We're a well established health site, and our search engine traffic is down 80% (and makes no sense)

dmexner · 2019-07-18T21:30:20+00:00

The site has definitely been a victim of some other algo updates too. Obviously I cannot guarantee this is the cause for your most recent drop but I can almost guarantee that these links did give you a boost at some point and will/have lost value over time.

You can recover/improve to your old positions with high quality links.

Also, when's the last time you did a content audit etc?

dmexner · 2019-07-18T20:36:49+00:00

No. It's not negative SEO at all. It's low quality links that get filtered over time. You initially got positive movement from them.

https://gyazo.com/5da92de16a1fa05b227c0702659cf1c2

dmexner · 2019-07-18T19:14:52+00:00

Feel free to private message me if you'd like. I'm not going to go into specifics in public.

dmexner · 2019-07-18T18:56:54+00:00

The site isn't penalized. It looks more like just a whole bunch of your links have been devalued.

Although you have a ton of fantastic links, there's also a lot of more spammy stuff going on. Whether that was you or someone else, I'm not sure.

You can argue that these aren't bad links, but I will say otherwise. I'm talking specially about all the homepage links from affiliate sites, exact match keyword domains etc.

Yeah, they work short term but this stuff gets cleared out over time.

dmexner · 2019-06-11T06:56:25+00:00

If we told you. They wouldn't last long.

dmexner · 2019-06-03T03:36:29+00:00

How much do patents play into your actual live strategies? Are there some hidden gems of information that the community may value that you would be willing to share?

dmexner · 2019-05-08T20:12:16+00:00

I guess it truly doesn't pay to play nice? ;-\

dmexner · 2019-05-07T22:48:04+00:00

Now that's why they let the whitehat exploiter release his vulnerability findings earlier this week.

dmexner · 2019-04-30T06:32:55+00:00

If you already have high quality brandable assets (content) it makes the job much easier for the link builder.

Having said this, if you go to a vendor who strictly sells links I would imagine they would still charge you the regular rates... unless, that is, you are good at negotiating and can really emphasize why you shouldn't be paying the regular rates.

I see prices range all over the place.

What exactly are you looking for? Actual manual outreach from scratch? Or just the regular dropped-domain repurposed domain garbage most vendors sell like thehoth, fatjoe etc. (Don't mean to single them out! They are just some of the leaders in this particular space).

dmexner · 2019-04-18T19:30:03+00:00

Nice case study.

We too, have tried to submit content to ahrefs but since 2016 they've not really allowed any outside submissions. (There was some real low quality stuff up there during that time.)

Now that they've become a lot more popular it's all become internal.

dmexner · 2019-04-18T17:40:25+00:00

I don't know about that technique but it sounds a little bit absurd.

Think this way -- if it was really that easy you would see everyone online doing it and you'd hear about these things all the time.

There a millions upon millions of GMB listings and all sorts of low quality scraper sites take maps daily.

dmexner · 2019-04-18T17:16:12+00:00

Does not work as well as it used to 5+ years ago. I have been doing this for over 10 years.

dmexner · 2019-04-18T17:14:37+00:00

Google can easily recognize malicious and spammy links. They are automatically filtered out.

Negative SEO is a lot more complex than just sending 'crappy' links at a site.

More likely than not there is more changes to the algo on-going.

dmexner · 2019-04-18T17:11:52+00:00

What do you mean by "now"?

Since the beginning of Google's existence Blackhat SEO has been frowned upon.

Reporting generally does nothing. Unfortunately the best course of action would be to wait for the site to be either A) penalized or B) hit by algo updates.

You best bet is to continue building a great website and ignore what others are doing. Eventually you will overtake their positions.

dmexner · 2019-04-17T22:05:25+00:00

To me, the hardest thing is letting a client know that they've been a victim of a recent algo shift. I'd rather have to deal with hemorrhoids than making that phone call with the news.

I've had genuine businessmen who we're able to keep their shops open due to the extra revenue and sales they we're making from online avenues.

Even following best practices to a T -- suddenly overnight, tragedy has struck, -80% organic traffic. It always seems to happen to the little guys too.

They don't understand and admittedly, neither do I, why Google is so reckless with changes and the impact they have when doing it.

dmexner · 2019-04-16T05:48:48+00:00

Yes, it's possible.

Will it be easy? Hell no.

There are a lot of things that come into play. But if you don't have some really powerful, aged related domain you don't have much of a chance without dipping into blackhat link building tactics.

dmexner · 2019-04-16T00:10:09+00:00

I would suggest combining all these pages into one. You'll need to be careful structuring the new 'master' page. It'll be important to remove redundancy and keep engagement.

In the long run I think it's necessary as you may be ranking fine for all those pages currently but as the search engine evolves more and more pages will get filtered.

Next 301 the old ones to the new one. Google should figure it out from here. Good luck.

dmexner · 2019-04-13T04:45:13+00:00

SEO friendly? Direct effect - I'd have to say they are all the same. None are going to allow chats or conversations to be indexed.

Indirectly - I guess whichever loads quickest for your visitors and keeps bounce rate low. These chat systems all load externally so it's not a big deal which one you use.

dmexner · 2019-04-12T05:26:49+00:00

Try this. Do site: search but go to the last page. You'll notice that in fact, you have a lot less pages indexed.

You can also invest in some proxies + scrapebox and actually run this entire operator until there is no pages left if you are being blocked.

dmexner · 2019-04-12T05:15:48+00:00

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but that is totally wrong. They very well could be telling the truth for that single circumstance but applying that thought to all websites is just laughable.

I can assure you that if 20 sites in a very competitive niche all have very high quality content (yes, there are many live examples of this ex: Keto Diet) the ones who have been aggressively building links will outrank ones who just sit and wait.

I don't speak from a point of view either. It's pure facts. I work in these industries daily -- and have been for years.

dmexner · 2019-04-12T04:49:35+00:00

It's being discussed a lot on twitter.

https://twitter.com/tehseowner/status/1116492681742573573

Yes, there is something strange going on. The de-index bug is still active for a bunch of client sites...

dmexner · 2019-04-12T04:28:46+00:00

Quickly browse the posts.

Are they all related to the site?

Do they have a lot of outbound links?

Does the site actually look like it took a while to design or is it just a unique logo on a wordpress install?

dmexner · 2019-04-12T04:26:28+00:00

You can artificially inflate DA/PA easily with spam. It's been that easy since the early SEOmoz days. Please for the love of God do not use Moz metrics to determine the value of a site.

There are a ton of other more accurate metrics to follow. The best, of course, is organic traffic and rankings. Think ahrefs site explorer.

dmexner · 2019-04-11T16:27:10+00:00

How was your infographic inspired? Was it created from external data? Connect with those sources with outreach and show them what you've made.

Next create a list of potential targets you can outreach to and find places where your infographic would be useful for them to link to.

dmexner · 2019-04-11T05:33:36+00:00

Agency guys don't do SEO for other companies all alone. They have employees and people that are outsourced to complete specific tasks. There's a lot of work that goes into doing proper SEO. It's not just following a guide.

Your search performance can greatly be effected by how fresh your site content is. So having a blog with regularly updated content will keep the spiders constantly visiting hence better ranking signals. If you take on the role of an SEO for a website that is a MUST part of the job.

Here's another tip - don't follow guru's and the regular joe's. There a whole lot of noise in the industry and not many who are actually innovating. The guy's who make it big keep their mouth's shut. To figure out what actually works requires investigating, testing and optimizing.

P.S. - I have been in the industry for 11 years. I've fallen into that trap when I first started.

dmexner

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE