Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

Some may have seen me around the forum recently asking a few questions about my website which was being re-vamped. Well its now live.

www.followuk.co.uk

Would love some actionable advice / constructive criticism.

Website background: It started life as a website displaying dates for UK bank holidays, noticed some good traffic/sharing so decided to open it up to UK occasions. This resulted in more traffic and social sharing so over the last month I have re-built the whole website to be responsive and 'I hope' professional / interesting to visitors.

I also opened it up further into other UK dates such as sporting events and festivals - these categories will gain more pages as well as new categories to come. I'm hoping to turn it into a little UK resource for this type of content.

Thank you.

Hi,

I understand a site which loads quickly is greater for the user but how does site speed affect rankings?

I mean does Google log the speed pages load, the faster it loads the better the signal? So say I have a page which loads in 1.5sec would Google 'Rate' the site better if it loaded in say 0.8sec?

Thanks.

Hi,

Just a quick question.

How important are the signals received by Google on a websites user behaviour?

For example: Bounce Rate, Avg Time on site, # of pages viewed, Geo of user etc

Thanks.

Hi Everyone,

Hope your all doing well.

Im about 1 week away from relaunching my website and im a little worried it might hurt my rankings.

Basically im trying to make the website better, so its undergone a massive overhaul such as being made responsive on tablet + mobile, completely redesigned colours etc so now a flat design bringing less images in the hope to increase load times, navigation is more of a silo structure to try and make everything that bit more relevant and to cut down on clutter for users.

I haven't touched the urls so they will stay the same but I have stripped and added new content because as the years have passed, reflecting back some of it is basic and not professional enough - so ive had it reproduced by a copywriter.

I've also gone through the social channels and stripped out some content from there (almost reset them) because the style of the content and design no longer aligns with the new design and voice of the new site.

Without a doubt the site is much better (been in dev for 2 months) im just worried Google might not like something? It's a shame really because I should be excited but all im worried about is Google spanking it.

Thank you very much (see my reply below).

Thank you very much (see my reply below).

Nice, extremely helpful - thanking you both Dennis + David. Its not often I get responses on forums where im actually going to action the advice but I will here.

Going to share a few things in the hope I can gain some more actionable advice/insight.

So im purely after rankings in UK search - a query which is highly valuable to me is 'bank holidays 2014'. I was ranking in the top 5 for the last 2 years (sometimes I would be 3rd for a few months), David is completely correct my content may well be 'stagnant' as I don't refresh my content at all really - little worried it might flick a switch Google's end so I tend to do as little as possible changes wise.

Like I said, I have now dropped to bottom of page (FollowUK) and have even seen flux onto page 2. You will notice a lot of Auth sites which is absolutely fine with me, I understand the reason and the work involved to out rank. Its just the others which confuse me because far as im considered (taken David's advice on competitor analysis) all they have over me is tables. So the ones im looking at are -> year-planner-calendar.wanadoo / ownersdirect / publicholidays - All of which were below me before a week ago.

But I have to admit being open their content looks more interesting than mine, which falls back to Dennis's reply regarding content formatting.

Even still, when you take 900 unique relevant words against 50/150 words you would assume mine would be more valuable to Googe's users - unless you think adding something as simple as a table would do the trick (I doubt it).

Thoughts?

Thanks for your reply.

Makes sense, hopefully some of these sites get pulled back a little.

Do you think the way a website arranges content on the page matters also? So instead of having a chunk of content in a block, have it broken apart more with sub-headings, tables, bullet points etc?

Hi,

So my site supplies Q&A type of content - user queries a question and generally they get the answer from my site (landing page). I always make sure my content is (1) unique (2) answers the question (3) extensive in answering the question - reason being I rely on social shares quite a bit and that system works very well, sharing happens with my content.

But one of my main pages has dropped from position 5 to position 10 in the last few days - I assume its panda 4.0 because my rankings have been rock for around 2 years.

But I don't think its dropped my site, I think it has boosted others above me. The thing I don't understand is the sites its boosted above me have very little content and in some cases lots of Adsense surrounding it.

I'm not moaning just a bit confused: I have 750 words of good content, another sites comes out of nowhere with 50 words -> how can Google decide the 50 word site is better using the panda algo?

This is me assuming the panda algo is purely content/copy based. Does it take other things into account such as freshness, layout, bounce rate?

Thanks.

My 2 pence.

I think its a relevance thing, guest blogging was being bashed by spammers - target was (from what I sore) moz stats basically, "this blog will take my article it has a DA/PA 50 mR/mT 6.0" and on it would go linking to a website which was completely irrelevant to the blogs content.

