Diagnosing a Penguin Demotion

[Nightwing]

Whilst ive noyt hit the panic button just yet ive learnt that a specific target term I was optimising a site flor has dropped off the Google radar from forth to zero

The site is www.davidclick.com the target term was "York wedding photographer" and the demotion happened at the end of March this year, below illustrates the carnage..

http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/target-term-demotioncopy.jpg

When i first learnt about this I began to wonder if I was a victim of the Penguin update. I suspected i might so I ran a test to see how many inbound links used the target term York wedding photographer and here is what i found... Only one site http://www.singingwaitersx2.com/links/ and at a push this site also http://york-wedding-photographer.blogspot.co.uk/

So my question is have i fallen foul to the penguin update? If yes then is the only remedy to block the aforementioned site links via this technique:

http://www.htaccess-guide.com/deny-visitors-by-referrer/

Thanks in advance,

David

[riplash]

Based on the date your site dropped down the rankings, it was not a Penguin related change. Penguin did not roll out until 24th April 2012. I've had a very brief look at the SEO for this site, I can see a few issues - this is not by any means an exhaustive or definitve list, but is probably a good place to start

1. You have canonicalisation issues - i.e. I can visit the site by going to www.davidclick.com and davidclick.com. Make sure you fix this with a 301 redirect.

2. You have 302 (temporary) redirects from wedding-york-photographer.co.uk (a URL linked to from the blog mentioned below, incidentally), and also www.davidclick.com - you prob want to make those 301 (permenant) redirects

3. The blog that you mentioned, http://york-wedding-photographer.blogspot.co.uk/ is not indexed by Google, having most likely been deindexed due to Panda.This will be because it's clearly there to affect ranking and not much else - evidenced by the fact that every post links back to the same website. I'd bin it completely if I were you as it's not doing you any favours SERP wise, and could be evidence of over optimisation leading you to fall foul of Penguin further down the line.

4. As a result of the blog above being de-indexed, the site basically has very few backlinks, and none with the anchor text matching the keywords you are targetting. Therefore there is no real reason that it should be ranking for those keywords.

5. A quick glance at the on-page for the site shows multiple repetitions of the keyword (title tag, h1, h2, body text) which isn't necessarily the cause of the ranking drop (as I said, Penguin came later) - but potentially looks like over optimisation. I would clean up the site - target the text at human visitors, not SEO.

Hope this helps a bit. I'd certainly start with the basics, and get those right, then build some relationships and get some good quality links in.

[Nightwing]

Thanks Riplash But curious about the following "The blog that you mentioned,  http://york-wedding-photographer.blogspot.co.uk/ is not indexed by  Google"

Ermm... when i google "Dark side of wedding photography" or put the url directly in the serach box it does appear in the SERPS. Does this not mena it is indexed?

[riplash]

Not for me.

EDIT: Ah, I see.. the .com blogspot URL is indexed.. but the blog has moved to a .co.uk - Do you happen to know when this occurred?

0Lyc8.png

[riplash]

EDIT 2: You never know, the site might bounce back once that blogspot domain change (from .com to .co.uk)  completes properly in the SERPs.

In the meantime, I would still fix the other problems I mentioned in my first post (the on page stuff, the 302s, etc), and perhaps change some of the backlinks you are getting from the blogspot blog to non-exact match anchor text. You could also consider getting rid of some of the links in those blog posts completely to make the blog less spammy overall, as the content therein doesn't actually seem that bad.

Meanwhile, try approaching wedding blogs/sites (local sites and general UK authority sites too), to see if you can write a guest post or two on for them. You could offer to write about anything, from the obvious (How to choose a Wedding Photographer), to the more interesting/unique (Top 5 things you should never say to a Wedding Photographer). It's sometimes good to break the ice by helping the webmaster or blog owner out, e.g. if you can find a broken link on their site, or a spelling error,  email them about that first to get the conversation going. As well as finding wedding sites, you could post for some general local blogs/sites - perhaps an article about wedding venues in York could work on a general local interest website.

When it comes to the davidclick.com site, I'd add a blog to that, and start trying to create some great content that will really attract links from other sites within the wedding sphere. Whilst you want to be giving your guest blogs some good content, you definitely need to save the best for your own blog. There are loads of great articles, videos and webinars to spark ideas for content here at SEOmoz!

[Nightwing]

Thanks riplash, respect the detail you've gone into here , ive got work to do