Bounce Rates and Crawl Errors

So further reading on the Panda Update today suggested there was a link between those who lost rankings post Panda and a high bounce rate. A little digging into my analytics and that would kind of match with which of our websites were hardest hit. Highest bounce rate = hardest hit. and vice versa. I had read other advice to get rid of pages with high bounce rates, but I wanted to see what I could find out about why people were bouncing off these pages first.

And it was really weird, there was no rationale that I can see anyway, as to why the pages I'm finding with really ridiculously high (90%+ on one page) bounce rates should cause people to bounce. So, dig deeper, and I discover that pretty much all the bounces are coming as direct traffic to the page, and bouncing straight off. Not real people then I would suppose from this. I've deleted /renamed the pages that I'm finding this happening with. I don't want to lose the purpose of the pages at the moment, as I think they're pretty useful, featuring sub-sections of valentines gifts, women's Christmas gifts for different types of women and budgets etc - they're pages written for people, not bots at all!

I've renamed (just with an extra _ on the end) and deleted the offending page for: /valentines_presents.php /christmas_gift_woman.php In terms of crawl errors on webmaster tools, I'm systematically going through each website one by one, and looking at every single crawl error. Showed up some interesting stuff, like the fact that the links by seo company built for me recently all link to server error pages. Hmm. He told me today after finally getting to speak to him that he would understand if I cancelled and could offer me a month for free. Double hmmm. He promised to come back to me today with some answers/explanations/analytics on why the site has dropped so badly....not heard back since. He just wants me to go away I guess, which I can totally understand, but he can fix his sloppy, sloppy work first, and pay me back for work they've not done before I'm going to leave him alone, that's for sure. Bloody rip-off merchants. The only reason I'm not naming and shaming just yet is because I feel I should give him a chance to offer me my money back, and fix the faults. So I'll give him till the middle of next week, and then I will indeed tell everyone and anyone about their shoddy, error-ridden, dishonest practices. As many times as I can. People like that company give seo a bad name, and they bring a whole industry into disrepute. Anyway, so any crawl errors I can fix, I'm fixing, one website at a time. One down, 3 to go so far. I'm continuing to put original content on the pages with duplicate content on, a page or two per day. Once all the duplications are sorted then I'll make sure every page has unique content on it, written by me, and obviously unique too, and not 'sales-speak' either, something people might smile at instead, and then I'll go back through the lot and increase the quantity of text. Writing, I can do, and I find it easy. So why I haven't done this before, God only knows!! And bouncy pages are moving house. I'd love to know why the bounce rate thing is happening - just some weird bot or scraper site? I have no idea, and think I've got better things to do right now than worry about why, and instead get on dealing with fixing it!

Duplicate content

Just a quickie before I may finally go to bed. I took some unique text on one of the worst hit pages, and searched for it in Google. 3 results, all with word for word match. All on my site. Damn it!! One is a sort by price version of the same original page. So I'm adding Disallow: /*sort= to robots.txt thanks to this tip here. Hopefully that will get rid of one duplication. The other is me being lazy, taking unique content from one page and mashing it up on the category page. Idiot! Am changing it now. Its the same on other pages too - lots of writing for me to do tomorrow!

Stage 2

Well today I spoke to both my seo companies for advice. Well I tried to anyway. One wouldn't speak to me. After much insistence, he sent me through the 'premium' links they've been paid to build over the past 6 months. 2 per website per month. He sent me 4 links, all linking to the same website, all with good PR. I clicked through to the links, and on looking at Google's cached copy of the links, surprise, surprise, none of the links were there on the last cached copy. As one of the cache's had taken place that very day, my assumption is that they just put them up this morning. I called twice, and left an urgent message for him to call me back with an answer to the question 'when were these links put up'. No reply as yet.



The other rang me before I got to him. He asked me if I had made any changes other than those he had noticed and could tell me about. He said he didn't want to shoot from the hip and make wild guesses as to why all my sites have dropped (he only works on one), and was obviously double checking some of his other client's links in Google while we were on the phone - all of which were fine. He told me them too so I could check, and repeatedly said all their link building was white hat and as no-one else had suffered like we have, he didn't think it could be that. He was much more honest, open and helpful, he asked me to let him know anything that sprung to my mind, however small, and told me they were looking into it in detail and he would come back to me.



