I’ve been experiencing this very thing for almost a year now with my bar stools site but I think I finally know why it happened to me and how I fixed it. If your site is in and out of search results pages, you really should try a few of the things I suggest here because today, my site is #3.
It’s probably not #3 by the time you read this but it has finally settled in the first two pages of SERPs. This, I’m convinced, is primarily down to a couple of things that are happening right now:
- I’m continuing to build links at a speedy pace and because my site is still relatively new in the ‘trusted’ SERPs pages, Google isn’t yet quite convinced by me.
- Google is picking up different rankings for my site from their different data centres
Why Was I Bouncing Around (and out of) the SERPs?
When I started my bar stools site with WordPress, I left the default wordpress setting to ‘Block All Search Engines’. In the meantime, I pulled products from my merchants and made individual posts on my affiliate website that related to the products from my merchants. I believed this would contribute to good long tail rankings. It might – one day, but not yet.
Whilst my site was still in the ‘block google stage’, I added about 50 products thinking that more content and more products would equal better quality site and rankings. I then wrote 3 or 4 original articles in a number of formats, article, buying guide, best of and press release.
After I had done this, I made sure my sitemap.xml was set up with the relevant wordpress plugin and signed up to google webmaster tools. Once I was satisfied with these things, I unblocked the search engines from finding my site via the option within the WordPress Admin -> Privacy settings.
Voila! I was being eaten up by google who took no more than a week to first appear on the site. Initially, for about a week, the site got good rankings (page 1) but they quickly died off.
For the next 8 months I bounced in the SERPs for a day, then completely out for 4 weeks, then back in for a day, then back out for a month etc etc you get the picture.
Now I know why it happened. It happened because I had TOO MUCH content and TOO FEW links when google first saw me. I was also running WordPress to power my site and this was generating a fair bit of duplicate content because some of my products were appearing in more than one wordpress category. When google came to view my site, it actually got about 250 pages of 70% duplicated content with approximately 10 (poor quality) links. Poor quality because they were simple link exchanges with PR 0 sites and a couple of links from a nofollow press releases and a couple from 1 or 2 articles.
Mostly these incoming links were going back to the homepage which wasn’t really doing anything for me because all that was doing was sending google back to the beginning of a duplicated content website. If I could use one word to sum my site up…it ‘looked’ shallow. Ironically, this wasn’t down to lack of content though, but more down to poor site structure that prevented google from seeing a majority of unique content. Instead, it saw a majority duplicate content.
Failing the content test, google then looked towards my link profile. Were high quality sites linking to me? Was there enough? The answer, of course, was no and despite months of trying to correct this, it took me a whole 8 months to really make a dent in this opinion of my site.
How Did I Do It?
- I stopped writing content.
- I hired a virtual worker from oDesk and paid them $3.59 per hour to build me links. I stressed that I didn’t want spammy links made up of forum profiles with random names, no posts and two links in their profile. The forum profiles needed to have at least 2 posts to their name and a paragraph of text in their profiles. The links being built would also not ALL link to my homepage but would be split between 3 urls on my site. 1 homepage and 2 deeplinks (wordpress category pages).
- I also made a more concerted effort to get my vworker to post on related blogs (dofollow and nofollow) with relevant comments and reasonable links. I managed to get one win on a fairly decent PR interior design blog that had my dofollow link sitewide on their site. I did the same thing with links – not just homepage but inner deep links too. Google loved this one…
- I repeated everything I just did in steps 1, 2 and 3 again, then again.
All in all this link building exercise lasted approximately 3 weeks and resulted in over 400 links appearing in Yahoo Site Explorer at one stage (before I begun the links, it had been around 60). The day before the links started showing up in yahoo site explorer my site had been ‘out’ of the SERPs. The day after they showed up my site was ranking #6 on page 1.
For a week the site kept it’s rank and I made a sale a day. Then the profile links started to dissapear as they moved into the ether regions of their site or admins deleted them. Blog posts were removed or links dissapeared from home pages. This resulted in yahoo explorer losing almost 250 links and the site falling out of the SERPs completely for a day, only to return on page 3, at position 25.
