Rankings Drop since Humingbird - Could it be my link ratio between .co.uk / .com ?

[SarahCollins]

Hi All,

I have an UK tool hire eccomerce muliti location website with different locations pages for each category. My stratedgy has been to specialise on local search for each location as oppose to try and compete with highly competitive keywords on a national level.

I do have some duplicate/ thin content issues on these location pages but I've been actively writting additional unique content on these pages to address this issue which also making sure my title tags, h1 , h2 tags etc are unique for each location along with having individual google local + pages etc etc. I have never previously been affected by any duplicate contents issues and always ranked first page (mainly top 5) for most of my local keywords).

However, when google humingbird update came out , I suffered approx 25% drop in traffic and rankings. rom what I read , local search sites have suffered somewhat in this update and I did a link detox report to try and asterain toxic links etc. I found a few which I disavowled but I have had no manul penalty message in my GWT so I can only assume I was affected by an google algorithmic penalty.

From looking at opensite explorer , I can see my link ratio for my .co.uk site shows

43% .com

37% .co.uk

I am wondering if it could be this which has been the cause of my local rankings to fail ?.

Has anyone else suffered the same as I am at my witts end as to what are the likely factors which could have caused such a drop ?

Any tips, greatly appreciated. Happy to give my sites url if anyone would like to take a look ?

thanks

Sarah.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Sarah

I have seen some odd bounces around of local pages since the late summer, but whether they could be attributed to Hummingbird it's difficult to be sure. With Hummingbird designed to refine search results based on the search intent I think it's possible that Google are looking for 'richer' content for local results and more guarantees from a semantic analysis of pages in a locality that they meet what local searchers are looking for.

Based on that, I think your thoughts on the link ratio between .com and .co.uk would seem to have some basis for concern. However, I don't think it is the ratio so much but rather the genuine value or lack of it of a link in a local search result.

Google will be looking at citations for the service your business provides in each locality and it would seem reasonable therefore that they will discount links coming from .com sites and therefore possibly non-UK locations. They may even treat those links negatively, but on that I am speculating. A link from a non-UK site for a local search result does seem to have little relevance semantically so if your pages are relying heavily on non-UK citations then that is likely to affect the performance of your pages in local search.

Miriam Ellis has a great deal of knowledge on local search ranking factors. I recommend reading her excellent, "Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors: An Illustrated Guide".

I hope that helps,
Peter

[SarahCollins]

Hi Peter,

Many thanks for your thoughts and taking the time to answer. Yes I have been trying to add richer content on my most popular local pages although it can be quite difficult when you have 90 odd locations , so I've done the top 25-40 depending on the category and I will remove some of the lesser popular locations for now to decrease duplicate/thin content ratio.

I agree , that the citations would be the way forward. I have started doing these as well for at least 20 locations although some don't have a link back to my local page but I believe that google is really looking for the NAP as a way of local verification as opposed to a link.

Good point regarding the .com and co.uk. These mainly go to my home page but I am looking ay my competitors,their ratio is better than mine so I will try to improve this also.

Thanks for the Miriam Ellis Article - I will study this in details. First impressions , it does look very good and has some great pointers.

One again Many thanks

Sarah