It felt like he was on my side, and that was very reassuring. The contrast between the 2 reactions and responses couldn't have been more different. You can guess what I am thinking about the first company. I also looked at some of the links the first company had put up. 4 link to 'server error' pages, because they have left a trailing slash in at the end of the url. One entire set of keyphrase links all have session id's on the end, and so end up linking to a duplication of my homepage (unavoidable due to our CMS system, having 2 homepages, but naturally I desperately avoid linking to the /index.php version, of course, this is the version they have been linking to in error). I will endeavour to discuss this with him tomorrow. I feel very much as though I have been fleeced and they have simply taken my money and not done what they were contracted to do.



But I have no idea whether what they have and haven't done has had an impact on our rankings. And, as its across more than the 2 sites they were working on, the answer is probably not. Doesn't mean what it looks like they've (not) been doing isn't pretty bloody fraudulent though. Obtaining money under false pretences, methinks!



The second seo guy mused that the internal links between my 4 sites (all hosted on the same IP address) could be the cause. He said he wasn't sure, and told me not to do anything about that just yet until they looked into it further. By this evening, I felt totally powerless and had to do something, so all those links went. I obviously have copies of the previous pages so can revert back at any time, but I wanted to do something, and it did seem a pretty sensible suggestion, so I just went for it, right or wrong. In user terms, it does seem more sensible for the links to be there, but hey ho, no users are coming any more so first things first!


In terms of the changes I made yesterday and their impact so far: http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/easter-gifts-c-159.html

Easter Gifts: (12-4-11 not in top 100): same

Easter Gifts for Children: (12-4-11 6th): 6th - category page is not the result showing, its an article page instead

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/30th-birthday-gifts-c-33_61.html

30th Birthday Gifts (12-4-11 22nd): 28th - meta info displayed by Google has reverted back to pre-change

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/40th-birthday-gifts-c-33_62.html

40th Birthday Gifts (12-4-11 40th): 42nd - meta info not changed back in Google yet

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/gifts-for-mums-mothers-day-gifts-c-23_100_179.html

Gifts for Mums (12-4-11 14th): same - meta info not yet updated


And the others

Gifts for Dads (12-4-11 77th): 79th, meta changes not updated


Get Well Gifts (12-4-11 20th): same, no meta update


50th Birthday Gifts (12-4-11 not in top 100): same


My gut feel for today is its probably not on page stuff like meta tags that has created this. But I'm still no closer to knowing what it probably is....

Panda Hits Us Hard in the UK

Well, not much sleep last night. Panda appeared to maul our 4 websites pretty badly, the main retail one http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/ the worst.

First page rankings (some of the which have been there for years) have dropped to pages 4, 5 and even out of the top ten. After the initial horror subsided, it was time to take stock, and get some info fast. The article I found the most useful as a starting point was here. I thought I'd start by focusing on the worst hit site, see what I could do to regain rankings, and then roll it out on the others. As it's a pretty big, sprawling site, it also meant I could test a few different techniques at the same time.

So, looking at my first hit list, I took a step back and tried to analyse without prejudice how we faired:

1. Little Or No Original Product Text Content - we write, from scratch all our product descriptions. We do use the same descriptions every time a component appears in a gift collection, but it is all original text, so I figured it couldn't be this.

2. Little Or No Original Category / Section Page Content - yes, guilty as charged.

3. Same Template. Page After Page After Page - ditto

4. Really, Really, Really Big Boilerplate Text - yep, ours is probably too big, needs looking at

5. Same Run Of Site Links On Every Single Page - again, guilty

6. Writing Unique Content But Giving It Away - no

7. Great Unique Content Buried On Pages Not In The Index - possibly

8. Unique Content Hidden From Spiders - don't think so

9. Multiple Pages On The Same Domain With The Same Content - some of this possibly, but has been mostly phased out of the site, but probably not the index

10. Competing against yourself with multiple sub-domains - no

So that gives me somewhere to start. But i also read that high number of internal links seems to be being frowned upon by Google. And ours were hideous really. Almost 300 internal links on the homepage, and when I took a fresh look at the site structure, it was totally confusing to users. Dynamic fly out menus, with the little > signal to indicate they flew out downloading last on some pretty slow loading pages, just shouted 'unfriendly' to me. In fact, I'd probably leave the site, somewhat overwhelmed and irritated I couldn't find what I was after quick enough.

