SOS! Any advice would be greatly appreciated

[Simon Riceman]

I am in a bit of a situation. My site is dying a sad death, since march the traffic and earnings have slowly been decreasing every month. The site is now up for sale and is vauled at a decent figure but all prospective buyers so far have been put off by the decreasing traffic. I am quite inexperience when it comes to SEO and am struggling to come up with a solution to fix this problem. I am calling on any experienced SEOs to read the information below and provide pointers/advice on what you believe the problem is and how I should fix it.

Brief Background

The site is an Amazon Affilate site in the health and beauty niche. Up until recently, zero backlink building efforts have taken place. The only backlinks the site has gained are spammy, also in December 2016 I had a negative SEO attack. I lost a lot of traffic which bounced back quickly after I disavowed all the bad links. The site has 125 posts with 40 of them being money pages. In the last 30 days, only 13 of the money pages have received over 100 page views with the vast majority of the rest receiving less than 10 page views.

My continuous traffic loss comes from 4 pages which happen to be my highest earners. These pages were also the target of the negative SEO attack in December. I have increased the quality of content on these pages to improve user engagement, but to date this hasn't had positive effect. I must also add that the competition within the top 10 SERPS for the targeted keywords is a lot more competitive now.

My diagnosis

I think that maybe I missed some of the bad links that were part of the negative SEO attack and because I have no good links to offset them, I then get punished every time google refreshes its algorithm. I also have to many money pages with affilate links on them which could be activating some aspects of FRED.

My Plan

1. Remove 80% of the money pages. The question is shall I:-

A) Delete the pages all together?
B) Remove the affiliate links and try to salvage them as information pages?
C) Delete the content and redirect them to relevant pages?

2. Build good links. I have some budget available so I plan to acquire links with high traffic metrics from services like loveto.link and link hero. I will also test out a guy I have recently connected with, who does guest post outreach and charges $55 a placement (including content).

A) Shall I mainly build links to pages targeted by the negative SEO attack?
B) shall I build links to power pages that sit on the home page and internally link them to the money pages?
B) Shall I hit links to the homepage, power pages and money pages affected by the negative SEO attack?

3. Build pillow links (web 2.0, forum and Q&A) for anchor text and nofollow ratio.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[lion1978]

First off if the Neg seo atacck was only link based, you have nothing to worry about, that kind of neg seo has not been effective for a long time, most of the time it actualy helps your site.

A) No do not delete the pages, see if they can be reworked, can you improve them and make yhem rank?, if not then use them as internal link oportuneties.

B)No do not remove the links, make sure they are No-followed, and potentialy cloak them, but at least make sure they have the rel no-follow tag
C) It might be an option to redirect them, but only if the content that you are going to redirect them to has a high topical relevanse.

2A) mainly build the links to your money pages/ the pages you want high ammount of traffic to.
2B) Yes always make sure to use internal links but still make it natural.
2C) Sure it won't hurt you to do so.

3. Yes depending on your anchor text profile, also consider that one key element when it comes to link value is traffic aka how much traffic does the linking site has and how many clicks through to your site.

There is some pretty awesome advice in https://www.buildersociety.com/forums/digital-strategy-crash-course.25/

 

[real]

or you could test if ...

1 D) moving the money page content to new a URL. And then create useful info content that gets links and add internal links to the money pages that are on new URLs.

 

[Simon Riceman]

Thank you mate, this is really useful stuff. I defo check the digital crash course.

or you could test if ...

1 D) moving the money page content to new a URL. And then create useful info content that gets links and add internal links to the money pages that are on new URLs.

I thought about that, but decided to try and fix this site because I want to sell it. I think I might have a better chance of turning this one around.

 

[Cash Builder]

This is what I have doing for my site and it's showing great results -

1. Don't delete any pages or remove any links. the pages were ranking before so it makes sense that they will rank again. As mentioned above make sure that all of your affiliate links are nofollow.

2. Add more informational content. For each of the 4 money pages that you said were your highest earners, create 2 - 3 supporting pages that are highly relevant to the topic of the money pages.

3. Interlink the pages. Naturally link each of the supporting pages to the money page, and interlink the supporting pages also (only the ones in each topic). Don't link to the supporting pages from the money page. This will create a silo type structure, and each silo will be topically relevant.

4. Build links. You can have the greatest content in the world, but if you don't have any backlinks you will not get very far. Build high-quality contextual links to the supporting pages and the money pages, and you should see great improvements within a few months.

I also interlink the money pages where it makes sense. As I said above, I have been using this method for the last few months and every time I build links the increase in rankings affects the whole site. So it's not just each silo that increases, but the whole site gets a lift.

 

[lion1978]

oh and when it comes to link building think 3*T (Trust, Topic and Traffic)

 

[Mahjong]

- The only way to get out from a spam attack, is to build more quality links.
- Fix your internal linking, and add more pages (review or whatever you do on your website).
- Try to drive non search engine traffic (social, blogs, forum...)
- You know why most of those affiliate websites lose traffic? Because of two things, your reviews or articles sucks, or you don't have a newsletter made for them to keep them updated on new stuff.

