Travel site features:
Domain age: 14 years
Time spent under filters: more than 2 years
Target: removal of the site from the sanctions of Google (Penguin, Panda) and Yandex (AGS, Minusinsk)
Promoted Search Engines: Google Yandex
Subject: tourism (travel agency, hot tours, tours to *Country*; hotels, tours to *City*, air tickets)
Region: Ukraine
Competition: high
Price positioning: medium-high prices
The niche of travel services is very competitive, as evidenced by the rather large budgets for external links in the subject. SEO promotion requires a highly qualified specialist and efficient allocation of resources for work. Moreover, we also had to correct the mistakes of the previous SEO studio, which actually led to site filters. What happened to us - read below.
Comprehensive SEO audit: detection of SEO problems, Google Yandex filters and development of a strategy to correct the situation
Market and competition analysis
- Marketing audit of the site (study of competitors and the tourism market)
- Comprehensive site audit (seo, usability, technical and commercial audits)
- Compilation and clustering of the semantic core
- Development of a new seo-site structure
Internal optimization analysis
- Analysis of technical sitemap.xml and robots.txt files
- Title, description, keywords analysis
- Content analysis, internal linking
- Site performance analysis
External optimization analysis
- Link quality analysis
- Analysis of the naturalness of the growth of the reference mass
- Checking donor sites for topics
- Website anchor list analysis
Critical errors, the correction of which was necessary to remove the filters Google Panda, Yandex AGS
- The site was empty: there was no content on 90% LP, there were no last-minute tours and other travel offers. The site did not carry any value for users.
- The content that was posted was non-unique and spammed with keywords. There was a malicious over-optimization.
The anchor list of the travel company was terrible. 90% anchors belonged to the gaming industry, and all donor sites were under filters (obviously the work of competitors) - Title and description were present, but they consisted of 1-2 keywords.
- Keywords has been re-optimized (+10 keywords have been added to the meta tag on each page)
- performance. The site took a critically long time to load. The waiting time sometimes exceeded 30-40 seconds. Agree, the behavioral factors of such a site could not be good.
Stages of work to remove the site from the filters
Works on internal factors
- Order and placement of new content on the pages of the site (high quality content, good uniqueness). All content is written using LSI technology.
- Optimization of meta-data (title, description, introduction of micro-markup on site pages).
- Implementation of microdata.
- Fixed errors in sitemap.xml and robots.txt (specified host, removed "Disallow" directives that blocked access to the necessary pages of the site).
- Moving site to https
- Performance optimization (using caching and compression, bulk image optimization, optimizing database queries) - page loading from 30-40 seconds has decreased to 5-6 seconds.
Works on external factors (Google Penguin filters, Yandex Minusinsk)
- Contacting site owners directly (work to remove low-quality links)
- Checking all links for quality in CheckTrust and Majestic
- Work on increasing the overall quality of the link mass by obtaining new natural links from good resources
- Building a new natural anchor sheet
After the work done, we submitted applications to Google and Yandex to revise the site. A month later, the filter was removed. The results are presented below (data taken from Google Analytics, Ukraine region, organic traffic).
Results
Google
Yandex
Yandex