Organic search traffic improved (besides Google) for last 6 months

[ivordg]

Hi,

to follow up on my previous post (http://moz.com/community/q/low-on-google-ranking-despite-error-free), I was wandering if someone can tell me whether we are penalised by Google or not?

Since the last 6 months, we see a rise in organic visitors coming from Bing, yahoo but Google remains the same. Despite the advice given in previous post, I just feel that something else must be wrong. Perhaps more inbound links with high PR? Socially, we are pretty much engaging 50-60% of our audience, yet no link flow will count for our organic ranking sadly enough...

Hopefully someone can have a look at our site www.mercadonline.es in more detail? Ask me in a PM for more info!

Thank you

Ivordg

[TomRayner]

Hi there

It's still early days for your website, which might be one of the reasons why you're not ranking as high as you might expect.  However, I've taken a quick look at your backlink profile.

You have over 60,000 links coming from two .nl forums - courtesy of two non-contextual site-wide links to your website.  This would look extremely unnatural to Google, not only because of the huge ratio of links to referring domains, but because of how unnaturally the links look to have been placed.

I'd argue that these links are doing nothing to help improve the link value to your website and, at worse, might be negatively effecting it.  In the not too distant future I'd look at removing those site-wide links.

If you take away those links, you're left with very little else in the way of quality inbound links, so as you have identified you may want to earn some more links (and much better quality links at that).

Additionally, you may want to look at implementing the hreflang tag.

Hope this helps.

[MonicaOConnor]

If you want to see if you have been penalized, use Barracuda's Panguin Tool. It is amazing at helping you determine algorithm related traffic loss which could help you know what to fix.

[ivordg]

Hi, thanks for your reply. Just a quick question: do we really need to implement hreflang tags since our site contains already es-Es as a language in the header??  http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="es-ES">

And how could we direct to an alternate version since we only have 1 version which is spanish anyhow?Thanks for your comments!

Ivordg