how to program bots to click on certain links, or they would have to do it manually).

You have a cool product, and could probably get (and perhaps have) lots of interaction on facebook, and could have a cool blog, with videos, product demos, and with weird subject like "10 coolest celebrities wearing Gatorz" and "Gatorz Guys are Girl Magnets" or for the girls: "Gucci is old and busted - Go Gatorz Girlz!" or the other side of that "Every Gucci needs a Gatorz"

[smckenzie75]

I'm trying to find out if the guy who submitted those articles is able to pull them - seems like the easiest and cleanest thing to do.

Remember we're not Gatorz the company, just a very good dealer for them. I've found it very difficult in the past to get interaction with customers when your not the actual brand, with this particular product there isn't any dealer loyalty, customers just look for the best price.

[Dr-Pete]

If you got the warning, you need to pay attention to it. 4/18 wasn't the over-optimization drop (not to say you aren't over-optimized, but that hit this week). There was a 4/19-ish Panda update (3.5), but that seems relatively minor. You more likely got caught up in some of the new link culling.

Having 40+ links per site doesn't make them the culprit. I'd be much more inclined to see what the 3rd party did and if they did something massive scale. Get a list from them, if you can (since it takes us a while to update the data, and we don't see all low-value links).

[smckenzie75]

GWT shows 101 domains linking in - probably 95 of those are all domains that are listing an article which points to the homepage and a product page. The two domains I mentioned earlier have 40 links each because of the way the article was tagged, all of the other domains a providing two links each.

[Dr-Pete]

You have 101 unique root domains, and 95 of them are all the same spun article? Yeah, that's not good. If you can get the network to drop the article, I'd do it now. If you can't, build up some higher-quality, diverse links as fast as you can. If those numbers are accurate, you are in danger.

[smckenzie75]

waiting to see if they can be removed.

otherwise I'm kinda stuck as to how best acquire those elusive high-quality links.