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Site rank being flooded with new sites and pushed down

by tastyjams
5 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello! I was hoping somebody could help me understand what is happening with my website's rank. When searching for 'Gift Ideas For Dad' my website (giftideasdad(dot)com) use to be the 3rd result and held that position for a long time (about 6 months). In the last week it went from 3rd to the very bottom and a bunch of gift.com pages have pushed past on the rankings.



I'm confused why google is favoring 3 gift.com pages over mine? And two pinterest.com pages?

My SEO strategy has been to have a keyword domain with the search keywords I was hoping it would rank up with (which worked pretty great for 6 months). I tried to build the site as clean and simple as possible, and I have clear URL structure. My back-linking strategy is just posting links back to my site as naturally as possible around internet forums and articles that are relevant to pages on my site. I'm also adding content to my site pretty regularly, a few new products a week.

I know it's not a very strong strategy right now, I feel a little overwhelmed competing for search rankings with sites like gift.com, askmen, and pinterest. I thought my average session and bounce through rate was pretty good:


I just feel like since its the holiday season ramping up there are a flood of new web pages coming in and Google is favoring them for a short time being. Is this a strategy that is used often by companies? Take advantage of the time Google will boost your site ranking for a short time to see how it goes? Should I start adding pages that are like "Top 25 christmas idea" and "Top cheapest gifts for Christmas", stuff like that?

Thanks for any tips! I am totally ready for the brutal beating on hearing how poorly my site is built so I can work hard to make it better
#flooded #pushed #rank #site #sites
  • Profile picture of the author jezter6
    On the plus side, your site isn't as bad as I expected it to be based on the hundreds of other posts here about why they aren't ranking. At the very least it's not visually disgusting and what text you do have is in English and is coherent.

    That said - why you feel you deserve to be ranked above Gifts.com sites? Main site is a PR7, with at least 2 of the pages in that SERP result a PR4 or higher.

    Your backlinks appear to me to be crappy comment/list links (some of the ones that came up on my list dont even exist anymore). SEO Spyglass, while it doesn't give you quite as good of results as something like Ahrefs, shows you have like 22 links, and not a one of them is on a site worth a damn.

    Your home page optimization is..meh. For articles, it's absolutely non-existent.

    Your design, while not as bad as most, doesn't portray a whole lot of confidence in your site as a brand. It lacks a quality logo, and well...any real text. All you have for 90% of your links is a big old picture and a single sentence. Sometimes there's 3 or 4 sentences.

    How will you ever rank anything without any text?

    Your EMD looks spammy. Some people still swear by them, but I know a BS Affiliate site when I see one, usually from the EMD.

    There are a thousand of these "cool gadgets" sites, basically clones of "This is Why I'm Broke". Your site offers pretty much nothing to a visitor other than pictures to stuff people can buy on amazon. What are you doing to make yourself stand out?
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    • Profile picture of the author tastyjams
      Thanks for the reply Jezter:

      What I want to accomplish with these websites is to really provide unique gift ideas and then have amazing affiliate links as an after thought. I have quite a bit of work to get there, but once I figure out how I want my sites I want to build up about 20 others like it and create a network.

      Could you elaborate on my link-building short comings? How do you get back-links from better sites? Pay for them? What would you suggest as a good strategy for somebody like me with not a lot of connections to other websites?

      I really appreciate your comments!
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      • Profile picture of the author jezter6
        Originally Posted by tastyjams View Post

        Thanks for the reply Jezter:

        What I want to accomplish with these websites is to really provide unique gift ideas and then have amazing affiliate links as an after thought. I have quite a bit of work to get there, but once I figure out how I want my sites I want to build up about 20 others like it and create a network.

        Could you elaborate on my link-building short comings? How do you get back-links from better sites? Pay for them? What would you suggest as a good strategy for somebody like me with not a lot of connections to other websites?

        I really appreciate your comments!
        If that's what you REALLY want -- you're not showing it.

        Your "unique" gift ideas are iPads, Kindles, and PlayStations.

        What it looks like (to me) is that you have 500+ product listed and everything is set to randomly toss anything on the home page in hopes that randomly someone will happen to see something in that particular refresh.

        There's pretty much zero rhyme or reason to it, just throwing up random stuff from BBQ fans, to projectors. Come on...an $11 chopping guard for cutting veggies? Is there really a MARKET for pimping something so stupid and provides such little commission? I get that you can't always target high priced products, as adding in little items increases your commission based on selling more stuff...but relevancy? Is anyone looking for that for a gift idea for dad?

