I'm having an exteremly hard time with SERPs despite my best efforts. Can someone help?
-
My site is www.drupalgeeks.org
Our traffic is going up but our SERPS are not. We simply don't rank for any of our targeted keywords.
I have covered nearly every white hat SEO strategy possible. Our site has a great social presence (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest), we write blogs regularly, and even guest blog. We have a YouTube channel, an RSS feed. We've cleaned up page speed times, set 301 redirects, checked for duplicate content. We use Bing and Google webmaster tools and have submitted a sitemap. We are indexed and webmaster tools see our keywords as relevant in our content. We have a robots.txt file configured properly.
The only thing I can think of is that our services pages also display (as a truncated summary) on our homepage. Could this be considered duplicate content, and is this causing a problem?
Is there anything else we can do? Or are we missing something vital?
We thank you in advance for your help!
Candice
-
You're very welcome Candice - I've gotten a bunch of inspiration and motivation from this site from other members in the past, so if there's ever a chance to impart the same on someone else, I jump at the chance.
I do like the Q&A idea, as it opens you up to being both a service and an educational resource, kind of like the guys at Distilled, with their SEO service but things like their blogs and their DistilledU ideas. So it can and does work. It also gives you a long lasting effect from your social media interactions.
All the best going forward, can't wait to see what you can come up with!
-
Hi Tom,
Thank you soooo much for your very thoughtful response. It's nice to hear words of encouragement while I'm beating my head against the wall I really appreciate you taking the time to look at my site and offer your words of wisdom and helpful suggestions. The Q&A idea is fantastic! We do get some questions from Facebook and this would tie in nicely also with our tutorial videos.
Again, your help is greatly appreciated. Faith in humanity: Restored.
Thanks,
Candice
-
Hi Candice
I've only had a brief look at your site and your link profile, but while I can see you've made a solid start, I think the reason why you're not ranking is that you'll need to be doing more of what you've done already.
I can see a a lot of links from directories in your link profile. Personally, I would expect these to add a very small, if any, amount of benefit to your SEO, so I would focus elsewhere from here on in.
Content marketing could be a great strength of yours as you certainly look like an expert in your field. This blog post, for instance, is very thorough and in-depth. While I think guest posting on relevant websites is definitely worth your time, I think you should reserve your best content for your own blog and try and attract links to those posts.
The way to achieve that is to do marketing by more traditional means - get your message out there. Your social media presence is definitely going to help with this. But in the example of the blog post that I linked to earlier, could you maybe envisage something like that in the form of an infographic, perhaps? That way you could get people to link to your website by also sharing with them the image that they can post on your site. Or perhaps you can make it an interactive guide? I remember this guide on how to learn robots.txt with interactive examples - I can imagine something like that would be incredibly useful for your industry and would certainly get people talking about it and linking to it.
Similarly, tutorial videos hosted on your site can make a great educational resource that people will want to link to. And how about a Q&A resource? I'm sure that you'll get a lot of common questions from clients about certain drupal problems. You could fashion these into a really cool resource. It's a bit out there but have a look at this Q&A that the McDonalds Canada site has done. I can totally see an equivalent for your industry - you could utilise your social media channels as well and invite people to ask any questions they have on Drupal. It could really take off - just look at the links on that McD's subdomain. Big brand, obviously, but with thousands of links and hundreds of root domains you can see how many people like the resource. If you can create something like that for Drupal, the links are sure to flow.
Set up some alerts on twitter using RSS feeds and IfThisThenThat that will trigger when someone asks a Drupal related question. You can hit them up and say you've answered the question on your online resource - this may encourage more links. Similarly, Pinterest could be a great channel for you. Showcasing the best or most visually pleasing Drupal sites on a public board could be a fun idea.
It's gonna be a bit of hard work, but I think you've made a great start to the site already - it's now a case of scaling these methods up. The great advantage that you and your team have is your expertise and the fact that you're already producing excellent content. If you can market those out in different ways and encourage people to see you as an authority resource, as well as an excellent service, then I think you could go really, really far.
