Questions
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Big established websites outranked by new thin low DA sites. How and Why?
You've gotten some great responses so far. I thought I'd add my two cents. Prior to the Penguin update on May 22 of this year, why do you think you were ranking above these other sites? Was it because Google saw the quality of your site? Or is it because you had a lot of links pointing to you? It most definitely was because you had a lot of links, especially links containing your keywords as anchor. And that's how things should work, right? Links are important because they are a vote from Site A for Site B. But are your links really true votes? I had a look at your links in ahrefs and you've got 294 domains linking to you with the anchor text "calgary web design". Here are some examples: http://www.cheaphostingsites.org/directory/articles/5151/1/How-Beneficial-it-is-to-Hold-an-Outstanding-Online-Site/Page1.html http://www.articleon.net/automotive/cut-down-your-automobile-insurance-rates-with-some-of-the-following-steps/ http://www.articlebook123.com/Article/42719/Experienced-Web-Designer-Would-Deliver-Fantastic-Results.html http://articledirectoryabc.com/Article/246682/Internet-Site-Designing-Simpler-Using-Calgary-Website-Design-Company.html These are all low quality spammy articles and there are a LOT more of them too. This is exactly the type of spam that Penguin was created to devalue. It may not be that Google is trying to show low quality sites above you. You've definitely lost the link equity you once had from those links. What we don't know is whether Penguin just devalues those links or actually causes a negative value to be applied. Google says that Penguin is not a penalty but simply an algorithm change. I think it's possible that what you have done by building these low quality links is tell Google that they can't trust the quality of links that point to your site. I haven't taken the time to look but I am guessing that the sites that are now ranking in the top places are ones that have a link profile that consists mostly of naturally earned links.
Inbound Marketing Industry | | MarieHaynes0