Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why?

[JoshuaKersh]

Hi,

We have had a Google action against us for over a year. After many "SEO Company's" we found someone who help us remove (December 2013) the action. Which was due to our bad back link profile.

We have 100% improved our content for our website, as Google has requested. We are active within social media, we add relevant content to our blog and we clean up our desk after we finish work

After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic, if anything its decreasing.

Is anyone else in the same position? or has anyone recovered from a similar situation?

Josh

[David-Kley]

Have you done a comparison month to month, or year over year since you received the penalty and after it was lifted?

Analytics can tell you where your visitors are leaving. Even if the content was revised, or changed completely, that doesn't mean it's connecting with your visitors. Check your exit pages, and on page time comparison with the following period to see if there are any negative changes that were made. I would look at your impressions as well.

Also, look at your competitors ranking closer, not just using tools. Tools only show a portion of data. If your competitors are using rich snippet markup, even if you outrank them, chances are their listing could stand out more and be getting more clicks.

[PaddyDisplays]

Generally the reason is it was the bad links is what was making you rank so well in the first place, now they are removed you don't get the benefit they where giving you.

I had a quick look at you backlink profile with OSE, and I can see some good links there (channel 4), but also aload of junk directories.  OSE just does not consider the quality of the back link so in the stats you may have better PA and DA but when you look at the backlinks your competitors might have better qualty links (not spam)

also there is a chance that the "seo company" you used might have disavowed some good links by mistake, but if they are any good they would not have done that.

[maxweb]

You need to think about why the website was performing well before the penalty. If it was spammy artificial links that were boosting your site, then removing the penalty means that they no longer help you. Therefore, your website is receiving considerably less link juice than before.

You may need to face facts that your link building efforts will probably need to start again from scratch.

[Silkstream]

I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.

"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9

Seeing the usual ebay, amazon big brand domain clusters for these queries so I'd say your doing OK. You might want to consider moving your category descriptions above the fold to improve further rather than below your products on the landing page.

[David-Kley]

He stated that they are ranking well, but traffic is lower. I'm thinking that links are not his issue, but rather some other factor ie lack of engagement, listings not standing out, products not marked up, etc.

[PaddyDisplays]

The title  is "Our ranking as not returned after penalty, Why" So I would take that their rankings are not well

When they said looking at "Moz tools we have great results" I took that to mean PA/DA, Domain trust etc.

[David-Kley]

"After looking at Moz tools we have great results, sometimes even better than our competitors. But we are still not getting or improving on our traffic"

It was an assumption of what he meant, as multiple items are mentioned. I think you know as well as I do that the questions are sometimes not clear on here

From another member in this thread:

"I just did 3 random searches and you were on page #1 for all 3.

"pearl+beads" position 4
"glass+beads" position 9 (wiki is at 7!)
"shambala+beads" position 9"

Seems his ranking is doing ok. What we really need to see would be the before and after rankings, which is why I stated he should look at his analytics, and compare time periods. Keywords, entry paths, exit pages, referring sites, root domains, ranking position, all that can be found there, and used to make an assessment of where they went wrong.

[JoshuaKersh]

Thank you all for answering my question.

Im going to try and answer all your queries as best as I can. Iv scanned through our analytics's

• Last year we jumped by 40% after Google lifted the ban in December
• Then this year our organic has dropped from January to May by 50%. There has been no report from Google saying we have had ban etc...

So our thoughts are that its to do with a Google update, but all our main pages have new unique relevant content etc

Yes we are/have removed many of our back links which which understand would effect our rankings, but like the Silkstream says, we are ranking for important keywords. In fact our main keyword beads has jumped from page 3 back to page1 (we used to be no1 for this keyword) So there has been a massive important, but our rankings are still falling.

This would then mean that a lot of our long tail keywords that only get 1 - 10 session have completely dropped off the map. Maybe this is problem?

In one comparison from March this year to 3years ago. there is a

• 40% higher bounce rate
• 35% high conversion rate
• 30% Higher sessions

Its difficult to check everything because we have changed website since then, which was in March 2012 and that is about the same time Google gave us our ban.

I can see that a the main pages that we got our traffic from are still in the top 10, just less volume.

As Mark Ainsworth says, we need to build up our link profile again, agree this is something that we will be looking at and treating with more care. But its confusing when things are looking to be moving forward with our traffic to be improving, but then to drop off again.

Let me know all your thoughts?

[JoshuaKersh]

We recently changed the descriptions to the bottom as we didn't want all the text to distract from people seeing the products

[JoshuaKersh]

Hi, could you explain your thoughts on this some more. Thanks

[David-Kley]

Since you have updated your website, have your competitors done the same? It may not be tied directly to a Google update, or all of the changes you have made, but also if your competition has made updates and improvements. Use the moz tools to check for updates to your competitors ranking changes, and visually look at their sites to see if there is an area or particular area of their site that works better for users.

[JoshuaKersh]

Id say the main features that our main competitor has done better than ourselves are:

• get people to share category and product pages via social media
• Their homepage content changes more often because of the new products features
• their urls are shorter than ours
• They added content to the category pages a long time before us

But then they have negative things that i would say should harm their site, which are:

• The navigation has to many links which is bad practice for internal linking
• The footer has a spam page which just targets a particular keyword
• The footer also use keywords which would be classed as a site link. Spam again.
• They also have duplicated content in the products pages like ourselves

and im going to check to see if i can see any changes to their rankings

Also could you expand on your comment above about user engagement?

Thanks

[JoshuaKersh]

I dont know if you think this would be a big factor, but iv noticed on moz that we have 'keyword stuffing' on quite a few pages. This is just a result of the category names on those pages etc.

would this be the cause?