There's NO reason these sites should be beating mine...Or is there?

[Jeepster]

Hi

Over the past 10 months, my internal page rankings (previously excellent) have plummeted. I'm now trying to recover them.

I haven't received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Also, I used to have hundreds of internal links to each of these 21 pages using the same exact-match anchor text eg, Tuscany real estate, Umbria real estate, etc. I changed this about 6 months ago.

So why am I still ranking poorly for these (only moderately competitive keywords) behind sites with poorer metrics?

1) Keyword: lake como real estate

My page here – **http://tinyurl.com/d34k8m ** -- used to rank No1 or No2 neck-and-neck with this page www.immobiliarevacanzelago.com/. He's still No1 but I’m down to about No13. Yet when I look in Open Site Explorer virtually all my metrics beat his.

[TomRayner]

I had a look at your link profile - to be frank, I can't see any reason why you should be ranking for these terms.

Apologies for being blunt, but from only the first 5 pages in your OSE link profile, I saw these links:

Blog commenting on .edu and .edu.sg domains about oil and energy
Blog comments on other unrelated sites
Free PR releases with syndicated content
Articles in article directories
Blogroll links that look artificial

Furthermore, look at these 3 links (out of dozens like them):

http://www.treasureboxhomes.org/search/
http://www.simoncolligan.co.uk/search/
http://www.pearsons.com/search/

Not only is that duplicate content, that just smacks of a link network.

I've actually yet to find a link to your site that looks like contextual link or citation from a relevant, quality website or blog.

The whole link profile to me looks hugely artificial and is out to game the algorithm and metrics such as the Moz tools.  It's no surprise to me if Google has come along, seen these low-quality links and blanket devalued them.  Equally, I wouldn't be that surprised if Google has, or intended to, penalise your site.

I apologise again if I'm coming across as blunt, but this is the harsh reality of it.  You need a serious rethink of your link profile and your inbound marketing strategy.  You need to earn high quality links by using your resources, be that content marketing, infographics or something else.

Right now, your links are offering nothing of value for a user, and Google is treating it equally as so.

[Jeepster]

No need to apologise. I'm here for honest answers, not to be soft-soaped.

I agree with a lot (but not all) of that. A lot of the article directory/blog footer links were obtained 3/4+ years ago by a previous SEO firm. Like everyone else, we haven't done article marketing in 2/3 years. Funnily enough, ALL our articles on article directories were high-quality and informative (Yes I know, we should have found another home for them. But time was when even Bing advocated using article directories).

Re; the 3 links you refer to, it appears the company that built our (real estate) site lists all the real estate sites they have built and puts them on a template. Trust me, I didn't ask for it, didn't pay a cent for it.

Re: PR links -- I'm fully aware they don't pass link pop. They were a genuine attempt to drive clickthrough traffic (and we have received traffic from them). Why are they bad, per se?

We actually do have editorial citations/links from related sites, including the New York Times real estate section.

I'm not defending the parts of our link profile that aren't great, just trying to improve things the right way.  FWIW, our link efforts are now focused on content creation and social media.