HomePage Stopped Ranking For Brand on Aged Site

[BlowFish-SEO]

I've got an odd issue (that I've never encountered in 27 years in SEO). Our home page stopped ranking for our brand "BlowFish SEO" and is no place to be seen when searching our brand.  I do get the knowledge panel on the right-hand side of the page. and our about page now comes up number #1. Technically the on-page SEO is correct This page has ranked for many years for our Brand. If I  search blowfish SEO west palm beach I get the home page and all the nice site links.  And other various variations of branded search. Our company has lots of mentions across the web and branded backlinks. No manual penalty has been placed on us. Im starting to think some type of negative SEO attack but I can't find it. I do know someone is using my name and brand along with many other companies in cloaked doorway redirected pages to gain SEO leads.. Yeah I know  I've complained about it to Google they do nothing about it..

Other things I've checked:

• No one else seems to be using my brand
• Home page canonical tag points to itself
• Title tag contains brand name at the front (rest of site it's at the end)
• No manual penalty
• XML sitemap contains home page (and accurate for other pages)

To make this even more confusing, if you search the brand name the physical location appears on the right rail with an accurate URL.

Ive added an image of the  search result  when I search BlowFish SEO

Please note the top result is PPC the about page is 1st organc

Any other ideas that I may be missing?

BT8F1fD.png

[KevinBudzynski]

I did a Google search and found the homepage listed. Strange as I checked if you were logged in and displaying something becuase of personalized results. So not sure

[Nozzle]

We just searched "blowfish seo" and see your twitter profile at #1, your about page at #2, and your home page at #3.

How long ago did you notice the change in which page ranks for your branded search? And has the about page consistently been showing up since you first noticed it or does Google switch back and forth between the two from what you have seen?

[BlowFish-SEO]

Over the last two and a half months in GSC, I have watched the branded search for the home page slip nationally from #1 to number three and then not show locally at all for the branded term. This started before the major core update.

[BlowFish-SEO]

Its been doing that sporadically playing hide and seek. I'm surprised it showed. I'm more than surprised the about page is coming above the home page since the About has an anchored link for the term pointing at the home page. It should tank the about page under the home page for the term. I'm using an Incognito window not logged in when i search.

[effectdigital]

I get you at position #6 on Google. You are there but admittedly it's not great:

• https://d.pr/i/XS14Cn.png (screenshot)

The site is ranking, just very badly which makes me think it's NOT technical SEO related

Let's look at that first though:

• https://d.pr/i/5a7y8D.png (screenshot)

By the way you can grab that Chrome extension here, it's quite handy.  DeepCrawl is actually a very powerful SEO crawling suite (they make their own crawler, and also this handy Chrome extension); many find it superior to Screaming Frog - the main reason it's not that talked about is the pricing which is pretty steep (IMO)

To confirm, there's nothing majorly wrong with your robots.txt file either:

• https://d.pr/i/7ZuIlf.png (screenshot)

On simple and relatively trustworthy one-page scanners, the site doesn't seem to have any massive technical SEO issues (at least at the homepage level): https://seositecheckup.com/seo-audit/blowfishseo.com

So let's look at links I guess?

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target=blowfishseo.com

• https://d.pr/i/eH0GKc.png (screenshot)

That looks like it could be doing some damage. Massive spike in linking URLs May 2018, followed by a massive spike in referring domains July 2019. Doesn't look natural AT ALL

So what about anchor texts?

• https://d.pr/i/GagQUI.png (screenshot)
• https://d.pr/f/jPWNPr.csv (data)

In green you have partially branded or branded anchor texts, Google usually has no problem with these. In blue you have part keyword part geo terms, Google can have a problem with these if they begin to feel your backlink profile looks unnatural. In red you have exact-match anchor keywords, Google doesn't really like people link-building in this way any-more (most SEO firms would say EMA links are a no-no)

That spike in referring domains which we saw earlier really interests me. It seems to be concentrated... mostly between... 28th June 2019 and ... 6th August 2019

Let's take a look at new links specifically from within that time period (remember it's actually the time when Ahrefs discovered them, they may have gone live slightly earlier - but Ahrefs are pretty supreme for any kind of proper backlink research)

https://d.pr/i/Wi7p8S.png (screenshot)

https://d.pr/f/RhbuDv.csv (data)

... highlighted some stuff there that looks odd. Links from unrelated markets (languages) or locked regions (CN / Chinese firewall) and links from weird looking subdomain sites that look spam-made and mass produced

Yup, I'd say it's the backlink profile being too oldschool and full of crap, with recent spikes and anchor-text balancing problems. You unfortunately 'just' tipped the scales in a bad way and now you're suffering

Four possibilities:

1) You have been doing some bad backlink work, or had previously done so and never took the time to do a big disavow / link removals project when standards changed. Legacy is hitting you now, because of recent spiking link movements, which tipped you over the scales (has happened to many people, doesn't mean you're a terrible SEO or anything of the sort - was actually quite impressed with your on-site architecture and stuff)

2) One of your subordinates has gotten slack and done some bad backlink work (you'd need to find out who is playing you for a mug ASAP and sack them). If it's someone extremely junior show leniency I guess. But if you looked at the data I had supplied and found a bad network of shallow content links from no-name sites, and then found a paper-trail saying you had actively paid for those... I'd personally be pretty annoyed

3) Some scraper site has started scraping your posts onto their sh*tty network of sites, in the hopes of making their sites less terrible, but actually now it's hurting you as well

4) Deliberate negative-SEO intervention (we have seen a few of these lately on here, it seems to be a very 2019 thing IMO)

... hope that helps!

[BlowFish-SEO]

Thank you so very much for taking all that time out to help me.  From what I'm seeing here it's looking like a combo 2, 3 and 4 and I am annoyed I'm going to have to go through all these links and add to the disavow file I guess. Once again I thank you. Besides handling the Day to Day here sometimes makes it difficult to get to the technical stuff lately personally. I guess its time to get this ship under control myself.

[BlowFish-SEO]

I think Google might actually have a problem with my site title.. I just googled BlowFish SEO west palm Beach and this is the result I got.

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