Cannot Work Out Why My Website is Not Performing

Hi,

Please forgive me, I know you get these kinds of threads every day but I'm looking for a bit of advice.

I'm trying to rank www.oyyy.co.uk/ink-cartridges for the term 'ink cartridges' and have been building links slowly over the last 6 months. I believe my links are of high quality - much higher quality than the link profiles of Ink2U and Cartridge Save who are currently #1 and #2 for the term - infact their link profiles seem down right spammy.

I thought I was doing quite well - I got the page up to page 3 for the term until about 2 weeks ago when the rank suddenly dropped to page 10 inexplicably. (I'm seeing a similar issue with the term 'external hard drive' but I'm less bothered about that.) Could anyone take a quick look and work out why this has happened?

I know the content is not that great, but there's more content on their than the two sites previously mentioned.

Our site performance is slow in GWT - could this be having that much of an effect? Saying that, why would it only affect the term 'ink cartridges' and not 'printer supplies' (#3) or 'flatbed scanner' (#12)?

I did mention in another thread that someone had been comment spamming using our URLs and wondered if this had had an effect.

I'd be really grateful if someone could have a look and provide me with a bit of advice.

Thank You.

Should I have not asked a question like this?

I'd be really grateful if any of you could help me out with the site...

Really, really grateful

Printer Ink is more expensive than gold. The nr.1 and nr.2 sites are build to rank for "printer cartridges", I imagine them spending lots of budget and resources to ranking these money terms, can you even compete from a business point-of-view?

With:
- cheaper product
- better service
- better website
- better content
- better marketing
- more backlinks

?

Usually the prices are uniform, the content is made by the manufacturers and copied on hundreds of websites, the websites are cookiecutter magnento or oscommerce and have decent themes. Marketing is top notch and backlinks can be arranged to an empty page, if you just pay enough.

Remains better content. I don't envy you for having to write articles about printer ink, but that would be the way to distinguish yourself in the market.

If I would consult a site/business going online to sell cardridges, they would have to have a super solid marketing/business plan, else I would turn any offer down. You can't compete with the big boys without effort, insight, skills, budget, unique content and less links.

So can't really help you, at least I acknowledged your situation. If I knew how to rank top 10 for print cartridges with little effort, I'd be typing this post from my yacht in the Bahama's.

KillBurn, Ranking an eCommerce Site is a much more difficult as you want to promote thousands of products vs just a few.


Your going to have a tougher time because of your domain. All of your Competition that specific phrase has the word "ink" or "cartridge" in the name. You will have to do 2-3x the amount of Content Writing and back link building that they do because they are established and because they have a relevant search word right in their domain name not to mention the entire sites are devoted to "Ink"

I would Suggest targeting some lower hanging fruit, longer tails, such as "HP Ink Cartridges" or "Hp Ink Cartridges in the UK". Rank yourself for these until you are a PR 4-5 then you can think about going after some of the bigger dogs.

Off the bat, you need:


- Focused Navigation. Think "Tree". Right now your a Web or a Nest. Your ink Section should have only deal with ink cartridges and related content. Eliminate the "New Products". This tells google what sections of your site are important.

-URL rewriting for the whole site. Make your site Search Friendly. http://www.oyyy.co.uk/section.php/87/1/ is not friendly, should be http://www.oyyy.co.uk/Brands/

http://www.oyyy.co.uk/ink-cartridges should be http://www.oyyy.co.uk/ink-cartridges/

http://www.oyyy.co.uk/product.php/80799/canon-cli-521-cyanmagentayellow-inkjet-cartridge--2934b007-/6639996ec32449d3d2007b1a9e522bbc

should be http://www.oyyy.co.uk/ink-cartridges/Canon-CLI-521


- Your Category Sections are not Optimized from your homepage. I found "Ink" on 1 link on the bottom. Move this link to your category section on the left side.

- More Content related to ink, Set Up an Article Section and write articles on Ink and related topics. You can Outsource this writing as well.

- More Backlinks.


All and All you could really benefit from some OnSite SEO rework.

And look what happened! Please don't mention it again... no, actually...


New content gets an initial 'boost' from Google (people call this the honeymoon period) which could simply have 'worn off' with no 'substantial' links to maintain it after that boost?

Here are a few other ideas. To really get to the bottom of the issue you should sit down with a professional & be 100% (not 99%) honest - if you haven't been already. If you have been 'a bit naughty' an SEO could probably help and save you a LOT of time and money. It is likely that then, & only then can you really move forward.

The solution is almost certainly going to be something to do with 'links' (because it is a competitive term):
~ "get more QUALITY links"?
~ If you have been manipulating things - either ease off, or undo whatever you did in the week or two leading up to the drop?
~ If your original benefit was from 'comment spam' the additional comment spam (that you mentioned before from yourself/whoever) could have tripped a filter causing all the comment spam to be devalued.

