Brand sections performing badly in SERP's but all SEO tools think we are great

[jpbarber]

I have had this problem for some time now and I've asked many many experts.

Search for Falke in Google.co.uk and this is what you get:

http://www.sockshop.co.uk/by_brand/falke/ 3rd Our competitor
http://www.mytights.com/gb/brand/falke.html 4th Our competitor

http://www.uktights.com/section/73/falke 104th this is us ????? 9th for Falke tights with same section not our falke tights section?

All sites seem to link to their brand sections in the same way with links in the header and breadcrumbs, Opensite exporler only shows 2 or 3 internal links for our compertitors, 1600+ from us?
Many of our brand sections rank badly Pretty Polly and Charnos brands rank page 2 or 3 with a brand subsection with no links to them, main section dosn't rank?

Great example is Kunert, a German brand no UK competition our section has been live for 8 years, the best we can do is 71st Google UK, 1st on Bing (as we should be).

I'm working on adding some quality links, but our comtetitors have a few low quality or no external links, only slightly better domain authority but rank 100+ positions better than us on some brands.

This to me would suggest there is something onpage / internal linking I'm doing wrong, but all tools say "well done, grade A" take a holiday.

Keyword denisty is similar to our competiors and I've tried reducing the number of products on the page. All pages really ranked well pre Penguin, and Bing still likes them.

This is driving me nuts and costing us money

Cheers

Jonathan
www.uktights.com

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Jonathan,

These sorts of problems can be many different things. With what you are saying, I would be leaning towards thinking that you had a penalty from Google - that would be where I would start looking.

You mention a lot more links back to you than your competitors have - perhaps it is Penguin that has performed a manual / algorithmic action on the site? When was the last time you were ranking well, or has this always been the case that the site has never ranked too well? Who built the current links to the site and how long ago was this done?

It could be so many other problems that it could be impossible to go through them all here, but the correlation between Bing and Google is something I have seen many times with penalties. Rank well in Bing, but bad in Google.

Sorry it's a little open ended, but like I said, it could be so many other things.

-Andy

[jpbarber]

Hi Andy thanks for your help

But all our links and 99% of our competitors links are all internal, our home page ranks 8th for our main keyword: tights, we have no manual action warnings.

Some brands are not bad, Pierre Mantoux, Trasparenze, Glamory.

Cheers

Jonathan

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Jonathan,

Sorry, I misread that bit.

What does your actual backlink profile look like?

-Andy

[jpbarber]

Hi Andy

Its not quite as clean as my competitors, using a natural linking tool we have 21% unnatural links they have around 17%. We have a few too many directory links so constantly trying to remove them as we build in more quality, we have many links from Google as we are an AdWords success story, plus they filmed us for their YouTube channel, many links from Wikipedia, plus a nice link from the BBC news site.

I'm wondering if we have too many instances of the brand keyword on the page, as if you lengthen the keyword to include tights, i.e "falke tights" the page ranks fine.

Also according to MOZ we have 1600+ links to the brand page with falke as the anchor text, This may explain why our sub sections rank for some keywords Charnos or pretty polly as these only have 2 or 3 links to them. They are not linked to from the header or breadcrumbs.

I'm really stuck on this, as I don't know how to hide the links from the header / breadcrumbs, if Google thinks 1600+ internal falke links looks spammy. Plus how do my competitors get away with it?

Jonathan

[johnny122]

According to SEMrush, your website went from 600+ KW in top 20 for US in august 2012 to 150+ nowadays.

In my mind, links like http://www.freeadultwebsitesdirectory.com/stockings.html

http://kupilandia.ru/individual-order/

http://www.sexualallsorts.co.uk/xxxSextoyShop/Stockings-and-Hosiery-Tights/default.aspx

are not helping to stay out of algo penalty.

[jpbarber]

I like SEMrush thanks

Yes I know I have try and get the profile squeaky clean. Its hard to stop these links, due what we sell,

I see our main competitor is on http://www.freeadultwebsitesdirectory.com/stockings.html and http://www.sexualallsorts.co.uk/xxxSextoyShop/Stockings-and-Hosiery-Tights/default.aspx too who rank well for everything, so maybe a few more good links and remove some more bad links

What's the best way for tracking down bad links, I'll try and clean a few more.

I still think the internal links may be causing a problem but may be they are passing bad juice.

[jpbarber]

The main consensus and I agree, is that we have penalties from Google, but looking at our competitors link profiles we are only slightly worse, and getting better by the day.

Maybe Google has algorithmic penalties on some of our brand pages, but why, as they have few or no external links?

Is it possible the number of internal linking pages is creating some sort of penalty and if so how do I sort it out as we are a big ecommerce site?

Why does open site explorer show us having 1600+ internal links but our competitors show only 2 and 12 internal links when they link to their brands sections in the same way with a massive amount of links?

I still don't know how to fix this, do the brand pages need more content?

I have new quality links going to 2 of the brand pages from a UK university that is also trying to help.

Cheers

Jonathan

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks Andy, great advice! Just to clarify for the asker, Penguin is purely algorithmic, not a manual penalty in any way.

-Dan

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

Bill Sebald offers a fantastic method for link cleanup, and then submitting a disavow here: http://www.greenlaneseo.com/blog/2014/01/step-by-step-disavow-process/ - if you have never submitted a disavow, I would do that. It's in Bill's post, but generally the links in Webmaster Tools are a good place to start, and use Cognitive SEO to process them and review.

-Dan

[evolvingSEO]

Jonathan

First off, I would ignore the competitors to some degree. It's going to lead you in circles. It's not so simple that links relate directly to rankings. There are a ton of factors as to why competitors can be ranking better. I'd focus purely on cleaning up your site as best as possible.

You also do seem to have an issue with anchor text in your link profile - a lot the top anchors are commercial keywords ""hoisery online uk" "tights" etc. These need to be changed or cleaned up. This is going to give you a flag as being over-optimized.

I don't think number of internal linking pages would create a penalty.

How's your non-google traffic as a percentage? If it's anything less than 30% of overall traffic (and organic Google is 70% or more) I'd work on getting traffic from other sources - this will all feed back into your SEO.