I think YouMoz is all good if your linking to a digital agency, linking to a payday loan site im not so sure. I've watched vids of Matt Cutts even stating the above about a relevance issue basically telling the same story as I above.

Traffic from a none relevant blog is spam, traffic from a relevant blog in my eyes is not.

Hi Jane,

No they do rank well:

5th: Bank Holidays, 4th Mothers Day, 5th Fathers Day - The hard part now is pushing past Gov websites and the likes of Wikipedia.

Thanks for your reply, So links don't pass PageRank? Im a little confused because I always thought rel=nofollow stops PR hence the idea of Pagerank sculpturing?

Also what's the benefit of a silo structure? Because to my knowledge it retains more juice and makes everything that little more relevant - http://moz.com/blog/site-architecture-for-seo

Very interesting, I see your a bit of a Auth on SEO so really appreciate your input.

Ta.

It took me a while to learn what EGOL just mentioned. If I have any quality content it goes one place, on my site.

But I do see social having its place and I also see a time limit for social as well, because before you know it large amounts of your time will be eaten up by it - and unless you know what your doing large amounts of it will be dead time.

So to me filling up a social profile with hash tags, unique content, links, images etc doesn't hold much weight. I just use social to list build numbers of followers, when I release a new piece of content on my site I share it with my lists - depending on the type of people in your list you may get re-shares, links, onsite shares, comments, email signups etc.

Thats just my thoughts though, I dont use social massively.

Hi,

I'm a little worried/interested in the affects of my new navigation on ranking.

So here is the current site - followuk.co.uk/mothers-day

I have chosen an internal page because 99% of my traffic goes to these and generally external links and social shares happen on these pages (naturally because of the nature of the content).

As you can see I have a nav bar on the left which links to all other pages. In my new design I will get rid of this nav bar altogether and have a breadcrumb which will give the user the option to root back to a category page which will contain these links instead.

Kind of like this: Home > Important Dates > Mothers Day (if your on the mothers day page)

I'm in two minds because maybe pages are passing PageRank helping each other to rank, but on the other side maybe the strong pages which do rank well and gain links/social shares are not ranking as well because they are passing link juice through the navigation to other pages.

Any thoughts?

Uh thanks for coming to have a look Ryan much appreciated.

The page itself is roughly 2 months old.

The guest blogging I did was through the MyBlogGuest system so 99% of the time links are do-follow.

Roughly 15 guest posts have been put up, the anchor text was split from 'UK Bank Holidays 2013' to 'Bank Holidays 2013' so roughly 8 each.

I am a little confused with your statement about guest blogging because I thought guest blogging was a good way of generating good links, I have seen a few videos from Matt Cutts and Rand on this subject but maybe I am doing the wrong type of guest blogging.

I understand what your saying about flux and term positions for different locations but I have consistently generated 50 visits a day from the term 'Bank Holidays 2013' and in the last 24 hours this has dropped to 0.

If it is as you say and it's just the way the cookie crumbles im fine with that and I know I need to generate more auth links but my worries are have I effected the ranking from the content changes I made, by the sounds of what your saying probably not.

Thanks again Ryan for looking into this.

Hi,

First off im new here, so hello to everyone.

Now to the reason why I have joined.

I am currently trying to rank for 2 terms:

**UK Bank Holidays 2013 (Term 1) **and Bank Holidays 2013 (Term 2)

The page which im trying to rank these terms on is:

http://www.followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays

Now some background history:

On the 29th Dec 2013, term 1 was 5th and term 2 was 7th - rankings achieved through guest blogging.

Last night I changed the h1 tag from 'Bank Holidays 2013' to 'UK Bank Holidays 2013'.

Re-worded the meta description to try and increase the CTR.

And removed the term 'Bank Holiday' from the end of each sub-heading - Ex: 'New Year's Day Bank Holiday' to 'New Year's Day' - I did this because I felt it was to much so in total 'Bank Holiday' term had been removed from 5 sub-headings.

---

Ok, so I went into WMT and resubmitted for indexing, over night the page got reindexed - the term 'UK Bank Holidays 2013' stayed at the same position (5) BUT the 'Bank Holidays 2013' term dropped into hell at roughly position 250.

I'm thinking of changing everything back and crossing my fingers that term which dropped comes back BUT maybe im being to rash and it might jump back as the page stands.

I did a grade test using SEOMOZ and both terms generate a grade of 'A'.

Has anyone got any ideas? Sorry if the thread is a bit messy im currently crying all over the keyboard as im typing.

Thanks