The BEST way to 'get the links' is going to be to 'get the content'. Give people something GREAT to link to - GREAT value, GREAT information, GREAT 'tools'/calculators, etc.
In other words 'would you link to your site if you didn't own it?'

Probably one of the biggest 'overhypes' I've heard about 'keyword in domain'. Yes - a ranking consideration - not as BIG a deal as that!

Good idea about the 'lower hanging fruit'/'long tails' - but ignore the 'PR' bit!

i really appreciate your replies jesus and grace and i accept your points and will taken them on board - it's just really frustrating seeing other sites rank well with spammy links



you're right with that - i think i've tried to go too high too early - i will be targeting moderate traffic terms with low competition in the near short term

our homepage has PR 4, but what frustrates me is that we are actually much bigger (no i'm not just being a bighead!) than those sites on the first page for ink cartridges



Have tried this, as you can see with the ink cartridge URL, but our CMS makes it incredibly restrictive - will try to do this again with a blanket URL rewrite if it is important



would you mind explaining why the trailing slash is important? i will do it, but would like to know why...



i agree that this is a bit of a mess



ok, on it - makes sense i suppose



we do have a lot don't we - you can always have more though! - can you see that our backlinks are far less spammy than those sites on page 1 - what are they doing that we aren't?! they hardly have any content!

We have had a lot of success streamlining our site in the past 3-4 months with a natural tree structure. We moved from no where to be seen Page 15+ on a two word mid (300k+ Searches) competitive search term to now position 2, as of today. We were position 6 for 3 weeks. Fun Stuff . We are targeting Many of these each with strong Category pages. We are eCom. Most Seo's don't know what they are talking about when it comes to eCom.


Structure.

Natural Tree Structure is this. You have a Site, Your Branches are your Product Categories, Products are the leaves. Your Navigation, URL structure, Site Map, and BreadCrumbs should mimic this Natural state.

http://Site/Cat/Product

The / Tells Google that this is a Directory/Folder that contains something. You are supporting the Natural tree structure by telling Google that this "Folder" Contains products and it more important.

What you currently have is a "Web" Site instead of a "Tree" Site. Google likes Trees. In a "Web" site every page seems to point to every other page, so how does a Bot Determine what is important?

You can figure out what Google bot considers important on yoursite by doing siteomain.

Are the links that you want to promote listed on top? If not you need to change your site structure so they are.

I can go into Tree Structure + link juice flow if you like.

To Sum it up for you kil. Your having a hard time ranking for ink cartridges because you've not told google bot what is important on your site.

Since your hindered by an off the shelf CMS you have a lot of work ahead of you if you want to change your site structure completely. If you do not want to do this, then you can still rank but you will have a much harder time.

Its a nice website, but as many have already said you are in a very competitive market. Here are a few things I would try:

1.Simplify your title tag - no need to have your company name, words to the left are given more weight - keep them targetted and minimal.

2.Your links arent ideal - this is because you are obviosly using a predeveloped shopping cart on php. I would try to see if you can add the use of TITLE tags to your 'a href's.

3.I did some tests using a common seo tool and you have over 164,000 links going to your site! have you been buying spam links?

Good luck!

I made an analysis of the first 500 links on yahoo explorer for your website and the 2 competitors you mention.
You say:
"I believe my links are of high quality - much higher quality than the link profiles of Ink2U and Cartridge Save who are currently #1 and #2 for the term - in fact their link profiles seem down right spammy."

I disagree.
If you are only looking at the PR of the links, then yes, you are doing better than the other 2 but of those 500 links, most come from www.myinkblog.com, side link under Sponsors, maybe Google has decided to discount those links all together (or count just 1) that alone could be the reason for your drop.
You said their links look spammy, well you are targeting the word 'ink cartridges' like crazy in the anchors, from 500 ibl you have 287 time the word ink and 374 times the word cartridges in the anchors, but strange enough of those 500 ibl 0 have the word cartridges in the title page, maybe those links are not from pages really on theme.

Your 2 competitors use a similar technique, Ink2U has the word ink inside the domain, and they target far more the word cartridges in the anchors, opposite for Cartridge Save since they have the word Cartridge in the domain they target far more the word ink in the anchors, both have links from related sites (on theme), unlike you.
You need to change your link strategy, you have too many 'ink cartridges' as anchor, it looks spammy, try mixing a bit more. Get less links but from sites that are on theme, is better to have a link on a PR 1 page inside and article that talks about printers that having a sidelink 'sponsors' on a page dedicated to photoshop that has a PR 4.
You need to get links from pages that have the words 'ink cartridges' inside the text, in the title page.....not just on the anchor to your page...
hope this help.

This element of SEO is important and not talked about near enough here. I have had similar results turning a navigation structure from a bush (my word for a poor nav structure) to a tree.

I will never bother pointing links at a site until the navigation structure is sound. Once that's done I often find I don't have to bother with any more links.