Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise

[CostumeD]

A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches.

Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.

[Xtend-Life]

Hi Li,

Do you have any warnings in Webmaster Tools for penalties? Have you removed all the damaging links to your site?

When you say dropped over night, do you mean you lost 90% of traffic or did you lose all traffic from a certain source?

Cheers,

Jason

[CostumeD]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your response. As far as I know we have no warnings in webmaster tools. I am not sure how to tell which links are damaging. Some have been removed.

We lost about 50% of traffic organic traffic. Our site dropped from 1st page to 3-10 page.

Regards

Adrienne

[LearnInternetGrow]

I can try to take a look for you, what is your website?

[CostumeD]

Thanks

http://www.costumedirect.com.au/

Regards

Adrienne

[Xtend-Life]

Without seeing the website, content or links to your site it sounds like a penalty.

You can check the drop in your traffic against algorithm changes here https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Also, it could be the keyword you are ranking for - if you were spamming this or using tactics to rank #1 you may have just been penalized.

Regards,

Jason

[Keszi]

Hi Adrienne,

I would try to use Barracuda's tool: http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/

sometimes it gives a clue when exactly the drop has happened (and what update has been near that date).

Also you could check Moz's Updates history: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

These will help you, if your website has been hit by an algorithmic update.

Let me know if you need further assistance.

Keszi

[CostumeD]

Thanks,

I will try both of those.

Regards

[Keszi]

BTW: love your website (sorry for off-topic)

[MoosaHemani]

I looked in your back link profile and not many SPAM links are available on the website and SEMRush data tells that the website is ranking for around 1.6k keywords (in AU) which was 490 keywords back in 2013. I understand that you rank for 2k plus keywords back in good days but it seems like you are improving and your strategies are working for you.

In my opinion all you need is to accelerate your efforts and keep working and you will see better rankings in the near future.

In order to tell Google that you are actually working on betterment why not changing your content from time to time on your website (different parts of the website) and get some media links back to your website.

I think it should work.

Hope this helps!

[BradsDeals]

Can you be more specific than "a couple of years ago"? It's going to be much easier to narrow down if we know what the search landscape was like, what algo changes were happening at the same tuime, etc.

[BeanstalkIM]

What month did it drop?

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you have problems that you either aren't aware of, or don't realize the impact of.

1. The bottom of the main content area of your home page and your footer are spam central for the keyword stuffing.  The range of phrases you use that are obviously intended to boost rankings for specific phrase variations is off the charts severe.

2. The scale of topical dilution on the site is also a concern.  Individual product descriptions are almost non-existent.  Consider the impact of the left side "link to all the things" content, right side "related" and "recently viewed" widgets, and the lower page "Also viewed" content, (and again, that scary keyword stuffed footer), and the "uniqueness" of that page is seriously questionable and you're forcing Google to struggle to trust uniqueness.

3. The shear number of "categories", plus brand funnels, plus costume "Ideas" funnels, just reinforces to me that it looks like the site is trying to rank for "all the variations" (which that footer screams is actually what you are trying to do).

4. Your "Search" subdomain is typical of now proven to be failed "enhanced automated content" that was supposedly a way to get more search visibility a few years back, and yet where all it does is create more duplicate content mess, since it just links back to the main site and is not actual, best practices SEO.

Those are only the first few things I found in a quick check. There's almost certainly a full range of issues you will likely need to get cleaned up if you really hope to ever see a strong, sustainable organic presence.

[CostumeD]

Hi Rebecca,

Our site dropped ranking November 2013.

Regards

Adrienne

[CostumeD]

Hi

It dropped November 2013.

Regards

[CostumeD]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your advise.

I think most of the things you mentioned were set up by an expert we had working here and also are features of the platform we us.

I am working on removing the excess links at the bottom of the pages, and will work through your other sugestions.

They sound like they will help us.

Thanks

[AlanBleiweiss]

I am glad to hear you will work through the issues. Be aware that there is no guarantee that these things alone will do the job, however each is an important step in the correct direction.

[CostumeD]

Hi Alan,

Once again thanks for the advise. It makes a lot of sense when I add it to the information I have worked out while trying to improve our site. Also a lot of these menus etc. were added about the time the rankings dropped.

Just a question. I have removed a lot of the unnessary links on the bottom of the pages.

The way our platform works, we have a home page - which I have removed the right side menus and left side.

On the product page we have removed the right side menus etc. also a lot of the left side - just leaving the wish list.

On the category page - we are wondering whether we should also remove the right side menus ?

Regards

Adrienne

[AlanBleiweiss]

"On the category page - we are wondering whether we should also remove the right side menus ?"

Do you mean the left side menus?

If so, I can give you a simple answer and I can give you a more complex answer.

The simple answer is "if you link to categories and sub-categories that are not directly related to the category you are on at that time, it is at least somewhat of a distraction and dilution issue".

The more complex answer is "it depends, and without a full audit, I can't answer that because there are many other factors to consider, some of which are purely User Experience, some are SEO and User Experience, some are crawl allocation related, and some are pure technical considerations".