        At best, it's a disorganized catalog. At worst, it's an "I am very obviously trying to get you to click on something on amazon so that I make money" affiliate site.

        Think for a second - WHY should anyone come to your site? What are you doing that is any different than Amazon itself? They have category pages for "Dad gifts". In fact, they're better because you can quickly and easily filter by category, price, and a thousand other factors. And even better, they have a full product description to lure people into clicking that "add to cart" button.

        What you have is an image and a sentence "dad might like some skeeball, haha lol OMG" and hoping that someone happens to click a link to see what the product is (that you know you're personally never going to sell to them) in hopes that you've jammed a cookie in there and something else gets purchased while your cookie is in place.

        That's certainly a strategy...just one that real sites, built to last and provide VALUE to readers don't NEED to do.

        What's your CTR to Amazon? What's your Amazon conversion rate? On products you linked to, or random stuff they were already buying when you happened to sneak a cookie in?
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        • Profile picture of the author tastyjams
          It's my first website to monetize affiliate programs so I've been experimenting a lot. Before I had 10 new, unique ideas that didn't involve amazon products listed upfront and I just had some random amazon products below as an after thought. I really didn't have an idea of what products people would be interested in at first but now I'm starting to get an idea of what viewers are finding interesting and plan on putting those products up front. I think you're right, and my website has started to turn into just a shitty cookie cutter amazon affiliate page.

          I'll go back to my roots and provide the homepage with homemade, personalized, unique ideas instead of random amazon products.

          I don't think this will improve my rankings, but at this point I've dropped so hard on the first page that I don't think it's going to hurt one way or another. Thanks for the brash, but constructive criticism.

          To go back to the link building, could you elaborate what you mean by linking from stronger, non-shit sites? I think link-building is where i'm really failing to grasp an understanding on.
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          • Profile picture of the author jezter6
            Originally Posted by tastyjams View Post

            It's my first website to monetize affiliate programs so I've been experimenting a lot. Before I had 10 new, unique ideas that didn't involve amazon products listed upfront and I just had some random amazon products below as an after thought. I really didn't have an idea of what products people would be interested in at first but now I'm starting to get an idea of what viewers are finding interesting and plan on putting those products up front. I think you're right, and my website has started to turn into just a shitty cookie cutter amazon affiliate page.

            I'll go back to my roots and provide the homepage with homemade, personalized, unique ideas instead of random amazon products.

            I don't think this will improve my rankings, but at this point I've dropped so hard on the first page that I don't think it's going to hurt one way or another. Thanks for the brash, but constructive criticism.

            To go back to the link building, could you elaborate what you mean by linking from stronger, non-shit sites? I think link-building is where i'm really failing to grasp an understanding on.
            Now you're starting to get it.

            Less pictures and links to Amazon right in everyone's face. Keep it a little more subtle.

            More engaging content that will bring in a reader and hopefully click on a few different things and find something they like. More text content means more long tails and LSI keywords so that Google can give you some things to rank for outside of just your main keyword.

            Find a way to niche out this whole dad gift thing. Gifts.com is just an ecommerce with thousands of items that one is likely to find at any mall store and a billion backlinks. Become that place where people go to find good gift ideas because you research cool unique gifts that you just can't get at the mall. They may be able to find them on Amazon, but Amazon's not optimizing specifically for "dad" gifts, they're optimizing for the individual items.

            If I were you, I'd find a category that you have some experience with and gets some clicks, and beat on that thing until you ran it dry. I'd stay away from tech based on the 50 million other "tech gift" type sites, but that's just me.

            As for link building...it gets easier when you build out some real articles about your products. It's much more natural for someone to link to your "10 best glass chess sets for dad" article than they would ever link to a 1 picture, 1 sentence post with a picture of a $5k skeeball machine.

            Even when buying or building your own links, it at least gets you into something that looks more natural.

            Stay away from Fiverr link blasts, forum profile and sig links, blog comment garbage, directories, and all the other spam. If I remember, you had 20 links, none of which were impressive.

            Personally, I think your focus should be on social exposure. Your type of site has the potential to (with a good article on a few related unique items) get viral traction, which people will share out, write about on their blogs -- in the content and not just in comment spam-land. That will generate some natural links (though not necessarily powerful ones) but at least are better than spam garbage.

            Depending on if you niche down and focus on a very specific category of cool dad gifts, it may be another contextually related way to buy some links. Or work on your own PBN if that's your thing.

            Just don't buy crap links by someone running a program for $5. You'll get EXACTLY what you pay for.
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