Repairing Damage to Page Rank & Search Engine Rankings

Posted on 2nd May 2010 in the Search Engine Optimisation category.

In the most recent google toolbar page rank update, this website, www.fiverdesign.co.uk, dropped from a 2 to a 1. I wasn't hugely surprised, as in terms of SEO I have neglected it quite badly in recent months, focusing my efforts more on my personal site (www.mysweetshadow.co.uk) and on writing for www.rocksins.com.

Previously, Yahoo Site Explorer used to show somewhere in the region of 400-500 links to my site when I turned off internal links, when I checked it today (Friday, April 30th 2010), it was down to around 270. This led me to dig out my manual link spreadsheet (which I know most of you anal SEO professionals like me keep) and decide to run through every link on the site, one by one (incredibly tedious yes, but it was late on a Friday and I needed an activity which required no brainpower). The results were pretty surprising, even though I was aware there had been a dip.

Out of the 143 links I had listed in my spreadsheet (this was most of the links to my site, not all, you always lose a few), 42 were no longer valid. The oldest of these links were less than a year old. Of these 43, about 60% had either removed the link from the designated page or the designated page altogether, and the other 40% of websites ceased to exist altogether.

This got me thinking that rather than my lack of recent activity, was the amount of "dead wood" I was linking to proving to be the problem? I am honestly not sure and would like the opinion of other SEO professionals who read this post (the comment form is just below guys!). Yes, I should have been more active in my link building but I am curious if this has helped contribute to the sites partial downfall.

I have taken steps to attempt to remedy this, removing all the dead links and freshening the site up, such as by starting this blog. I am hoping by starting this blog there can be some relevant discussion about various web design and SEO topics, in addition to me giving a few people a good read (hopefully).

22 Comments

Posted by Jamie

Testing

First post lol, this is just me testing my own website.

Posted by Tom

Link checker

Interesting, I wonder how larger sites deal with that problem, perhaps some automated tools to remove dead links?

http://validator.w3.org/checklink looks useful at least for your own testing purposes.

Posted by Peter Handley

Hmmmm....

Not quite sure what you mean here Jamie...

Have you been linking out to some of these dead wood sites, or are these ones that have been linking back to you? I was somewhat confused...

Reciprocal link directories are dying out - even a year ago, I did find some improvements as a result of using them, but these have been diminishing in their returns for some time - is this the type of site linking that you had been doing?

Adding fresh content to the site will almost undoubtably help you - Blogs are quite possibly too powerful in my opinion, but if they work, then we have to do it :)

For my own blogs, I really don't do any link building (yet - I might do), but the content I have been writing has been attracting content based links - it helps to have good content from that regard - and targeting writing content that was contentious or just getting a review of a conference before anyone else did...

So get out there - find things to write about, and do it first! Don't hold back with opinions and pimp it to folks...

Having said that, looking at my blog, I need to follow my own advice ;)

Posted by Jamie

Clarification

Hi Pete,

Thanks for the comments. The "dead wood" sites I was referring to were reciprocal exchanges that were set up at least 18 months ago. Some were directories and some were proper websites, other web design companies or web relevant websites.

I could not agree more about the fresh content, hence starting this thing! :)

Posted by Peter Handley

Reciprocal Linking

Where I still have sites with reciprocal links, I am looking at phasing these out over time.

I note that the links pages on the site are n/a PR when I look at them - do you know if they used to have any?

If so, I would take that as a sign that these pages are being seen as low value.

By all means link to some of these sites should you wish to continue to do so, but I wouldnt do it in this directory format - perhaps write a blog and link out to some of them (whilst removing them from the link directory) and start to look at reducing this area of the site.

It will offer more value to the people that you link out to, and offer more value in terms of content on your website.

Posted by Peter Handley

External Link Checker

Oh by the way - you might find http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/seo-tools/external-links/ useful for checking external links on your site :)

Posted by Jamie

Reciprocal Linking - Response

Regarding the PR of the link pages, I'm honestly not sure whether they had any PR or not. I think some of them may have been "PR0" which may indicate they were being indexed or regarded more highly than they currently are.

In terms of restructuring the way any linking is done if it is reciprocal I am planning on doing exactly what you suggested, I have not had the time to do so thus far. I figured the first step was to get rid of the dead wood and then work out what to do with the rest afterwards.

As a side note, I really need to develop the "notify a user when a reply occurs" functionality for this.

Posted by Peter Handley

Reciprocal Pages with N/A PR

Pages that go from having PR in toolbar (even 0) to n/a usually suggests a problem to me - it is usually a signal that the page in question is considered of low value - I've had some sites duping some content of a client lately that I identified primarily as a result of the dropping of the toolbar PR.

I've also seen the vast majority of reciprocal linking pages drop to this - and this is a signal to me that its time to update - sounds like you have a plan with this mind :D

Posted by Jamie

Repairing drops to N/A PR?

In your experience what is google like at reconsidering the value of said pages?

I am guessing it does not consider them of no value forever but wondering how difficult it is to make google reconsider the value of the page.

Posted by Peter Handley

Repairing Drops to n/a PR

With duplicate content issues that cause this, it's easy - either get the people that have copied your content to remove it or rewrite all of your copy again if its not possible to (I'd prefer to not have to rewrite copy in that situation, but its not always easy to get the offending copy removed - legal threats can be effective though ;) ).

With things like links pages, I would fundamentally change these - don't link out to everyone that is offering you a link back in return, overhaul the main page of this (and leave the others to 404) and provide a small number of links to sites that you really rate - a small number of authoritative websites - provide "value" with them rather than a list of links that ultimately aren't realistically of benefit to your users.

So... you use Drupal - link to some really good resources on that - same with SEO etc. But not a free for all (ok, that might be harsh, but I only had a quick look at your links pages) directory format that ultimately is not there to benefit anyone other than your site (in theory) with the links that you get back in return...

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