PHPBUILT. Thank you very much for an amazing guide. I am completely blown away by the content you have provided and have already started to implement it.
I have a site that was bringing in about $400-$500 per month (in about 5 months from launch). It was my first site and I felt like the king of the wolrd becuase I thought I had something that works! But then tanked, all pages have nearly gone from google. They are indexed but do not rank. The site had abut 300 pages. The is no manual penalty in webmasters tools.
The site disappeared from search on 4th Sep, which seems to coincide with a google update (
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17328.html)
Below are the issues I discovered using you guide and the steps I took. I have some questions related to my implementation and if you can shed some light, it will be really helpful.
Issue: Duplicate content on tag pages, categories, author and blog pages (site.com/page/1, site.com/page/2, etc).
Issue: Keyword stuffing in categories, keyword density, navgation
Issue: Some tags pages were getting more traffic then actual articles (and no ads were shown on them!) indicating messed up keyword density.
Resolution: I removed all tags - they were not adding any value to the navigation of the site, dropped all author pages. They were added to increase keyword density in the first place!
Resolution: Dropped several categories that were keyword stuffed, renamed some to things like News, updates, articles, etc.
Resolution: Dropped keywords from footer, from alt text in header, navigation (now only going to home, contact, privacy and blog)
Resolution: Targeting articles one by one to bring keyword density under threshold you mentioned and will take it from there.
Issue: keywords by domain names. I had Partial match domain target e.g. keyword: lightweight bike parts domain: lightweightbikepartssite.com
Issue: 36% links with exact anchor text "lightweight bike parts"
Issue: Links from spammy domains
Resolution: Moved site to new domain (somethign like bikerepairpros.com), Added No index to the original site.
Q1: Will this be counted as duplicate content as the old domain is still alive but set to noindex? Do you know how long it takes for google to deindex them?
Q2: Should I use webmaster tools and deindex pages from the index ( I hear its effective to get a site down in less than 24 hours)
Q3: I want to get rid of the link profile, all links were low quality (non-relevant free directory submissions, bookmarks, spun articles, etc) and limited tired link building GSA). The domain has PR 0 after the recent update
and only two links have PR on them (PR 1 and PR2). I judged this as a link profile to run from and start from a clean slate. Do you think once the partial match domain was removed, my sites tolerance to exact anchor text would increase and I can 301 the old domain to new domain or do I still run a risk of getting penalized again for keywords in anchor text?
Issue: High bounce rate.
Resolution: Added a widget to the sidebar (across full site, promoting my top articles). The links are image links, so no anchor, are site-wide. This to me seemed similar to the way you promote stores, by adding links in the sidebar. I would want to rank for all those pages I am linking to from the side bar, so I am concerned about having an anchor text in the link. With limited traffic now (only from bing and yahoo) the bounce rate reduced from 85% to 60%.
Q1: Do you think not adding anchor text with keyword was the right move? I am getting a good reduction in bounce rate by this and don't want to mess-up keyword density by having overly optimized anchor text.
General Questions:
Q: I have several pages such as "lightweight bike parts in New York" "lightweight bike parts in California", they were all blog posts. All of them had the same 150 word description and then some listing of where to get the item from bringing they word count to 300+ ion most cases. Some of these were ranking before the update killed them. I feared duplicate content initially and removed the same description from all the pages bringing the page to 150+ words only. No improvement was observed.
Which page is better in your view? From the user standpoint I was giving all the information on one page and was also hitting 300+ words, now I have much smaller word count, the page does not look as good, and is no longer as useful but has no duplicate content. One solution is to add unique descriptions to each page (which may all convey the same thing but written very differently). Do you see this as the only solution or do you think 150 word pages have a chance to rank?
Q: I am also moving these posts to pages as that will further improve the structure of my site (I will use blog post to promote those pages)
Q: I have several topics such has "how to make lightweight bike parts" "How to install lightweight bike parts" where I actually want to target a five to six word keyword!. I typically write a 5000- 700 word article for them. Can you give me keyword density suggestion for this.
My best guess after reading the guidelines for a 500 word article would be as follows.
"How to install lightweight bike parts" - Title in H1 tags (I am assuming this is a 5 word keyword as to would be a stop-word - Is this a correct assumption?) ( I am already at 1% density fro this phrase now)
"lightweight bike parts" mention 1 more time, so over all two occurrence of three word keyword - 1.2% density
"bike parts" 2 more time - 1.6% density
"lightweight parts" - 4 times 1.6% density
I will also keep single word density under 2%.
