Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello

I work as an in-house SEO (previously worked for an agency) for the website naturalworldsafaris.com. After a strong start to the year we were seeing really good growth but since Panda 4.0 was released we have been steadily declining.

Our site has, I believe, good, unique content and is largely free of technical issues. I'm struggling to identify what exactly is the issue for the drop. We've had several key terms drop from the top half of page 1 to page 2 of the SERPS, such as the term "Borneo Holiday" (on a Google UK search). I don't believe we have any duplicate content issues.

We've had a few external SEO specialists take a look and none have come up with anything new. Site speed has been flagged as a concern but when compared to our competitors in the SERPS we are consistently one of the faster sites so while we are looking to improve this, I don't feel it can be the only issue.

Any suggestions as to what else we should be investigating next would be much appreciated.

Thanks everyone. I thought that was the case but it's always good to get a second opinion!

Hi

I manage the SEO in house for the site http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/

A new add on to our services has been launched in the form of an online store allowing us to sell, for example, expedition clothing that is relevant to the trips we offer. The store is managed elsewhere and sits on a subdomain of the company who are providing this service for us.

There are sitewide links throughout this site back to our homepage: http://naturalworld.newheadings.com/index.php

I'm just a bit concerned about these links from an SEO perspective and was wondering if we should request these are set up as no follow. Would appreciate any thoughts on this.

Thanks!

Thanks Doug, that's really helpful. Good to see that phrase has bounced back up as well.

We've been looking at our backlinks as we are aware there are a lot of bad, irrelevant directory sites that we are clearing up. Historically the old sites were in a pattern of steadily declining organic traffic, from the end of 2012. This has transferred to the new site (keywords slipping a few places, less long tail traffic). We think this may be due to a poor backlink profile.

We will also look into doing some outreach to the linking domains on the old site and see if we can get these moved over to the new site rather than just relying on the redirects.

Thanks again!

Hi Doug

The reason for the sudden increase in August was because we consolidated several product websites under our one, main domain. The content on the old sites was transferred to the main website and all the pages were redirected. This was done working in partnership with a fairly large SEO company to ensure that everything was handled correctly.

We've not been doing any link-building/acquisition since, other than working with some selected travel journalists and photographers. However historically it does look like there has been some bad link building done on the old sites. The traffic on these old sites had been dropping overtime. With the backlink profiles of these sites pointing to the main content, could they be passing on old penalties?

Organic traffic as a whole is up month on month, but down year on year. Most of our tracked keyword terms have seen slight increases recently, it was just this one in particular which has plummeted.

Thanks for the advice! Would you recommend that the backlink profile is the primary issue to look at for now?

Hi Robert and Travis

Thanks for your responses.

We've not changed anything in the last 90 days, other than fixing a few issues with a duplicate subdomain. When I looked in Majestic I'm only seeing 9 external backlinks to that page. Open Site Explorer shows 35 inbound links from 4 domains. This hasn't changed recently as far as I'm aware.

Thanks for pointing out the issue with the duplicate domains, I thought this had been fixed but we will get back onto this. It isn't a new issue though so I don't see why this term would suddenly drop so dramatically. We've (fortunately) not had the same issues on other top traffic driving keywords/pages.

We are picking up some bad links in our backlink profile that may be contributing to a gradually declining SEO visability. We are cleaning these up but I'm still not sure that it would account for a sudden drop on a key term like this.

Any further insights are most welcome!

Hi

For our site we previously ranked well for the term "botswana safari holidays" on the page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx

We've suddenly seen a dramatic drop for this term, currently ranked #43 on Google UK.

There are no penalty notices in Webmaster tools and the only edits to the page recently have been to include the term "Botswana safari holidays" in the page title and the on-page h2 (previously Botswana safaris and holidays).

Any suggestions why we have seen a large decrease for this term? We expect to see some fluctuation but this one seems a bit dramatic. We've not lost any backlinks to the page that we know of.

Thanks for the help.