Tidied up site by getting rid of bad pages and now rankings tanked. - Please help

[PeteC12]

Hello Mozzers.

We historically had Location specific landing pages on our eCommerce site.

examples -

site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-london

site.co.ukj/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester

These all had unique content(600 words approx) and ranked in top 10 for many cities. I understand these would have been classed as doorway pages so we got rid of them (301'd back to the category pages) and now our rankings for these terms have tanked.

We also have specific branch pages but we have kept these like many other companies with multiple branches do.

It feels like by doing a good thing and tidying up everything , we are actually making our site worse. Everything else seems to be in place. Loads of new regular content , clean profile , mobile friendly, lots of citations etc etc.

Any idea what could be going on here. Here's a link in our site - http://goo.gl/0yjSd8

thanks

Pete

[MattAntonino]

Lots of wild goose chasing later...

Exactly how many sites are 301'd into bestathire.co.uk?

10? 20?

These have a couple thousand links and redirect 301 to your site:

bestathire.com
londononlinehire.co.uk
jetwashhire.co.uk
woodchipperhireuk.co.uk
chainsaw-hire.co.uk
platformhireuk.co.uk
nationalgeneratorhire.co.uk
scarifierhire.co.uk
carpetcleanerhireuk.co.uk
patioheater-hire.co.uk
rotavatorhireuk.co.uk

These are the most obvious link networks in the world:
motorhoming.eu
a272.co.uk
motorhoming.org
motorhoming.net
motorhoming.com
motorhoming.biz
motorhoming.co.uk
motorhoming.mobi
motorhoming.info
motorhoming.me.uk
motorhoming.org.uk

Then there's .info spam
iclanky.info
schoolpay.info
0b0b.info
2fashion.info
freestockphotography.info
toptravellingtips.com
vidysporta.info
kivis.info
schoolhide.info
weddingdesignideas.co
syerasale.com

And a local UK network
leedssearch.co.uk
nottinghamsearch.co.uk
plymouthsearch.co.uk
leicestersearch.co.uk
bristolsearch.co.uk
norwichsearch.co.uk
edinburghsearch.co.uk
derbysearch.co.uk
sheffieldsearch.co.uk
cardiffsearch.co.uk
london-search.co.uk

Nearly 60% of the rest of your backlinks come from multiple subdomains on either blogspot or opendi.com

I'm assuming everything listed above is in your disavow? You may need to rebuild some authority having given up 80% of your link juice. And if they're not in a disavow, the link profile isn't nearly clean.

If you also had a bunch of doorway pages as well, have you checked WMT for a manual penalty? If not, you're just on the harsh end of some algo issues. Did you also pass the 301s from those old doorway pages to another part of your site?

[DirkC]

In addition to Matt's reply - you state that you redirected the doorway pages type site.co.uk/cleaning-enquipment-Manchester - however if I try this with the url you provided it returns a 404 - rather than redirecting to branches/manchester-tool-hire-shop or /cleaning-equipment

Dirk

[PeteC12]

Hello Matt,

Many thanks for taking a look at our site.

1. The other sites which are 301'd to our site used to be separate microsites we had . We closed these down last year and just 301'd the links to our homepage.

2. The links from Motorhomes etc are all in our disavow file . We used to hire everything but then just concentrated on tools so the seo agency we used at the time spent alot of time cleaning up our link profile and disavowing whatever we couldnt get removed ourselves

3. The links from leedssearch.co.uk and similar are from citations and these link to our branch pages

We did have doorway pages but we 301'd them back to the main category page (the urls are in lower case)

example - http://www.website.co.uk/cleaning-equipment-manchester  will 301 back to http://www.website.co.uk/cleaning-equipment

How would we rebuild some authority ?.. We did get a manual penalty last year which we recovered from for unnatural links and it took along time to sort out and get it removed. We are naturally quite scared with regards to link building after what the last freelancer did and got us links from a blog network which got penalized.  The seo agency we use to use only provided a few links from poor quality domains and it wasn't worth the money we were paying them every month ?

What would you recommend ?

thanks

pete

[PeteC12]

Thanks Dirk for taking a look,

Sorry my fault (typo) , The urls are actually case sensitive so it needs to be done in lower case.

So for example , site.co.uk/cleaning-enquipment-manchester  would 301 back to cleaning-equipment

thanks

pete

[MattAntonino]

SO much easier to understand now - thanks.

When you get rid of links or tidy up things to clear up a penalty you have a situation where you used links that shouldn't have ranked you to rank higher than you actually would have. You remove those links and fall down to where you really sit.

We think by cleaning those, we've now "improved" the site - and you have - but at the cost of all the old link juice you had. Now you need to go about doing things like "link earning" and better link strategies than you've had in the past. I'm not going to give away everything we do here in Q&A on Moz but let's just say there're enough ways to build links and earn links that your site will rank again if that's the part of the equation you focus on most.

[Guest]

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[CraigBradford]

Hi Peter, quite a history you have.

It looks like you have a lot of good advice above, but I want to add a little to what Josh said. I think you are correct to clean up the site, these things will bite you eventually, but it would probably make sense to do it in a staged approach. By cutting off a bunch of pages that rank, you are unfortunately going to lose a lot of traffic, that doesn't mean it isn't the correct long term solution, but the situation you've found yourself in now is as bad as a penalty.

If you are not getting a lot of traffic from the redirected domains I would recommend removing the 301s too, eve with the disavow file I would be concerned that it could be causing issues, especially as such scale and such a variety of topics. I don't see how redirecting a generator hire website to a cleaning website is relevant at all, I suspect Google see it the same way.

To summarise, if this change is costing you money, I'd reverse it, but start planning to get to the point where you can remove the pages asap without the same level of drop, at the moment you've essentially given yourself a penalty.

Best of luck

[PeteC12]

Thanks Craig,

We are basically a tool hire website but previously as also had a number of mini sites which just specialised in one aspect of what we hired, so for instance, we had a carpet cleaner hire website and a generator hire website as well. This helped to give us a larger SEO footprint and until the start of 2014 was proving very successful. By we got a penalty(due to some links from myguest blog which an seo freelancer did for us ) and this took a few months to clean up and we also then stopped the microsites for saftey as well.

I will check the traffic from the 301 domains and see if I can remove them.

thanks

pete