Dancing, Panda slap OR dud domain?

[GrindingTo10K]

As you may remember from my follow along thread I bought an aged domain with backlinks from TB Solutions, after reading a recommendation from @Charles Floate. It was a domain with decent links from wedding and fashion sites and I used the domain for a site about appliances (so, not related to old site). Most of the backlinks 95%+ used the brand name, or generic anchors... so I thought that would be ok.

I bought some easy to rank keywords and made pages with 1000+ of unique content. I tried to not over-optimize the on-page (still learning as a lot has changed in the last few years!). After a week or two I was ranking 60-70 for one of the keywords. Then it disappeared on 8th of March during the Fred update. But I thought it was just dancing. The page has not came back and it was been 3 weeks already.

Basically I go to the mobile-friendly test (it is deemed mobile friendly btw), then I click "submit to google" and the site appears in the search results in 90-100th place (roughly) for a few hours or a day, then disappears out of the search results again.

Is my page just dancing, is the new site penalized, or did I mess up by using the old domain for a different niche and now I am screwed?

I read Matt Diggity's On-page SEO guide. First thing I did was change the page URL from "best-xxx-xxx" to "top-5-best-xxx-xxx-reviews" so that the page URL would not be the exact keyword I am trying to rank for. Basically, I have tried to de-optimize the pages (no keyword stuffing etc), I will add some images and embed a YouTube video, then link out to an authority site (NOT Wikipedia!).

Any advice from the pro's?

 

[Charles Floate]

Had this happen before, where you have a generally niche domain but it's not niche focused on the topic you want to go after.

Normally it takes 4-6 weeks but you'll one day you'll see a sudden ranking for keywords - I just had it happen on a sports personality domain I bought in mid-Feb index #33, #44 and #46 for my 3 main keywords with 0 links, but the pages have been up for several weeks already.

Likely a sandbox style thing Google are doing to counter the effectiveness of repurposing domains.

 

[Ryuzaki]

The page bouncing in and out of the index around position ~90 makes me think you could have an indexing issue on hand, like a robots.txt or meta noindex directive. You said ~60-70 which makes more sense, but now they're gone.

This is assuming your on-page SEO is even remotely acceptable. If it is, I imagine you should index much higher even on a brand new website for even a harder term.

I'll be the bearer of bad news. It's not always the case that this happens, but Google has gotten a lot better about wiping the juice from a dropped domain. If it obviously switched hands then "wipe." If it changed verticals then "wipe."

Little things like changing the URL slug aren't going to fix this issue, if it's a ranking or indexing issue.

I'm going to be honest and say (and hope that it's not the case) that you goofed by taking a Wedding domain and turning it into an Appliance domain and all of the juice was reset. I'm not sure you could salvage it as a wedding site at this point either. I hope it's not a penalty either, where they wiped the juice and doomed the domain.

The anchors aren't the only indicator of topic relevance, although that was clever to check that it was mainly Brand anchors. But most of the pages linking in are probably wedding sites in the context of being about a wedding.

Have you put it in Webmaster Tools and seen if there's a manual penalty? You never know but someone could have bought it before you and TB Solutions and used the type in traffic for pharma impressions or even cloaked the homepage. I've had that happen and Google is happy to fix it within 24 hours once I let them know I'm a new owner.

I hope this works out for you. What I would do is take your few 1000 word pages and put them on a new domain, re-written. I'd do it real sloppy too, just get it done, but keep most of the headers and optimization similar. The idea would be to see where they index with no links on a new domain, versus your current situation. It'll give you more insight into what the problem is and where to go next.

 

[GrindingTo10K]

This is assuming your on-page SEO is even remotely acceptable. If it is, I imagine you should index much higher even on a brand new website for even a harder term.

I do not have any images or external links on the page. But that should not keep me out of the top 200 right? The pages do not do any keyword stuffing or anything like that.

I hope this works out for you. What I would do is take your few 1000 word pages and put them on a new domain, re-written. I'd do it real sloppy too, just get it done, but keep most of the headers and optimization similar. The idea would be to see where they index with no links on a new domain, versus your current situation. It'll give you more insight into what the problem is and where to go next.

I have a new domain which I have owned since last August, which I just got indexed a few weeks ago with a link from a Tumblr. I will follow your advice and recreate the exact site structure, but with uniquely written content in the same style.