Is my seo damaging my ranking?

[kimoonyx]

Up until last month I was doing the seo on my site myself. I farmed it out to ipage because I figured they were big and reputable. Today, for the key words they are working " how to open a franchise" I have no google rank... Two weeks ago I was 14. There is no link to my site in this post because I dont want it removed...i want you guys' help because I have an awesome site with great info, and have spent lots of time and money closing the brands that I rep. I need to get my name out there. Check my profile if u want to view the site to answer the question with a full context of where I am coming from. Thanks.

[Harold Mansfield]

I can't say for sure if what they are doing is damaging your ranking, without knowing what they are doing. But one thing is for sure, Google takes notice of natural linking and they punish self, manipulated linking.

For an SEO company, at this point in the game, to promise services that isn't an overall approach to improve and market your content so that it gets these natural links, is a disaster waiting to happen. You can't fake links anymore.

[DeniseTaylor]

Hi

If you've been hit by Penguin, one reason would be for a spammy link profile. Find a backlink research tool like Majestic SEO and see if you can see your backlink history. If you see lots of spammy looking links, it could be a Penguin hit. You can work to have these links removed. If it's your SEO doing it (you can tell by the date of the links), I'd get them to stop.

[MyITGuy]

If you just changed your SEO methods, and your rank dropped then I think we can attribute that to your SEO Changes.

While I'm no expert I do see a few things that are working against you:
1st - Your site is moving slow. Search Engines are now taking in the responsiveness of the site and this can impact your rank in a positive or negative manner
2nd - The links to different Franchises on your home page may be impacting your SEO as the search engines may see this as a tool/trick to increase your SEO so they will penalize you for it.
3rd - Lack of keywords. I do not see any on your site and while they may not make a huge impact on your ranking, there still might be some usefulness that your missing out on with them not being there.

[MyITGuy]

Just to follow up, here's a report on your sites responsiveness:
Auto-generated (Mon Jul 16 2012 16:10:17 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)) - Load Impact - On Demand Website Load Testing and Performance Testing Service (http://loadimpact.com/load-test/allyoucanfranchise.com-6365ce17578cc8fac74344284c76af44)

Your sites average load time is approximately 12 seconds, until you get to 37+ concurrent users where it spikes to an average of 40 seconds.

All of those images are increasing your load time:
allyoucanfranchise.com/
Tested from New York City, New York, USA on July 16 at 17:45:49
Page size 834.1kB
Load time 60.01s
Requests 64
Perf. grade 86/100
Your website is slower than 96% of all tested websites
Pingdom Tools (http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dxOxc4sc9/allyoucanfranchise.com/)

[ReganP]

I'd say yes you can attribute that to your change in SEO methods. Do you know what methods this agency is using? Did they tell you their overall plan, are they sending you reports that include the links they've built? If the answer to any of those questions is no, that is a definite problem.

[Paul Elliott]

Michael, here is more information on Google Penguin mentioned by Denise. What is Google Penguin? (http://ambrking.hubpages.com/hub/What-is-Google-Penguin)

Paul

[synconlinemedia]

There was a time where you could just take $1000 and buy a bunch of links to rank. Most of the big SEO companies either bought links or they owned their own network of sites to link from (link farms). Penguin nixed this. Now you actually need to have plan in place to rank. For example we focus on what we call the four pillars of SEO today: On-site SEO, Off-site SEO, Social Media and Content. There is no doubt in my mind that the company you were using was relying on paid links...or link farms. When Penguin came out almost all the sites we manage increased in rankings. However the best thing of all was that we began to rank for more keyword combinations and synonyms.

[webmarketingpro]

I think you already got your answer. Buying links is very dangerous these days. You're better off writing a couple of articles each week, and maybe a press release every other week, and building quality contextual links naturally, at an ongoing pace, not 1000 links one week, and no links the next.

Good luck with getting your site rankings back!

[mdillinger]

It sounds like you got deindexed by Google. I've had this happen before by building too many links too fast.

Be careful who you hire to do your SEO. They tend to focus on raw numbers over quality for their reports. Set up Google Webmaster Tools for your website, and you can use the "disavow link" feature to cast away links that could be hurting you.

[KennethT]

Lot's of good comments here for you. I just looked at your Meta Data too (Title. Description and Keywords). Some are good whilst others are poor (sorry - not your fault). I am not sure what they were before but missing data could mean Google o longer thinks certain pages of your site are relevant based on that data, so you have dropped off.

SEO for a website can no longer in isolation get you to top of Google / dominate. It is now a combination of many, Website content, SEO, Video (WITH SEO), Blogs, Forums, Directories etc etc. I don't even bother with Links nowadays to be honest.

I would push video hard as is a very powerful tool.

[Ronald Dod]

Yeah did you hire someone to do your SEO? Did you use elance :)?

