Having possible problems with rankings due to development website
-
Hi all,
I've got an interesting issue and a bit of a technical challenge for you.
It's a bit complicated to explain, but please bear with me.
We have a client website (http://clientwebsite.com) which we are having a hard time ranking in the past few months. Main keywords simply don't show up in Top100 searches, even though we are constantly building backlinks through Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc.
Normally, we use ahrefs to look at the client's website backlinks, but just today we used Majestic to look at the backlink profile and one backlink stood out.
This is a backlink from a development server (http://developmentwebsite.com) which redirects to http://clientwebsite.com
The developers who were working on the redesign of the client website, put it up on their server and forgot to delete it.
Also, the content inside the development website is almost identical with the client website.We then checked to see if http://developmentwebsite.com is indexed.
It's not.Although, inside the robots file http://developmentwebsite.com/robots.txt there's:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
The funny (and weird thing) is that http://developmentwebsite.com/ and all development website inner pages are not indexed in Google.But if we go to http://developmentwebsite.com/inner-page, it doesn't redirect to the corresponding http://clientwebsite.com/inner-page, it's the same development website page URL and the pages even have links to the client website, but like I said, none of the pages of the development website are indexed, even though crawlers are allowed in the robots.txt's development website.
In your opinion, could this be the reason why we are having a hard time to rank the client website?
Second question is:
How do we approach in solving this issue?
Do we simply delete the whole http://developmentwebsite.com with all the inner pages?
Or should we do 301 redirrects on a per-page basis? -
the problem, might be about your template .
-
Thank you Jake, will definitely give this some thought.... Appreciate the help.
-
Recommending link development would be difficult without knowing more about your specific industry, competitive advantages, etc.
Generally speaking, you want to focus first on ensuring you have valuable assets capable of justifying new links to your site. This would be a variety of content types depending upon your business, but can range from Free Advice and How To Guides, Data Insights, Tools/Widgets, Detailed comparison/reviews, Interviews and insights from industry through leaders, etc. You can use methods like broken link building to identify new content opportunities that you can capitalize upon, or look at top linked pages on competitor sites to see the types of content that has earned their links.
Once you have established your linkable assets, you can begin the process of outreach and amplification to bring attention to those assets and earn natural links. Of course, you can always reach out to other thought leaders, cited sources, etc... to encourage some additional sharing, linking, etc.
You can also do link profile comparisons to see if there are reputable outlets citing your competitors but not mentioning you.
Those are just a few examples off the top of my head. If you have the resources to do link dev internally and just need strategy guidance, you should check out the Moz recommended list, as many of those agencies (I know ours does) will offer ad-hoc consultation to help your team get the systems in place to be successful with your link dev efforts.
Cheers,
Jake
-
Thanks, Jake. We've had the dev site removed.
As a side note, what link-building would you recommend if you think we should not be doing outreach / guest posting?
Cheers!
-
You have to search and replace the new sites URLs with the same consistent URL not from the dev server then block the dev server.
- search and replace the URLs in the new site.
- block the developer site with a password
First things first take Make sure you have all the images and code on the http://clientwebsite.com/
Then go to the new site and do a search and replace on all the URLs including the database.
Search for http://developmentwebsite.com & replace with http://clientwebsite.com
- https://www.funduc.com/search_replace.htm
- https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
After doing this.
Go on to the development site and block URLs by password-protecting your server directories
Place a password on the site preventing it from being indexed by anything or even accessed without using the password.
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93708
- https://blogvault.net/how-to-block-google-from-indexing-your-wordpress-site/
You might want to check the header tags in the development site URLs. This would only be for curiosity you really want these things gone.
Did you check for
_(…)_ **X-Robots-Tag: noindex** _(…)_
Or no index meta tag in the section of your page:
Lastly, remove the offending URL's from Google if you must & follow this guide when launching sites.
I hope this helps,
Tom
-
You can also use Moz's Open Site Explorer to look at the spam scores of your incoming links.
-
Zakkyg, as previously mentioned, the problem may be the "building backlinks through Guest Posts and Profile links, and the type of links that you're building to the site. I would take one step further and run the site's links through Link Research Tools' Link Detox to make sure that the links to the site are good links and you're not building any toxic links.
I would also immediately take down the development site completely. Make it deliver 404 error pages, with all URLs. There's no need to set up redirects at all. Since it is an old dev site, it really shouldn't have any traffic or links to it--so I would just remove it.
-
Great question..
First... some of your rankings problem may be around this - "Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc."... at least 2 of those items carries some decent risk, the consequences of which would be "not ranking". Have you checked search console to see if any manual actions exist? Did you have rankings and they disappeared, or have you been unable to secure rankings in general? Does the site currently get organic traffic, but just maybe on terms that you aren't targeting?
As far as the development site, this could easily be a separate issue from your rankings, and I would doubt this would cause significant rankings drops if the dev site isn't being indexed by Google. Would you be lucky enough to have any type of access to this through a CMS login? If so, you could easily verify the site in search console and see where things stand in terms of indexing. Additionally, if you could access through the CMS, you might be able to change a few settings, such as canonical tags, "website" or discourage indexing (if wordpress), etc. .that would cause the site to begin redirecting to your clientwebsite.com or at least give the indication that it is a known copy.. Did you check the individual pages of the site to see if a meta tag is in place on the pages blocking robots?
Ultimately the easiest thing regarding the dev site would be to simply ask the dev company to remove the site...