It’s held that position for almost 2 weeks now and the only reason it’s so far down is because I haven’t built any more links yet (at least I hadn’t until yesterday/today). In the last 48 hours, I’ve used The Best Spinner to turn 1 article into hundreds of unique articles easily and have begun the process of submitting these articles to article directories, ‘how to’ sites and other content focussed sites.
I’m pretty sure that in the next week or so, the several hundred new articles I’ve created with 2 or 3 links in them will start to get picked up by google and I’m absolutely confident that my rank in the SERPs will increase substantially as a result.
If my bar stools affiliate site was able to get top 3 rankings for 2 or 3 good keywords, it’d cross into the £xxx per month category.
If your site has been bouncing in and out of the SERPs, follow the instructions in this post to stop it and start to take control of your rankings!
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October 21st, 2010 at 8:04 am
if your site is barstoolsuk.co.uk and you are trying to rank for bar stools uk in google then my opinion would be that this should be an easy task to get page 1 ranking , u shouldnt need all thoses links to rank for you own keyword name. I would guess there is something else wrong or the onpage seo is wrong (will have a check later)
October 21st, 2010 at 10:49 am
I agree that a large number of links should not be necessary. For my first site I didn’t do any linkbuilding but just had a few onsite articles. It went straight in on page 2 of Google and made sales from day 1. A month later it was sandboxed for two weeks then came back at no 3 on page 1 where it remains. I didn’t really do any proper link building apart from a handful of articles – both on site and in directories. Even now, 6 months on it has barely 60 links from about 20 sites.
My thoery is that you need good original content and SEO to get into the first few pages. If it is not too competitive then you’ll get to page 1 or 2 quite easily. Otherwise you need some decent links (ie: popularity) to propel you higher.
My second site, in a more competitve market however mirrors your experience with Bar Stools – it jumps between page 15 and page nowhere. I am sure a penalty has been applied but I’ve no idea why. The site started with a similar layout and the same amount of content with no duplication.
I’ve since made massive changes to the design, mainly to try and improve conversions as I am using PPC (reduced the bounce rate quite a bit but sales still quite erratic) but Google is still not interested. Even ntlworld homepages rank above it! Maybe Google’s automated systems just make mistakes sometimes?
Much as I want to know why all this is happening, and I have worked on it full-time for the last 2 months, I am leaving it for a while to create another site. So far, two sites 50% success rate!
October 21st, 2010 at 11:16 am
also think there is a bit of confusion on what you are trying to rank for. Bar stools uk has a low niumber of searches each month but bar stools has a high amount of searches . so personally i would be targeting bar stools as the keyword.
Also maybe a little spammy as there is the word bar stool everywhere.
I personally would do the SEO a little different.
October 21st, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Maybe I should point out that, bar stools does have a higher search volume BUT also has a lot tougher competition. That would be the reason for trying to rank for Bar Stools UK first. I would have done the same thing.
Also Mark, in essence you are right that it should not need that many links. Starting out again I doubt Lee would have done it this way. The issue is that the site has been sitting on dupe content for a while now, and not enough uniqueness to authority to let that content be indexed etc.
You still need keywords to rank for your own domain name, and if ths was not the case then words like lcd monitors will have an lcd monitor domain. It is totally depended on the competition you have, and how thorough they have been.
If I was already established in the space, i woudl have secure the bar stools uk terms with couple of high power links. Then it will be up to the next guy to try and break that.
October 21st, 2010 at 12:14 pm
yeh , u can get anything to rank for any keyword if u have enough quality links.
what i was saying is that to rank for bar stools uk with that domain (from scratch) should take 2 mins (but looking at the keyword tool is it worth trying to rank for that term?)
but if the prob is dupe content then i guess u need some good ol links
October 21st, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Great discussion going on here, Guys, thanks for the feedbacks!
@Mark – Yes, that is my site (I’d link to it but I’m paranoid about linking to it from here :s) You would think it would be easy to rank for but due to the problems I’ve highlighted above (and in previous posts) about duplicate content, starting the site too big with not enough links and some possibly questionable SEO tactics and poor wordpress setup, it has proven more difficult than it perhaps should have been to get any kind of ranking for ‘bar stools uk’. Only now, after building some pretty decent good quality links is the site starting to feel its way into some ‘authority’.