I would honestly just go get a wordpress website. It has great SEO plugins and it's unbelievably inexpensive. I start them out at $1,000. You can even do it yourself!

Good luck.

[Jimmym]

I can't say for sure if what they are doing is damaging your ranking, without knowing what they are doing. But one thing is for sure, Google takes notice of natural linking and they punish self, manipulated linking.

For an SEO company, at this point in the game, to promise services that isn't an overall approach to improve and market your content so that it gets these natural links, is a disaster waiting to happen. You can't fake links anymore.

Harold Mansfield, you couldn't have said it any better!

[dianecoleen]

Can you list all the SEO techniques you have done so far for your website? From that, try to sort out the most to least important task. Then check if you are sending your website url to any non related websites. You have to make sure that you only submit your site to related one's so that your effort won't be wasted. If you haven't known, Google is now devaluing links from unrelated websites. So if you are being listed to those unrelated sites better to email the owner of that site or try the disavow link of Google webmaster tools to remove your url to such unrelated categories.

You can also try to have a responsive design. Ask someone to review your website as to what they think about it like what you've done in here. And also try resolving the issue on your website by following the comments in here you think you haven't done for your site. Hope that helps :)

[webnetpromo]

Yes, it may do this way also. Many people do over SEO to get more traffic as soon as possible but Google has become smarter. Spamming or rapid link building may result in penultimate actions to your site.

[Ted]

Up until last month I was doing the seo on my site myself. I farmed it out to ipage because I figured they were big and reputable. Today, for the key words they are working " how to open a franchise" I have no google rank... Two weeks ago I was 14. There is no link to my site in this post because I dont want it removed...i want you guys' help because I have an awesome site with great info, and have spent lots of time and money closing the brands that I rep. I need to get my name out there. Check my profile if u want to view the site to answer the question with a full context of where I am coming from. Thanks.

You can't judge the efficacy of an SEO company in the first month of work alone. That isn't fair to them. If they took over your SEO in the last month and have been making changes to the site and building links, then you have to give them at least several months to start seeing progress.

You should be asking that SEO company about what your expectations should be. Actually, you should have covered that before you started paying someone else to do it for you. Didn't you ask when you should expect to see results?

[kimoonyx]

Thanks to all for your replies .I implemented many of your suggestions and I wanted to give those of you that helped specific thanks.

Paul and Denise, thanks for enlightening me to google penguin. I looked it up and learned alot. I discontinued the ipage service....Wow, to think i paid 300 bucks a month to lose all of that ranking really pisses me off.

To WebMarketingPro..I'm back to article writing as you suggested, and with my new found penguin knowlege i'm safely doing all of the seo stuff on my own (if you can even call it SEO.) I took you guy's advise and opened a webmaster tools account, which led to google analytics. I'm way more knowledgeable about this now.

To SyncOnlineMedia your "offline seo" feedback inspired me to try a tradeshow. I went to a franchise expo is San Francisco last month and saw a spike at least in traffic terms and I think it helped my ranking some. Actually.... That whole thing helped my company as a whole, I didnt realize how easy that was gonna be. I leveraged vista print for a big banner, it looked good and was only like 30 bucks, I put a vid together that i played on a small 32 inch monitor, shook some hands and handed out some business cards, and blam... done.. It cost me like 1800 total and most of that was travel expense.

I've made the crawl back up. I'm back up to 25 (far from the top for sure). ipage's BS had me busted down to 135 apparently. With the momentum i'm seeing i'm sure I can achive front page again.

I'm glad I had this little mishap with the allyoucanfranchise page first, because I had plans to purchase ipage's services for my real meat and potatos page as well (gamestartstores.com) I enjoy 1st page ranking for this one. but I wanted the very top spot. Luckily I didn't let them get their hands on it. I think its really crazy what they advertise. If I would have put Game Start Stores in their hands and they had done the same thing to it, It would have killed me financially.

SEO is a scary game. I don't think trying to hire a company to increase your web presence is unethical. Hell I was willing to pay what it took, and look what it got me. I think many other small businesses run this risk. I have always said a smart business man uses every tool at his disposal. he does not necessarily have all the answers, but knows when to turn to the experts and utilize every tool he can to make the best decisions. To me... I had made a sound decision, I knew I needed more of a web presence to gain prominence..I hired the experts...I mean come on, its IPAGE, they are everywhere...huge, and I paid a premium for the service... and then I got "Google Smacked" (which was the ipage reps own term for what happened to me.) FIRED!!

Just more experience I guess.... If a client comes to me with questions about SEO This little experience has taught me alot.

[kimoonyx]

Actually, you should have covered that before you started paying someone else to do it for you. Didn't you ask when you should expect to see results?

Of course I did. And I was told as you suggested that my results would come 2 - 3 months after initializing the service.

