ideas and comments for site fixing please

[UncleBob]

Hi there

Just looking for the thoughts, experience and wisdom of you all here with regards to one of our sites. Yeah, it's one that we did consider selling late last year. No one took, but it's a nice earner and we want to try and push the earninings up.


www.bedandbreakfast.org.uk

The .org.uk isn't the problem - it makes a minimum of £200 a month for us.

On Yahoo and Bing we are doing well. Search for for "bed and breakfast", with or without a geo in the search like "bed and breakfast London / Manchester / Etc" we are there on page 1, and this is where we get the £200 a month from.

Previously it was pg1 of Google also, which put us in the world of £100 a day. Getting back close to that would obviously be a plus.

We are not sure why Google all of a sudden dropped us from the rankings. I'm having backlinks checked but I don't think that's an issue, and I am certain we have all original, unique content.

There is no problem for us if what needs to be done is a complete redo of the site, but the thing is we need to know what square one we have to go back to and what we need to do to be back up. All thoughts, ideas, comments and views on what direction or approach we should take would be very welcome.

We're sat with a few other domain names that would be nice to develop into sites to keep the coins coming in, but there's not much point in starting with that if we don't know where this site went wrong and how we can get it to go right.

Thanks in advance for any input or comments - be as brutal as you like, so long as it's got a constructive point as to what to do about it!

 

[martin-s]

This site is in a pretty poor state in lots of different areas. If you want it to perform in Google, it needs a big on-site and off-site overhaul.

Things to check:

* Messages and warnings in Webmaster Tools
* Analytics graphs in comparison to known Google updates (see https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change)
* Bounce rates - which pages perform and which don't?
* Backlink quality (you don't actually have many to be competing on such big-ticket terms - check Moz keyword difficulty)
* External backlink distribution (home vs inner pages)
* Internal linking
* Uniqueness of content (Copyscape premium)

Things to improve:

* Url structure (using dynamic querystrings for page content is bad news)
* Responsive (and more attractive) site design
* Adding structured data/microformats
* Text in images ("helping you find a perfect b&b")
* Unique meta desc (currently the same for every page)
* Image naming conventions and alt text (plenty of potential there)
* h1, h2, h3 tag usage (pretty poor right now - with duplicate h1's)

 

[Adam H]

2 second glance and the main things that stood out to me from an on-site perspective although may not be vital or may not be an issue would still be things i would personally fix.

1. URL's being nasty in search results
2. you have two H1 tags on internal pages. Change <h1>Search for B&amp;Bs in...</h1> to something else.
3. Not mobile friendly
4. Images and script not optimised or close to being optimised.
5. Alot of outbound links
6. NO rel="canonical"
7. Microdata or lack of


A look at your backlinks however tells another story, literally the first things i see is :

http://www.hotelsleeds.org.uk/ - http://www.hotelschester.org.uk/ - http://cheaphotelscentrallondon.co.uk/

Loads and loads of the same script most of which being hosted on the same server : http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/

So i assume most are yours, all interlinked or linked to the main site.

Id say your footprint and strategy is.................................in need of work, alot of it.

 

[Adam H]

Martin beat me to it

 

[UncleBob]

Martin beat me to it

strictly speaking you both beat me

yeah, we know it needs a heck of a lot of work. really do appreciate the honest and direct comments - gives us a good idea of where to start in getting it fixed up.

 

[martin-s]

There's a lot more to do besides the above, but it's a good place to start

 

[UncleBob]

There's a lot more to do besides the above, but it's a good place to start

from the acorn comes the tree, i believe the saying is

yeah, lots to do, but i think we were just staring at it and having no idea where to begin. so many thanks for fresh eyes and giving us a good a place as any to start work.

 

[Adam H]

from the acorn comes the tree, i believe the saying is

yeah, lots to do, but i think we were just staring at it and having no idea where to begin. so many thanks for fresh eyes and giving us a good a place as any to start work.

In fairness Bob if its earning you a minimum of 200 notes a month now in its current state it can only get better for you