Page position dropped on Google

[TextStylesUK]

Hey Guys,

My web designer has recommended this forum to use, the reason being: my google position has been dropped from page 1 to page 10 in the last week.

The site is weloveschoolsigns.co.uk, but our main business site is textstyles.co.uk

the school signs are a product of text styles.

I have been told off my SEO company, that because I have changed the school logo to the text styles logo, Google have penalised me for it, and dropped us from page 1 for numerous keywords, to page 10 or more.

They have also said that duplicate content within the school site  http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/school-signs-made-easy/ has also a contributed to the drop in positions. (this content is not on the textstyles site)

Lastly they said, that having the same telephone number is a definate no no. They said that I have been penalised, because google see the above as trying to monopolise on the market.

I don’t know if all this is true, as the SEO is way above my head, but they have quoted me £1250 to repair all the errors, when the site only cost £750.

They have also mentioned that because of the above changes, the main text styles site will also be punished.

Any thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated as I don't know whether to pay them to crack on, or accept the new positions.

Either way I'm very confused.

Thanks

Thomas

[Masoko-T]

Hello

What was the developer's argument exactly? I mean, did they give you more information or just told you: "hey, you changed the logo and now you're on page 10"?. I think it is preposterous and unprofessional to say such a thing. A simple change of a logo should not wipe out your rankings.

Did you notice the drop yourself or did the developer inform you of it? Who does the rank tracking usually?. Do you have access to your Google Webmaster tools? If so, have you received a message from Google informing you that your site was being hit by a manual penalty?

[Smartloan]

Hello

I worked for an agency for a little while in SEO and i can tell you the people getting in the business weren't always good at explaining the full truth to customers when it came to SEO. Which upset me greatly.

Can you maybe explain more where this duplicate content in? I am a bit confused by your link. I would also agree with the other person who has answered. Simply changing your logo shouldn't result in such a drop in positions. What i would suggest it could be is bad backlinking. The reason i say this is because the Agency i left had no SEO person for 6 months after me. All sites were doing well then after i left they just anyone to just do the SEO. This resulted in people constantly link building to sites that were no good. Then one company crumbled in the SERPS their traffic dropping for 10,000 a month to about 2,000 a month in what should be their busiest time. A friend of mine who worked there still kept me up to date on the situation told me their rankings went from page 1 all the way back to page 5 for keywords they had ranked highly on for a long time.

I believe their only option in the end was to take down the site and relaunch on a new domain to break the links with the old bad sites. I believe they seemed to have picked up in traffic slightly.

So in answer to your question this could be the problem. Duplicate content shouldn't cause such a drop. However, surely your SEO company should be making sure there is no duplicate content? As for the phone number i haven't heard that before. If it is in the header or the footer, i shouldn't think it will make much difference. AS there are plenty of companies out there that have the same registered address but are different companies. This info is on the website in the footer normally and their websites are being penalised.

They want to charge you £1250! When i worked in an Agency it was about £40per hour. When i do freelance i charge 20 per hour. Based on those figures they say it is going to take 31 hours to fix!! As i assume you will have to pay VAT on top. I am not sure how they can say 31 hours is the amount of time it will take to fix. What are they going to be doing on it? I would demand a breakdown of exactly what they are doing for that money.

Also can you confirm if both sites are selling the same products or to the same market place?

Hope this helps.

[TextStylesUK]

Hi Masoko,

Thanks for your feedback,Yes, pretty much. They just mentioned that my recent editing in wordpress, change of logo etc, allowed google to spot that it is a micro site from our main company.

As a result, they said I'm now on page 10.

I didn't notice the drop myself, and I also hadn't checked my position recently.

There is no google webmaster in place or google analytics, and I have had no message from google, only the phone call from my SEO team, informing me of the drop.

Thanks again

Thomas

[TextStylesUK]

Hi Bex,

Thanks for your reply.

The duplicate content has been in place since day 1 and I agree they should have spotted this.

We are a printing company, who supply anything from promotional pens, polo shirts, signs etc,

The school signs is a product of ours, which has a simple page on our main site textstyles.co.uk, our new site is designed especially for the school sign market.  weloveschoolsigns.co.uk

This is what they are saying about me trying to monopolis eteh market, they said google hate this,  and as a result dropped me to page 10.

The penalty they say, comes under the last penguin 2-1 update, but this is way over my head...haha

Thanks for your email, and I appreciate your feedback

Thanks Thomas

[Masoko-T]

This is very odd.