So that was my first step, and today I have about halved the number of internal links on every page. Still not what it should be, but certainly a step in the right direction (I hope!). Gone was the fly-out menu, left hand column now only show the main gift categories, and once you're in those categories, you can drill down further to get to the section you're after. My problem with this solution is, and always was - hence how we ended up in the massive internal link thing in the first place, that the fewer clicks a user has to make to find what they want, the better. But hopefully I've got to a halfway house where a trade-off is made which works both ways.

Next comes the tricky issue that I made some meta changes to all of my pages about 4 days ago. So I am slightly suspicious that those changes have had an impact - yet I know Panda has just hit the UK, so my gut feel is that it's probably not the cause. Even so, it could be, so on 4 pages below I'm reverting back to the original meta data. I've listed the current Google.co.uk positions prior to the change, and will track them (I'd like to say weekly, but it will doubtless be daily as a minimum while I grasp madly at straws that it'll all be ok any minute!)

Pages to change back: http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/easter-gifts-c-159.html

Current Meta Title: Easter Gifts, Easter Gifts for Children, Kids Easter Gifts, Adults

Current Meta Description: Easter Gifts for Children plus Easter Gifts for Adults or the whole family - lots of lovely fun and cute Easter Gifts that stand out from the norm this year

Current Google position for Easter Gifts: not in top 100

Current Google position for Easter Gifts for Children (was first a few days ago btw!): 6

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/30th-birthday-gifts-c-33_61.html

Current Meta Title: 30th Birthday Gifts, 30th Gifts, 30th Birthday Presents, Gift Ideas

Current Meta Description: 30th Birthday Gifts with lots of choice including 30th Birthday Gifts for Her, 30th Birthday Gifts for Him, Fun 30th Gifts, Commemorative 30th Birthday

Current Google Position for 30th Birthday Gifts: 22

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/40th-birthday-gifts-c-33_62.html

Current Meta Title: 40th Birthday Gifts, 40th Gifts, 40th Birthday Presents, Gift Ideas

Current Meta Description: 40th Birthday Gifts with lots of choice including 40th Birthday Gifts for Her, 40th Birthday Gifts for Him, Fun 40th Gifts, Commemorative 40th Birthday Presents and more. Fast delivery too

Current Google position for 40th Birthday Gifts: 40

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/gifts-for-mums-mothers-day-gifts-c-23_100_179.html

Current Meta Title: Gifts for Mums, Birthday Gifts for Mum, Mothers Day Gifts Cocoon

Current Meta Description: Gifts for Mums - whether you need Mothers Day Gifts or Birthday Gifts for Mum, we've got loads of lovely Mum Gifts to treat her and make her feel special, with fast delivery too

Current Google Position for Gifts for Mums: 14

I'm going to also try something a little different on another 4 pages - one keyphrase followed by 'from Cocoon Collection' as the title, the meta description just featuring this keyphrase once with one semantic variation and some marketing spiel, and the h1 text not being the same as the meta title keyphrase, some semantic variation instead. These are the pages I'm doing this on:

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/gifts-for-dads-fathers-day-gifts-c-28_112_181.html

Current Google Position for Gifts for Dads: 77

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/get-well-gifts-c-25.html

Current Google position for Get Well Gifts: 20

http://www.cocooncollection.co.uk/50th-birthday-gifts-c-33_63.html

Current Google Position for 50th Birthday Gifts: not in top 100

That'll do for today, I'm emotionally and physically exhausted, and the only potential benefit is that my weight loss is going better than expected as I can't bloody eat a thing!!