Cheers,
Jake
-
I would do the redirect to be safe then in the future make sure you run noindex on any development sites.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Problem with Google finding our website
We have an issue with Google finding our website: (URL removed) When we google "(keyword removed)" in google.com.au, our website doesn't come up anywhere. This is despite inserting the suitable title tag and onsite copy for SEO. We found this strange, and thought we'd investigate further. We decided to just google the website URL in google.com.au, to see if it was being properly found. Our site appeared at the top but with this description: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We also can see that the incorrect title tag is appearing. From this, we assumed that there must be an issue with the robot.txt file. We decided to put a new robot.txt file up: (URL removed) This hasn't solved the problem though and we still have the same issue. If someone could get to the bottom of this for us, we would be most appreciative. We are thinking that there may possibly be another robot.txt file that we can't find that is causing issues, or something else we're not sure of! We want to get to the bottom of it so that the site can be appropriately found. Any help here would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
H1 tag on website logo problem?
Currently my website is having H1 tag on website logo and also h2 tag on post title. I think for seo it is good to use H1 to my post title and H2 to website logo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MasonBaker0 -
Getting Your Website Listed
Do you have any suggestiongs? I do not know local websites where I can get some easy backlinks. I guess a record in Google Places.would be great as well. Any sound suggestion will be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stradiji0 -
Product Page rankings - How to boost?
Hi folks I am responsible for an e-commerce website. Our website is doing very well but I believe that our product pages should be ranking more highly than they currently are. When taking over my current role, it became clear that a number of changes would need to be made to try and boost the under performing product pages. Amongst other things I therefore implemented the following: New Product content - we have placed a massive focus on reworking all product content so that it is unique and offers value to the reader. The new content includes videos, images and text that is all keyword rich but (I hope) not seen as overly spammy. Duplicate content - the CMS was creating multiple versions of the same page - I addressed this by implementing 301 redirects and adding canonical links. This ensures there is now only 1 version of the page Parameters - I instructed Google to not index certain URLs containing specific parameters Internal links - I have tried to improve the number of links to the products from relevant key category pages My question is, although some of the changes have only been in place for a month, what else can I do to ensure that the product pages rank as highly as possible. As an e-commerce website with so many products it is very difficult to link to these product pages directly, so any tips or suggestions would be welcome! Here's an example of a product page link : http://www.directheatingsupplies.co.uk/pid_37440/100180/Worcester-Greenstar-29CDi-Classic-Gas-Combi-Boiler-7738100216-29-Cdi.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Ranking Factors for Google
Yesterday a blog post appeared on SEOMOZ titled 'A Tale Of Two Studies' - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies-google-vs-bing-clickthrough-rate It suggested some of the ranking factors Google and Bing take into account when ranking. A few of them I want to talk about: Social Signals, Age of Domain and H1 HTML Tag So I thought age of domain and H1 both had some weight in Google? I guess not! And social signals, now I know it gives some weight but its right up there in the list for both SE's, so should getting likes, tweets, plus1's now be part of my everyday link building? Bing-Google-CTR-Infographic-e1321978731479.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
How to increase rankings?
I know to increase rankings involves link building, but what kind of link building is worth it and what type is not? At the moment most of my link building effort is focused on guest blogging, which has worked well for me, I have seen some good movement on a range of keywords using this tactic but I cant help but think I could get a lot more movement in the serp's if I mixed it up a little. A few other link building techniques I know of are below, but I don't really use them, so my question is what ones should I be using combined with my guest blogging to give my rankings that little extra help. 1. Directory Submissions 2. Article Submissions 3. Press Release Distribution 4. Forum Signatures 5. Blog Comments 6. Social bookmarking 7. Social Sites (Squidoo, Weebly, Wordpress, blogger) If I have missed something please let me know. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Organic Search Problems?
Hey guys, I am in need of a little help! I am currently an aspiring SEO (trying to absorb as much information as I can and implement changes to help my site organically)... Most of my experience revolves around SEM. That being said, I have a problem. My site is doing well through paid search... great quality scores, etc. However, the content on my site (and even my site as a whole) does not "appear" to rank well in Organic. To explain further... My site is federalautoloan.com... and when I type in exact article names (or even federal auto loan) into Google, nothing shows up. And yes, my content is all original/unique content. I've even recently added a unique Calculator to my site. site:federalautoloan.com in the search bar shows results for all of my pages... but it just seems as though Google does not like my site for some reason. At least in Organic. The odd thing is, none of my other sites have this problem. Do you guys have any advice? The only thing I can think of is that somehow my 301 redirect was performed improperly. Yes, I had a permanent redirect performed on my site about 4 months back. The URL we were using prior just wasn't performing as well in Paid Search. But seeing as how that is the preferred method by Google... I'm really at a loss... Again, my site is FederalAutoLoan.com. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Even generic SEO advice would be appreciated. Edit: Two other things to note... I have plugged my site into the SEOmoz Pro tool... the tool is not showing any issues for my site. I am also making use of Google Webmaster Tools and the only error that shows up for my site is a Soft 404 for one of my pmcs... Not sure why it is even pulling one of my pmcs... but as far as I can tell, there really shouldn't be any problems. Note on the 404 for anyone who might give a response on that issue... http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers returns a 200 OK response. Edit2: Question presented below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WPColt0 -
Website rebranding, what should I worry about?
Hey guys, A client of mine will be doing a rebranding exercise, this include changing their brand name and their domain name. They are considered a well known brand within their industry (Their brand name shows up in Google's "Search Related to..." section) My question is: Apart from making sure all 301 are put in place,changing all the links to point to the new domain and doing PR exercise, is there anything else I should keep in mind / be aware of to ensure a smooth transition? Also can anyone come up with possible issues we might encounter during the move? Apart from having a significant drop in traffic and rankings? Thanks, Clement
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NextDigital510