Website No Longer Ranking In Google:

[trailblazerzz9]

My website was on first page google couple of months ago, now nothing. Shows up in Bing page one. Some queries/pages still showing OK, but some not at all. Example "residential elevators illinois" found nowhere. http://www.accesselevator.net is the website. Have found 900 poor quality links and used disavow tool. Any further suggestions? Their Page Rank also went from a 3 to a 2. Implemented nofollow on all outgoing links. Need advice.

[AlanBleiweiss]

There could be many reasons the site has lost rankings.

Does Google Webmaster Tools report that the site has been manually penalized for bad links? (check both the "site messages" section and the "Search Traffic / Manual Actions" section in GWT).

What about other factors like on-site problems such as topical dilution?  When I view the Residential Elevators page there's a lot of content that has nothing to do with "residential elevators", let alone that the company has experience installing residential elevators in Wisconsin or Illinois.  For example all the "Recent News" sidebar content, and all the "Our Product Categories" content on the lower portion of the page severely dilutes the unique content of the page.  As a result, there's likely not enough depth for the primary focus of the page.

This is made worse by the fact that that sidebar and lower portion content is duplicated across the site. The end result for just this one factor is that important pages are likely being considered "thin" overall.

Another major problem that could be contributing to the loss of rankings is site page processing speed.  My test of the home page showed fourteen seconds - Google has the ideal page processing speed for an individual page at between one and three seconds.  Such slow processing harms overall trust and quality.

There could be a dozen other issues impacting the site's rankings as well, such as , however those were the first few I found that all need addressing.

[Asjad]

Hey Joanne,

Your website could be victim of Penguin 2.1 (launched on 4th Oct, 2013) Lets analyze possible issues with your back-links

Back-links Analysis

• Money Anchors: This is the biggest issue of all. More than 50% of anchors are money: http://screencast.com/t/jC8wtH6Ijwj. This is not a desirable situation
• No Social Shares: Hardly any social shares: http://screencast.com/t/IUSEORZ69o
• Most of links From Directories and Social Book-marks: This is not an ideal situation. good to be divers. Few Guest Posts, Few Press Releases, Few Local Directories, Few Business Directories.

Starting with disavowing is good but disavow could further lower rankings and you are going to lose link juice. So, buid quality links to make amends for it.

Additionally few On Page Tweaks can help

• Title Tags are over-optimized. More than 70 characters
• Try to crawl your website through Moz and find other SEO Issues regarding Meta, Content, Semantic, Images etc
• Product Categories making things duplicate (Agree with Alan)
• Loading Speed needs some work
• Making your website responsive will be another good thing
• Hardly any internal linking. Need to improve it

I hope that will help

Regards

[TommyTan]

Hi Joanne,

Another possible reason is that some of the so-called poor quality backlinks are actually the reason why you were ranked on the first page.  However, after Disavowing these links could have caused you to drop in ranking.  For that reason, many people don't recommend using Disavow tool outright but try to remove the links manually first.

In addition to the above suggestions, maybe try the following:

• Add separators in the title tag to separate keywords
• Image Weight - you can either use Google's Tool or WebPageTest to check out the speed of your site and what needs to improve

[trailblazerzz9]

Thanks Alan, Wigas and Tommy for your in-depth responses.  Really appreciate the insight!

Alan - no notifications on Webmaster Tools.  Feel like I'm between a rock and hard place with the spammy links.  Google does say if you upload another file it will completely override the first disavow file, so perhaps I should consider uploading a new file with only a couple of bad links, thereby negating the original file with over 800 spammy links.

Wigas - Crawled through Moz showing over 100 critical fixes including configuring attachments as no follow/no index with redirect to main site. Need to work on improving the backlinking!

Tommy - Disavow is just a mystery. Bottom line probably is if you don't have any warning notice in Webmaster Tools, don't disavow, just improve. Will revisit title-tags and image weights for sure to improve response time.

Certainly have a big mess to clean up!

Thanks again!