You are also correct about the actual keyword and targeting ‘bar stools uk’ sort of became a by-product of my experiments with the site. I found in the early stages (based on my belief that I should rank for ‘bar stools uk’ easily because it was my domain) that when my site appeared in the SERPs for ‘bar stools uk’, it also ranked for a great deal of longtail keywords too. When it fell out of the SERPs and didn’t rank for ‘bar stools uk’ it lost all of its longtails too. Obviously the two are not really related to keywords but more to overall site quality, but it then became my focus to try and stabilise the rank for ‘bar stools uk’. I believed that by doing this, I would see a return to all my longtails but it hasn’t happened like that.
So now what I’m doing is targeting category pages ‘chrome bar stools’, ‘leather bar stools’, ‘kitchen bar stools’ because clearly they get a lot more searches than ‘bar stools uk’.
Totally agree on the ‘a little spammy’ comment too
Also think you’re spot on with the confusion observation. Google is definitely confused about what the site should rank for. All the links come in with anchor text ‘bar stools uk’ but the content pretty much supports ‘bar stools’ – a slight conflict there, I’m sure.
@Raymortim – I agree with you for sure on the ‘shouldn’t need many links’ comment. I think that this hugely dependant on competition though and in tougher niches, good on page SEO and content is absolutely not enough and you need good links.
With regards to your second site, without seeing it, my instinct would be that it was not ranking as high down to the competition in the niche. Also by changing the design you’ve probably just sent your site back to the end of the google queue again and you’ll have to ‘win them over’ all over again.
I am certain that your site would gain its rankings with some good links. I mean good links, not just forum post and profile links but really good quality links – maybe spend $50 on a few blog posts on some PR 2/3 blogs whilst supporting that with as many press release and articles as possible.
@Mansoor – Spot on with that one! I have since started another site and have taken a different approach to it’s early stages of growth and it is so far performing much better. I built less content, used less categories (cut down dupe content), created a much higher percentage of 100% unique articles on the site so that proportionately, the site is over 70% original and unique, albeit a lot smaller than BSUK. So far this seems to be working and the site had a sale today £7.68 commission from John Lewis, actually…who the heck would spend £195 on…;)
I think your strategy of securing the keywords with a couple of high powered links would have been a much better way to go with this (never thought of this before but am confident it would work – thanks!) What are we talking, PR6/7?
October 21st, 2010 at 3:36 pm
2 mins is a bit harsh…It will take a while, but because of certain amount do trust that is lost.. (can be lost) it does take a while for google to come back to your terms.. Similar thing also applies if you do too much too soon
Mansoor
October 21st, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Though i will make a post about this, but i have a general feeling that PR might be replaced sooner rather then later. In any case, you are looking for two things.
1) In context links, preferably form real viable relevant blogs..
2) Pr of the link will depend on competition, even a good pr5 link is enough. Send me an e-mail if you need guidance.
October 22nd, 2010 at 1:51 am
2 mins was just a figure grabbed from the skies
But i believe that a niche of this size u could have it ranked page 1 within 5/7 days , with a basic link to have the site indexed.
WhiteKnight – great to here what you have been doing , guess you have had a bit of a rough time with this site but I also guess it has been very valuable and you have probably learnt a lot for the future
October 22nd, 2010 at 5:39 am
I have had two sites that have behaved exactly the same in the serps both are fed from datafeeds one wordpress one affilistore both exact match domain names for their keywords.
Now the thing is, the first one (affilistore) I built the site then immediately did some PR’s etc (only a few links) and all went well ranking 3 for my exact match domain it stayed there for 1 month (site prob 2 months old at this point) then I decided to pay someone too build some directory links and the site has been bouncing between 3 and nowhere ever since!
The other site I followed the same initial plan with the PR’s and a couple of links and it kept it’s position for 10 months (6th in the serps). This site was never going to make any real money so I thought I’d experiment and pay for some directory links to it and guess what, it’s been bouncing around exactly the same as the first site ever since!
I’m no offpage seo’er but I really think spammy links from directories and the like are being heavily penalised. The first site could do well especially on the run up to Xmas so I might try doing some article links to it (proper ones) and see if I can get it stable again.
October 22nd, 2010 at 6:16 am
@Chris – Great input and experiences there. Very interesting about the few PR links and then the sudden drop when you started creating directory links.