Ex: "Thewirecutter" people on this forum talk a bit about it and how should affiliate websites be build similar to it. See how they put newsletter (email form) on every page they have.

Also on their side bar where usually people put ads. Their structure is mediocre on that side bar, but I guess it do the job.

I recommend you check the digital course here it's important. And make sure to put good reviews or articles that explain enough to them why this product is better, and how it fulfill their needs, by answering on those problematic questions.

 

[lion1978]

The only way to get out from a spam attack, is to build more quality links.

If the atack is link spam that is not true, link spam has NO negative effect on a sites ranking, unless in some rare cases it's a brand new site and even then it will only make it bounce a little, even google them selfs has admited this thatsince they can't tell neg seo in the form of link spam from "blackhat" seo they simply disregard those types of links.
And just becouse no one should trust what google actually says I ran a single variable test on it and my conclusion is that link spam can't hurt your rankings, in some cases make it bounce and then reafirm your possition.

The disavow tool thing was a tool to get seo's to help rankbrain gain knowledge as to what types of links should be discounted.

 

[Mahjong]

If the atack is link spam that is not true, link spam has NO negative effect on a sites ranking....

I don't put all my work on SEO, so as I stated, I add more high DA links to my website, that's how I see my ranking recover again. At most cases I drive traffic by doing what the usual marketer should do, "advertise".

Thanks for your insight.

 

[lion1978]

At most cases I drive traffic by doing what the usual marketer should do, "advertise".

On this we can agree, seo is only one piece of the marketing puzzle. And everybody should be focusing on the entire picture not just one piece.

 

[Simon Riceman]

Thanks for the detailed response Mahjong

On this we can agree, seo is only one piece of the marketing puzzle. And everybody should be focusing on the entire picture not just one piece.

The negative links came from what seemed like legit business type websites. There was thousands of them from the same sites using my target keyword as anchor text. When I searched the page I couldn't find my website link anywhere. They some how managed to cloak it. I couldn't even see it in the source code.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Up until recently, zero backlink building efforts have taken place. The only backlinks the site has gained are spammy

This tells the whole story. You acquired no valuable backlinks, you were spammed and we're assuming those links were disregarded and disavowed, and all other things remained equal.

There have been a TON of updates since March, several of them seeming to act directly on links, specifically some kind of recalculation and realistic valuation of the good ones and disregarding of bad ones. There were two of these last month alone.

So if your site is stagnant, and everyone around you is getting links, and half a year goes by with a ton of SERP updates, it's no surprise that you're losing some positions to people who are actively working on climbing.

The good news is that Google finds your content to be rank-worthy. Like you pointed out, there could be some other issues like Fred, but that doesn't seem like it needs to be invoked to explain your experience. If you're worried about that, you need to increase the rate of publishing non-commercial content, not delete what you have.

If you want the quick fix, you need good links directly to the money pages that are slipping. If you want the long term fix, you need to be actively campaigning for links and take them all over your site, where ever possible. Your domain wide metrics act as a safety net to keep you from slipping beyond a certain point while also acting as a springboard and shortcut.

So yeah, you don't have to run around hoping to get links to money pages, which people don't tend to want to link to. You can create posts for the sake of getting links and interlink them to the money pages. You need links is the point, good ones. Otherwise your traffic is guaranteed to erode until there's nothing left, because Google will determine you're less important and relevant than the other pages and sites that are actively being referenced and discussed online. It'd be like continuing to rent out the 1880 Almanac of Current Events to someone in 2017, when you and they both know that the newest edition covers up to 2015.

 

[real]

I thought about that, but decided to try and fix this site because I want to sell it. I think I might have a better chance of turning this one around.

What I meant is - keep using your current domain, but change the file name of the article and update your internal links to point to the new URL of the article.

 

[Encrypted]

So if your site is stagnant, and everyone around you is getting links, and half a year goes by with a ton of SERP updates, it's no surprise that you're losing some positions to people who are actively working on climbing.

Ah! This makes sense now!!. I'm in the same situation as the OP.

I have a huge site that has been losing rankings month over month since June. See screenshot :

Initially i thought it was a penalty but i just realized my problem is Links.

From January till now , i have built Zero backlinks to this site. All i have done is to continually add content and i thought that is all i need. Content is king , right?

So my plan now is to build high quality backlinks but i have a HUGE problem.

The Problem :

No one in my Niche accepts guest post. I mean , NO ONE. This is one of the reasons why i haven't bothered about building links.

The Solution :

The only way out for me is to get links from news and entertainment websites in my country. These are sites with millions of visitors every month and tons of high quality backlinks. Each link will cost $150 - $300 but i'm not sure about 2 things.

1) The links aren't related to my niche (I'm in tech) , would this raise a flag?

2) Should i send a press release (1 content to all sites) or do it like a sponsored guest post ( each site with unique content)?

3) in order to improve the site's overall authority , I want to build more links to homepage and less to inner pages. Is this a wise thing to do?