I think you are missing the point though....I already had a position of 14. and I enjoyed that position plus or minus 2 or 3 positions for like half a year. Then after hiring ipage my ranking dropped to 135... I was nowhere to be found on Google. Results are a drop... if it would have taken me 3 months to go from 14 to 10 I would have kept paying... but in a month I went from 14 to 135. Not cool... that isnt a lack of results...that is BS tactics that I have since learned good will penalize you for. The experts should have known better. I was the consumer turning to the expert. I do not believe at all that I am being "unfair" to this company. And I did the only thing I could do in the interest of my fledgling company.... I Fired them, applied myself towards damage control and moved on.

[brandyc]

Michael I think you did all of the right things. Other than hiring Ipage which really wasn't your fault. I have an authority site for children's car seats that was devastated by Panda/Penguin and it still hasn't recovered. I'm glad that you've been successful in regaining lost traffic.

My take on all of this is that I'll never put so much reliance on Google or anyone else in the internet marketing world. It's been a hard lesson learned. Thanks,

Brandy

[kimoonyx]

I am standing on the other side of this Chaos echoing your sentiment Brandy!

[merlot105]

Something that's been skipped is that you're not going to rank on the phrase "how to open a franchise" - no matter how much on-the-page or off-the-page SEO you do your site. It's too popular a term, I presume, and there is way too much competition 1) in that field and 2) for that phrase. I would focus on ranking for long-tail keywords like "information, tips, and tricks to starting a franchise". Also, Google's algorithm changes constantly. If your rankings change it might not be something you did but something Google changed.

[neil@camisonline]

Having a good easy to navigate website with relevant content is the most important thing; sure SEO and back-linking will bring traffic to your site, but customers won’t stay on it if they can’t find what they’re looking for or your information isn’t relevant to them.

Analytics is a great way of tracking visitor behaviour on your site and can give good ideas of where you need to make improvements.

[brandyc]

Having a good easy to navigate website with relevant content is the most important thing; sure SEO and back-linking will bring traffic to your site, but customers won’t stay on it if they can’t find what they’re looking for or your information isn’t relevant to them.

Analytics is a great way of tracking visitor behaviour on your site and can give good ideas of where you need to make improvements.

Another important area that analytics will track is bounce rate and duration of visitor stays. If people aren't hanging around long once they come to your site, that can affect your ranking in a very negative way. Neil you're right about the importance of analytics.

Brandy

[ozetel]

Patience Grasshopper... The more I look at SEO and taking charge of it myself, the more I am being reminded that it is a patience game. If you are trying to gain position quickly, you will be caught out. It has to be a consistent content based process and it will take time, as the real world would. Build things slowly, and yes you can do that yourself. I dont think you doing things is a bad thing, but you would want to know what others are doing as well.

Good luck...what a tricky world it is, but rewarding when it works. SEO has always been a trial and error world from the day dot.

[Jerieth]

You need to be careful with SEO, as google may penalize some if they suspect fraud in anyway or unfair practices. Best way to increase your search rank is to design you website well, and update it regularly. Bombarding your site with fake traffic, doesn't always help. I would also recommend you do everything you can to market your site and spread the word. Google's search algorithim is so complex, anyone who says they completely understand it is probably lying.

[Harold Mansfield]

Anyone who says they completely understand it is DEFINITELY lying.

[Avah]

Your links must look normal, I mean ponder on this "the regular surfer style" ask yourself, what do a regular surfer do when they're browsing the net? What type of links or keywords they usually go for? base on yourself whenever your reading or watching an article or image in the internet what type of things that usually catches your eye?

[ttayehh]

Good point webmarketingpro, excessive link building will automatically hurt your SEO. As you mentioned building quality links at an ongoing pace will do the trick. Also slow response times can also hurt your website. If google robot is indexing your website, and your website takes too long to response, it will be ignored.

[johnmclaren101]

SEO won't damage ranking anyway until one resorts to "Black Hat" SEO strategy. If one relies on getting links from the link farms, that is now being penalized by Google. Google Penguin update was based on the premise that low link building sites were penalized by Google search engine. Content of the site does matter a lot in search engine update now. One should stay away from key word stuffing.

[mark2media]

You need a marketing plan...plain and simple. We define marketing into 12 categories. SEO falls into our "Chance" category because its among those marketing activities where you are NOT in control. Everything stated above is true. There has been some fantastic feedback. As all above would probably agree, a coordinated marketing plan means a decrease in Google rankings is a minor hiccup. I suggest a well thought out marketing plan with elements you control. All working together with a unified message.

[dianecoleen]

I visited your website but it seems not working on my browser [allyoucanfranchise dot com]. I think you have gone through a deceptive SEO company. You may want to check on their link reports and see on where they're throwing your website url. Checked this article out to have further information about Google Penguin, Google: Penguin Update | Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-penguin-update). And also, you may want to do some quick keyword research depending on your business because you have a really broad term KW. You may narrow down the keyword so you'll have a targeted visitor.