I’m 95% sure that some good quality article links to your site will stabilise things because it sounds like you’ve experienced exactly what I have. The only real solution once you hit that bouncing stage seems to be to add authority to your site by proportionately adding in some good links to balance out the poor ones.
Maybe a few good PR links would stabilise things? In my case, it took a hundred or so links to stabilise but my links were only in articles. If these links were on high PR sites, maybe the volume necessary would be dramatically reduced.
October 22nd, 2010 at 6:54 am
Yep it’s a mightmare this offpage seo stuff!! You constantly hear people say outsource it but I’m so worried now about purchasing ‘services’ that I will get penalised for so I don’t bother. I have a site doing well at the moment in a good niche that really needs some links but I don’t want to risk doing it wrong. I might just try writing some decent articles for links.
If anyone has any advice for a sound offpage strategy I’d greatly appreciate any advice! It’s my real weak area I think if I could get this sorted I’d be away.
On a side note, I have a site that has one link to it (from a4U) that has had no updating with far more competition than those other 2 I mentioned and it’s held the number one spot in google for well over a year (shame it makes no money). lol, funny old world this google world!
October 22nd, 2010 at 8:22 am
I would be targeting bar stools as the keyword too, it has a high amount of searches in comparison with your key term. Should be an easy one, I think you just need more quality links.
October 22nd, 2010 at 9:28 am
@Chris – Outsourcing is still a useful tool but I think before you outsource something, at least a task as delicate as this, you really should do it yourself first. This way you can give absoluteley clear instructions to your virtual assistants. This iwll be my method moving forward.
The best advice for an off page strategy would be to write an original article related to your niche with The Best Spinner and then look to distribute this via:Exchanging blog posts with other users in your niche (or closely related)See if you can get a couple of High PR sites to showcase your article (similar to above but focus on one or two high PR sites)Distribute the article to as many article directories as you can find (try and do steps 1 and 2 above before resulting to this method)
Really weird about your single link site. Similarly, I have a site with no links pointing to it, 5 pages of content and a keyword domain and it ranks #2 for its domain. I think the success of these small sites is hugely dependant on competition though.
@David – I don’t mean to sound critical but I’d say that was pretty poor advice for an internet marketing company to be giving out
There’s much easier/better keywords to go for than the hugely competitive ‘bar stools’. I’m pretty sure going for ‘bar stools’ won’t be an ‘easy one’ but I do agree with you in that my keyword choice isn’t the best currently!
October 22nd, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Cheers for the advice WhiteKnight, I’ve already started building some ‘on topic’ blog type links to the site but I’m going to do it slowly and hopefully I can get it to stick.
I think you’re right on the outsourcing you really need to do all the steps yourself then outsource the repetitive bits.
October 23rd, 2010 at 6:57 am
WhiteKnight – two things stand out when I look at your home page -
1. The number of mentions of “bar stools” 39 seems high given that you don’t have that much content on the page.
2. You seem to have hidden content within those product blocks, granted Google is unlikely to be penalising you for that but I’d still fix it.
Will be interesting to see if the links improve the situation.
October 26th, 2010 at 5:59 am
@Chris – Yes, definitel do this slowly. Do not blast 100 or so articles in one day and then none thereafter and expect things to have an immediate effect. This type of marketing (of which I have first hand experience right now), only serves to add more uncertainty over your site – at least for a time.
@Paul – Thanks for the advice.
1) Do you think that if I remove ‘bar stool’ from the end of each product name that this would improve the onpage SEO for the page?
2) If I remove the hidden content, that means the page will have even LESS content…what would you suggest I do to pad out the content? Increase the number of posts shown in the reviews section from 5 to 10?
November 2nd, 2010 at 9:50 pm
If it was my site, to start with I’d look at removing “bar stools” from your Shop by Type links. I’m guilty of doing something similar in the past, just looks a bit spammy.
I’d also look at trying to add 2-3 paragraphs towards the bottom of the home page where you talk about what the site is about, how it works etc. Similar to what you have on your about page – maybe you could combine the 2 pages.
The bottom of the home page of this site is a good example of type of thing I mean: http://www.underwear.co.uk/
I realise it’s not the easiest of subjects to write about though, which is one of the reasons I’ve stayed away from the niche.