I propose the following: ask your SEO company to put into writing what they told you by phone and to send it to you. I can give you and unbiased opinion if you send me their reply by private message. Please note that while I'm not an authority in SEO and I do not do consulting, at least I think I can help you determine if your SEO company is telling you something that makes sense or not.

Also ask them to give you a detailed quote on this 1250 quid job to "fix" your site's position. I agree with Bex when he writes that the amount is extremely high for such a job.

Cheers

Jorge

[TextStylesUK]

Thanks Jorge,This is what they emailed me.  (sorry it's long)

below would be best route to take, but this would mean you losing http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/- this would stop the possibility of a ban being sanction too www.textstyles.co.uk and give you the best chance to regain rankings quickly and cost free.

If however you really want to salvage www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk we can help but it will take time and a lot of hard work, there will be costs but we will not add on mark-ups and you would only pay for time and back link building costs involved.

£1250 + vat would help cover the onsite work, rewriting the content, template coding enhancements for inner pages, and a targeted high value back links programme run over 8 weeks.  We would normally charge around £1750 + vat for this, has it is a lot of work and will take up much time and resources.

We have shown you we can rank a website, and we maintained rankings for many months, we really want to help you regain rankings to help you out and continue the business relationship and has we suggested above there is a quick and free fix by pushing this website into your main one, but if you want to go with this second choice, I would advise acting fast, or you run a risk of your main website getting a google ban for a web ring.

From our side we will need to do the following.

1 – Re-optimise the website sitewide.

A – Where possible split the content up, to show a little at the top of a page and the rest at the bottom.

B – Some pages may need rewriting from new, has google has taken away the content credits from them.

C – Work on high value back links to help regain google trust.

D – Work with google webmaster tools to ensure any tweaks are corrected.

E – Help regain content credits to your top level homepage - https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Using+the+best+materials+to+create+vivid+and+imaginative+signs+that+can+easily+be+tailored+to+match+any+particular+schools+preferences,+here+at+weloveschoolsigns.co.uk,+our+attention+is+purely%22&hl=en-GB&rlz=1T4ADRA_enGB440GB440&filter=0&biw=1680&bih=884

You can help out by ..

1 - Replacing the phone number with a new one.

2 – Replacing the logo and any reference to text styles from the website.

2a:  An example here is http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/about-us/ you mention “Text Styles UK Ltd” in the first and end sections.

Thanks Thomas

[Smartloan]

Hi Thomas

Firstly, i would suggest having two sites is not you trying to monopolies the market. There are many companies out there that have several sites all connected to each other and who are selling various types of products. Have one page about a product you sell and then developing a website within that niche to sell that one product shouldn't be an issue.  I have worked with websites before that have done what you have done.

However, i am assuming they designed your other site as well as your main site? At which point this didn't point out their "concerns"?

The last Penguin 2.1 update was around October and the one before that in May. The Penguin update is meant to improve the search results by targeting spam website. Those that have bought links or who have been adding their website to websites specifically boost Google Rankings. This article should explain it better. http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-penguin-update

I noticed that you said there is no Google Analytic in place? This is very odd for a company that is meant to be doing your SEO. How do they track anything or even see what keywords your customers are coming in onto your site.

I would suggest that they have dropped the ball, if they ever had it. Now your site is suffering and they are blaming Google for it. If they had always been doing your SEO and correctly then there shouldn't have been such a massive dip in your listings. Yes sometimes you can be unlucky. However, from what you have said and the way that Penguin works it shouldn't have affected you this much because of one page and one website.

I would advise you not to pay the £1250 plus VAT. Firstly that is a large amount of money. I would also suggest that you consider shopping around for a new SEO company. That would be my personal thoughts after doing SEO for a few years.

Bex

[Masoko-T]

Hi Thomas

Did you agree with the SEO people a list of KW to rank on?. I just ran a simple search with some kw on google.co.uk and the rankings I found were

aluminium school signs    5    
safety signs    50+    
school sign company    7    
school signs    50+    
school signs in aluminium    5    
we love school designs    50+

So you are at least on first page for some of the KW in your title tags and that describe your business. This is not what you expect to see if your website drops to the 10th page of Google's results.

Try downloading a program called "free google monitor" from cleverstat, Use it to find your ranking for the KW that are important for you. You probably still rank well enough on them.

In my opinion the SEO company is giving you a vague list of what they will do. The activities they list are not wrong, but since they lack detail I would not be comfortable with giving my business to them. I think they are not being straightforward with you on what happened, why it did and what is it exactly that they will do about it.

You should probably get a quote from some other (quality) SEO companies.

Cheers

Jorge