Hope this helps Candice! Give me a shout on Google+ if you fancy chatting some more.
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
-
4 ads on SERP
As you know google preview 4 ads on mobile view, So I want to know How much is the CTR's PPC in mobile view? BYaRB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pintapin0 -
Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?
I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content. My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code. Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content? It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod0 -
What's the best redirect to use for a newer version of a blog post?
For example: suppose you have a post "The Best Games to Play for YouTube Gamers in 2016" and you want to make this a yearly series. Should you 301 the 2016 version to the new 2017 one? Should you use the canonical attribute? If 2016 isn't in the URL, should you make the 2017 one the new URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edward_Sturm0 -
Inbound Affiliate Links: can this solution help?
Hello everyone, I have a pretty large e-commerce website and a bunch (about 1,000) affiliates using our in-house affiliate system we built several years ago (about 12 years ago?). All our affiliates link to us as follows: http://mywebsite.com/page/?aff=[aff_nickname] Then our site parses the request, stores a cookie to track the user, then 301 redirects to the clean page URL below: http://mywebsite.com/page/ Since 2013 we require all affiliates to link to us by using the rel="nofollow" tag to avoid any penalties, but I still see a lot of affiliate links not using the nofollow or old affiliates that have not updated their pages. So... I was reading on this page from Google, that any possible "scheme" penalization can be fixed by using either the nofollow tag or by using an intermediate page listed on the robots.txt file: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en Do you think that could really be a reliable solution to avoid any possible penalization coming from affiliate links not using the "nofollow" tag? I have searched and read around the web but I couldn't find any real answer to my question. Thanks in advance to anyone. Best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Starting Over with a new site - Do's and Don'ts?
After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website. Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake. Our original site,(call it mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the engine in the old one. We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page. There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net. Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign. All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new. We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again. We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net. My questions are: 1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go? 2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html ? Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site? It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site. 3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block? Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help 4. What have I forgotten? Cheers, all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenX0 -
Googlebot Can't Access My Sites After I Repair My Robots File
Hello Mozzers, A colleague and I have been collectively managing about 12 brands for the past several months and we have recently received a number of messages in the sites' webmaster tools instructing us that 'Googlebot was not able to access our site due to some errors with our robots.txt file' My colleague and I, in turn, created new robots.txt files with the intention of preventing the spider from crawling our 'cgi-bin' directory as follows: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ After creating the robots and manually re-submitting it in Webmaster Tools (and receiving the green checkbox), I received the same message about Googlebot not being able to access the site, only difference being that this time it was for a different site that I manage. I repeated the process and everything, aesthetically looked correct, however, I continued receiving these messages for each of the other sites I manage on a daily-basis for roughly a 10-day period. Do any of you know why I may be receiving this error? is it not possible for me to block the Googlebot from crawling the 'cgi-bin'? Any and all advice/insight is very much welcome, I hope I'm being descriptive enough!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith1 -
Can Bundling Products Help eCommerce SEO?
We currently have over 13,000 products on our site. SeoMoz reports many duplicate pages, which are items that are very similar (different size, application, sku, etc.). Would it be prudent to create a bundled product that has one page, one description, a set of images and a table with add to cart buttons for all of the different products on that page? (called a bundled product in Magento). Then create 301 redirects from all of the individual pages and categories to the relevant new bundled product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iJeep0 -
What would be the best domain choice?
Hello I got a website www.keywordCA.com and I'm ranking #1 spot on "keyword" but what I notice if you have the exact match you get more site links and etc. Like this keyword that match with my domain name "keyword CA" The ideal name will be www.keyword.com but is taken and the owner don't want to sell the domain (at least he is not using it, is just parked) and I also got the domain www.keyword.net Do you think www.keyword.net will be much better than KeywordCA.com in order to get more exposure and google will generate more site links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0