Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We have a 6 year old domain that has been through several website themes in its lifetime. It now has approx 5000 pages of uniquely written content in a competitive vertical. The site went live in Apr 09 with new content being added regularly. Yahoo directory submission and other paid directories submitted at that time. Google WMT sitemaps working OK.
We also had 2 domains focused on 2 subjects that were already live with unique content. It made sense to incorporate this content into the main site so we 301 each page to the relevant page of the 6 year old domain.
site: www.example.com shows full indexing. Search on the domain name (without the .com) shows the domain position 1.
A number of backlinks are not on topic because of the sites previous incarnations.
We saw a small volume of traffic (using google analytics), mostly via the already established 301 domains. Since then we've not seen any substantial increase in traffic. In fact around xmas, we lost pretty much all google organic traffic and it hasn't come back.
The site bounce rate is high (so we thought of spliting some pages). Site speed is average - not fast and not slow. canonical tag on every page and WMT has preferred www. set.
We've had a company working on the site for around 4 months. Their focus has been on:
1. making sure each page has a keyword phrase and that the phrase is included in the page title, both meta, h1 and text content
2. making sure that all onsite anchor text points to the relevant page with the exact same keyword phrase (so some links look a bit unnatural)
3. forum / blog posts (mainly links from the username)
4. article submissions (more unique content not on main site) to the usual article directories. Variety of footer anchor text - some to homepage - some deeplinks. A few have been picked up and used by other sites.
5. directory submissions (mostly free - several hundred)
It would be great if any of you have suggestions or observations to share. Otherwise we may have to dump the domain and move the content to a new domain name (if so what's the best way to do it - we would prefer a complete break with the old domain but want to use the unique content).
Thanks for any help of advice. Really appreciated.
[edited by: tedster at 4:03 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]
[edited by: tedster at 6:36 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2010]
We always owned the domain. No previous owner.
Its been live for 6 years since we purchased it.
Apr 09 was the first time it had real content written for us. It had no content at all for a couple of years prior to that (just a homepage - no content).
Prior to that, it had been a portal - directory / search engine with a bit of price comparison shopping, news, sport and weather channels thrown in. No link building but some sites still have it listed as a directory.
Thanks for your help.
Also, would you explain what you mean when you mention "footer links". Are other domains giving you a run-of-site link in their footer? If so, that could be triggering a paid link flag.
[edited by: tedster at 6:36 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2010]
There are a few sites republishing these articles. They are linking back using the 'footer block' that we have specified. Of course, there are also some sites copying the articles but not linking back.
Therefore my reference to footer anchor text may have been confusing. Sorry! They are not ROS. Just a link back in the footer of an article as payback for using the article.
In addition, there are a few natural links starting to build in page content on 3rd party sites - but not many yet.
Whether backlinks are the issue or not, I wouldn't jump into a new domain just yet, especially because this is a chaotic time at Google and lots of odd things are being reported here.
Since you've got a forum, I would definitely check for any possible abuse and hacks (especially parasite hosting of any kind) -- and once you are pretty sure you're clean, be sure to install the most recent security patches and upgrades. Remember that outbound links to bad neighborhoods can kill a site, too. So make sure you are processing your forum's outbounds in a safe manor.
[edited by: tedster at 6:36 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2010]
I'll take a look at the link dev forum.
We do have a wordpress blog and that seems secure.
My mention of forum / blog posts relates to our SEO company posting on other 3rd party blogs and forums rather than on our site. These posts have a backlink either in the message body or by virtue of the username having a link.
We do have a wordpress blog and that seems secure.Really? I hate to tell you this wordpress blogs have been hammered and hammered and hammered with hackers.
Make sure it is up to date on ALL patches.
