Website dropping from page 1google uk

[germinus]

Hi all,

Firstly let me stress I am not really SEO minded, I know the very basics and that is about it. I am a driving instructor in the UK and have had my website (Wordpress) on page 1 for about 3 years now round the position  3 mark but for the last few months it has been dropping and is now right at the bottom of page 1 so no doubt a few more days and it will vanish completely from page 1 of google.co.uk .

I was wondering if someone could just have a quick look at the page to see if they can see anything obvious that wouldn't be seen by me! The search term is " Driving Lessons Worcester " and the page that has always show on page 1 of google is ..

http://www.passlee.com/driving-lessons-worcester.html

I also had another site on page 1 for about 2 years which was www.drivinglessonsworcester.com this has also vanished to page 5 over the last 3 to 4 months. What really hurts is I made a website for another local instructor using WP and with similar setup to mine and that is now showing as No.1 on page 1 of google.co.uk!! So how is it the website I did for him is doing amazing yet mine is dieing a death when they are setup the same way but obviously different content!

As I said I barely know the basics , I am sure a lot of you are thinking " Just go research " which I know I should and no doubt will, but I just wanted someone to have a very quick look to see if there was anything obvious!

Kind Regards

Lee Francis

[Johnny4B]

Hi Lee,

Have you had any warnings from Google over bad links ? Do you use GWT, can you check to see if you have any messages relating to your website ?

You seem to have a lot of links coming into your website from not so good directories. You could have been penalized as Google would not see them as relevant, or dare I suggest paid links

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.passlee.com

Similar to www.drivinglessonsworcester.com, has links coming from what look like link farms, websites with high DA located in Russia !!! ... I imagine his one of the reasons why it plummeted.

Further review on ahrefs.com shows lin ks coming in from all sorts of cr*p ...A lot of these first seen from early this year right up to last month ,did you use some sort of tool to creat backlinks ?

My advice to you is this links  / directories are more damage these days than benefit, especially if you are paying for them. These directories that pop up everywhere, offering links are something to stay clear off

Also, the content on the page http://www.passlee.com/driving-lessons-worcester.html is replicated all over the internet, I just ran it through Copyscape and found at least 47 replications of the text above varying from 14% up to 63%

A few links below

http://www.surreydrivingforce.co.uk/

http://www.surreydrivingforce.com/driving-lessons-surrey/driving-lessons-a-m/driving-lessons-addlestone/

http://www.aditrainingashford.co.uk/driving-lessons-middlesex.html

The list goes on, as I said Copyscape throws back 47 websites above. I am not suggesting you copy and pasted the content, but it sure looks like you did.

You have to make the content unique and relevant ... more importantly try and make it unique, it seems every driving school is using the same content.

Your DA is better than any of the competitors ranking above you, your page you are ranking for is not though ... i suggest you clean up the links coming into your website, sort out the content on the page and you should recover, the term is not a high competitive term, your competition don't seem to have invested in any serious SEO work, so you should get back up there

BUT you need to clean up those links !!!!!!!

Hope this helps a little, maybe some of our more esteemed experts may throw up in advice

Regards

John

[germinus]

Hi John,

Many thanks for your reply, even if most of it is over my head, yes I did use some link building tools about a year or so ago, as for the content it is unique as my family and I wrote it together so looks like it has been copied, but its no big deal I will just re write it! How does one get rid of these links? I just had a look at a paid service to remove links.. http://www.removeem.com/ but put my url in and it said I only have 3 bad links! So don't think I will use them!

I do use GWT but admit  don't really understand it but I have not had any negative or bad messages from them.

Can I pay and SEO company to do this and if so is it expensive?

Kind Regards

Lee

[Johnny4B]

Hi Lee

You could try to manually have them removed, contacting the webmaster, and lastly you could use the disavow tool

Great article here explaining the whole process.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2237534/Unnatural-Links-Recovery-Emerging-from-a-Manual-Penalty ,now you have no notification that you were penalized, but none the less, you would need to remove the links that aren't good

If you have no quality warning from Google Lee in your GWT, that's good.

If I was you I would get rid of all those links into your website immediately, obviously the bad ones, you have some good relevant ones also (like the driving school authority and similar).

I have never ever used Remov'em but read other people talking about them and have not heard much negative ... Maybe someone else could qualify them.

You could of course pay some agency to carry out this work, but you aren't in a critical position in terms of penalties, your webpage is still ranking ... albeit slipping down the ranks ... but still number 10 (front page). As for the cost, each and every agency will charge accordingly as they see ... there is no one definitive price !

Work on cleaning the links, get relevant fresh content within your website, start utilizing your social media presence ... Just to clarify before I put the fear off God into you Lee, you aren't in a detrimental position here .. a little work on your side should see you hopefully improve / recover ..

Hope this helps a little more and clarifies for you

Regards

John

[germinus]

John,

Many thanks for your words of support and help, you have been amazing! I have already started to email some of the sites to get  my links removed, one of the things I have noticed is the inconsistency in backlink checker tools, some say I have over 150 links other like GWT say much less but I guess the best thing to do is work with the one that gives me the higher number of backlinks,

I do struggle to understand which links are good and bad, do not really understand the terminology that these tools use when listing these links ie if they are good or bad links. However that site I did for my fellow instructor that is now no.1 on page 1 has no backllinks to it at all as I never did any backlink work on it, so I am very tempted to just try and remove ALL links from my site good or bad.

As for Remov'em, I used their "predict" box and according to them I only have 1 back link so I dont see much point in paying them for that.

I think the Rusrian backlinks are going to be hard to remove so perhaps I can use the google disavow tool for those but they are mainly on the 2nd domain which has completely vanished so I am not as worried about that at this stage.

Once again many thanks for you help and I will be following your words of wisdom to the letter, if you or anyone can think of anything to help my quest the help is much appreciated and I will keep all updated with what I have done as I hope it may help other in the future!

Once I have the links situation sorted I will tackle the content as that will be an easy fix, but I suspect it may take a few weeks or even months to sort the links problem out.

[Johnny4B]

Hi Lee

No problem, glad to offer an insight I can.

There is no one software that will always pick up links pointing to your website, no matter what they tell you, my advice is to use the list within GWT, its usually the most reliable, actually it is the most reliable.

Its really up to you ... you own your won website, but I would not advice removing all the links, you really only have handful of domains linking into your website, the bad ones are the obvious ones, really looking at them and asking your self are they associated with your industry, are they relevant to your website, was it a link earned as opposed added to a directory.

Removing bad links are never easy ... even using the Disavow tool as a last resort ... I believe the backlog there ,especially after the last update is quite extensive. While you are trying to remove the links, start focusing attention on the content, and don't ignore the social aspect, its more important than ever now, and that's not my opinion but the opinion of a lot more savvier people then me.

You have a couple of links coming from industry related websites ... They wont harm you, or shouldn't, I think If I recall one is an Authority on driving instructors in the UK .

Yes, you may have to use the disavow tool, but insure you try yourself before, use it as a last resort .... As they get lots and lots of requests from people who don't even try themselves, its a sort of tool you have one shot off ,so insure you get it right.

Best of luck

John

[germinus]

Any idea how often GWT updates the backlink list? just tried a very quick google with no joy.

[Johnny4B]

Lee

Usually around a week or so, sometimes quicker in my experience, shouldn't be any longer than a week.

Regards

John