Problem with Website and Google Ranking

[RoveTeam]

This post is deleted!

[jonnyholt]

One problem I see is that you have 250 referring domains from only 151 referring IP's (as seen on Majestic SEO)  That right there tells me you have about 100 or so domains that are likely owned by the same people all referring to you.  In general that usually leads to blackhat SEO.

Also, if you use OpenSiteExplorer, you will see that your Page Authority and Domain Authority are both fairly low for the competitive, global market you are targeting.  This likely comes from dead end links that dont have anything to do with furniture, your local area, or your products specifically.

Duplicate meta data and page titles will cause major issues.  OSE says you have 283 new links in the last 32 days.  That seems like quite a few for a furniture company.  Do you have a new SEO working for you?

Do you have a strong social media following?  Are the followers real, viral followers or were they purchased? (I only ask because you seem unsure of your previous SEO team.)  Do you sell globally or would Local help you gain some of that traffic back?

Unfortunately, undoing bad SEO is much harder than just starting from scratch.  First things first, learn about Canonical links, 301 redirects, and get rid of any duplicate page titles and meta descriptions.  Remember, each page should be about a specific keyword set.

Good luck!

[MickEdwards]

I would also be very careful of this:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/a-reminder-about-selling-links.html

[RoveTeam]

Hi Jonathan, we haven't had a SEO company that we worked with for the past 6 months.  We also have tried to do lots of link removal from the past SEO companies work as we finally realize they were probably generating bad links for us.

Can you elaborate on the dead end links that causes our PA and DA to be low ?  How can we fix this? Can you give us a example.

Regarding the 283 new links in the OSE analysis, these are all from home decor bloggers that have links to our site regarding either our product or company.

We have a great social media following , all the followers are real and acquired organically.  We sell in North American only at the moment.

I will work on learning more about Canonical links, 301 redirects.  We are now going page by page to give unique metas and keywords.

Thanks so much for your contribution.

[RoveTeam]

Hi Michael, we don't sell any links on our website to anybody... do you mean the other way around? WHere we shouldn't purchase links from sites that pass PR ?

Thanks

Victor

[jonnyholt]

By my definition, dead end links are any links that don't help.  These would include links to pages that no longer exist on your site, that perhaps need a 301 redirect, links from websites that have nothing to do with your keyword topics, or links from websites that have really bad DA on pages with bad PA.

Webmaster Tools within Google is probably a great place to start.  You can see where Google is finding errors by looking under Crawl > Crawl Errors.  There you will find pages that might have been deleted without a redirect and are therefore showing a 400 Error.  Also you can see who is linking to your website under Search Traffic > Links To Your Site.  That's probably a really strong place to start.

OSE only gives you a sample of the pages that are pointing links to your site, but you could find those domains there as well.  Majestic SEO offers a free account with some Referring Domain information as well.

As far as fixing the issues, well if ts a link on a website you don't want to be linked from, you can start by emailing them and asking for it removed.  If its a link to a page that has been deleted or renamed, just 301 redirect that page to a live, working page so that when its clicked through, the user ends up on a working page.

Google's number one goal is user experience.  If their users click on a link from Google that ends up on a page that doesn't exist, it works against you.  If Google sees a link on a referring domain that is pointing to a page that doesn't exist, its a similar situation.  If Google sees two pages with the same content, that's another notch against your site.  That's where Canonical links come into play.

It's a long process so just hang in there and make sure the powers at be know how important it is because its going to take a large amount of man hours to fix this issue.  Can you check Webmaster Tools and tell me how many errors it finds under Crawl Errors and how many links are under Total Links and under "Who links the most" check domains that have a ton of links to your site that might not be helpful to your site.

[RoveTeam]

This post is deleted!

[jonnyholt]

In your Moz Anaylitics under Search > Crawl Diagnostics - are there errors there?

Also, on many of your paid links, you are using img's without alt text.  Anchor text is becoming more and more important in today's SEO.  If you have 50,000 links with no correct anchor text that alone can be hurting you.

[RoveTeam]

Hi Jonathan here are the results of the errors

soft 404 = 2

access denied = 163

not found = 148

I just had a last question, for the paid links should I tell them to put a nofollow? or is it okay to leave it as is ?  Does google know that these are paid links or....

Regardless I should be telling them to put alt text on all of them as rove concepts right?

Thanks so much

Victor

[jonnyholt]

So one reason you may not have any crawl errors is that your pages may not be submitted to Webmaster Tools (WT) in the form of a Sitemap.  Can you click on Sitemaps inside Webmaster Tools and see if any are submitted?  If so how many pages are submitted and how many are indexed?  Moz Analytics is letting us know there are errors on the site, WT is not so the conclusion might be that all the pages are not submitted.  If thats the case, you want to get a sitemap.xml created ASAP and submitted to WT.

I've always been under the assumption that a follow link is better than a nofollow as long as its a good link.  Google doesn't penalize you for having paid links, they just don't offer as much authority.  Someone else can chime in but I would prefer the Follow over Nofollow.

Yes, you need to ask them to add correct alt image text for your image links.  "Rove Concepts" would likely be best if they are all directed at your front page.  Also, consider an Adwords Campaign for specific terms and make sure to send those adwords clicks to the page for that term.  One way to create DA is to have people entering your site from pages other than your front page.  For example:

Create an Adwords ad for "eames leather chair" and then point it to this page "http://www.roveconcepts.com/store/living-room/chairs/eames-lounge-chair" rather than the front page.  Learning to effectively use Adwords is a completely different topic but this will help bring traffic back to your site.  I would venture to say whatever you are paying for those IMG adds, if applied to Adwords, would generate more business for you.

For now, let me know about the Sitemap questions above.

[RoveTeam]

Hi Jonathan, my apologies on the answer earlier we were looking at the wrong area for the crawl.  We do infact have errors , listed below .

soft 404 = 2

access denied = 163

not found = 148

[jonnyholt]

Do you know off hand how many total pages you have on your website?  Also do you have those sitemap statistics?

Edit:  Also I see you already have adwords going.  One of the biggest issues I see are meta descriptions.  They are far from original but I understand that can be hard with so many products.  Another issue could be the rating markup you have, but someone else could chime in on that as I'm not fully knowledgeable of that world.  Lastly, make sure you have a very active Google+ account.  I see very few +'s on your profile and I would imagine just posting images of your furniture on there will garner many many links from Google back to your site.

[RoveTeam]

| 445  Submitted |
| 398  Indexed |

Theres the pages on the website.

I will have to look into google plus, I was reading up on google plus and authorship.  This seems like something we should be getting on, more active google plus account and authoring our blogpost with a author account.

Thanks so much for the advice so far

Victor