Page not ranking despite indicators showing should easily be mid-1st page?
-
I have many years old website selling a service. The main keyword is 47% competitive, and we used to be #1 page 2, occasionally page 1 couple years back.
Domain authority is double of any of the competitors on 1st page, followed root domain links is many times that of 1st page competitors, infact against some of them almost 10 times as much, MozRank and MozTrust higher too. Infact, every metric is higher than competition. Only metric which isn't as good is Followed vs NoFollowed links metric, 95% of our links are NoFollowed, but we are still #1 in external followed links.
Yet we are stuck on 4th page, and on some localizations we are not even in Top 50.
This has happened slowly over time, not a overnight thing. Page we are trying to rank for gets grade A for optimizations, yet we have less significant pages ranking higher for that keyword. Further, newer pages tend to rank better than old ones. The whole site actually ranks quite low and we are not even getting search traffic for long tail keywords.
No problems reported on GWT, Analytics etc.Is this a google penalization or something of the sort? How can i troubleshoot this and get past this?
-
"...slowly going downwards over the year"
This sounds like possibly user metric related, which are important ranking factors no tool is able to give us. It's possible, users have showed preference to other pages ranking for that query over time. Metrics could be;
- click through rate from SERPs
- bouncing back to SERPs ("pogo-sticking")
- time on page
- repeat visits to the page
- direct visits the page
- completed actions on that page
- ...etc
Essentially, users might be telling Google they don't like the page based upon their behavior. Some suggestions;
- Watch Rand's video about how to improve Pogo Sticking
- Check out these articles on improving CTR in the SERPs (most the top ranked resources there are good)
- Set up goal tracking to get a conversion rate
- Try Justin Cutroni's scroll tracking to see how users are interacting with the content
- Try a heatmap program like http://www.crazyegg.com/
Without being able to see your page, it's tough to give custom recommendations, but I would also recommend making sure you have the best design of any site in your niche for your audience.
-
It's been slowly going downwards over the year - the page itself is more than 2 years old, only with minor modifications during this time, basic texts have remained the same.
No changes correlate to major algorithm shifts as far as i can see.
Could google penalize that hard for the content age? This is a business frontpage - so there really is not that much to update on that particular page.
Our link portfolio hasn't seen major changes in years - infact, it seems to be pretty much the same. I went through the first 300 or so as reported from GWT on random check, didn't see anything seriously spammy, many of which are high quality organic links. HOWEVER, moz tools says we have ~8600 inbound links, and GWT says total links 854,161
Something seriously wierd is going on for the keyword since #2 position is held by a site with 1 external link inbound as per moz tools, only thing they have pretty much is 99 google +1s.
Downloaded more sample links and still cannot see anything seriously spammy. There are some scrapes and people copy pasting offers or announcements, but not much. There's also some semi-spammy sites which list best offers etc.
GWT tells no manual actions.
-
Ranking factors I would look over, how fresh is your content and how fast is the site? I would also run your site through copyscape to see if there is someone scraping the site.
I would also look over your link profile if there are too many spammy exact match anchor text links. With that I like to go back and compare my GA data to major shifts in the algorithm. It helps to identify what issues need to be fixed.
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
-
Domain Change, Lost ranking on 1 keyword
Hey guys, Long time follower of the Q&A forum, but don't post too often. I'm having an issue I never came across. We changed a domain from mpbuilderscincy.com to mpcincinnati.com. We did the 301 redirect and all the SEO flowed through pretty well. Most pages didn't even change in file structure so we didn't need to do page redirects for the most part. Anyway, long story short, we are seeing the same rankings as we had before now (it's been about 2 months) except for 1 and only 1 keyword. It's "Home Remodeling Cincinnati". We dropped from page 2, to page 11 on Google and it won't budge. Now on Yahoo and Bing, we are right back where we were before already with that keyword. But Google just refuses to bump us back to where we were before the change. The Home Remodeling page: http://www.mpcincinnati.com/Residential-Services/Home-Remodeling.aspx has an on page grade of A for that keyword and we have it as one of our main keywords on the home page of the site (title, h1, alt tags, etc). No errors on the page. I mean it looks pretty clean for this page as far as SEO except for 1 notice that mentions the 301 canonical redirect. We uploaded the new sitemap right away. I just can't put a thumb on it and wondering if you guys had any tips. Thanks, Chris
Keyword Research | | Cincinnati_WebTec0 -
Ranking for broad search terms
Hello, ive been getting some good organic traffic lately, i always run the live real time analytics and have noticed that the site is ranking for very broad terms and not specific exact keywords that i have the pages optimized for. Is there a reason for this? thx
Keyword Research | | TP_Marketing0 -
Google ranks better apps over articles
Hello, On my quest to recover from Goolge´s updates I found out that the serps show apps and software downloads ranking better than content (articles or similar) for one of my most popular keywords. When the ads above the fold update hit my site (I can only assume that because of the date) I lost about 50% of my traffic). This keyword dopped from the first or second position to a steady fifth or sixth page position. Today, I was trying to research which sites outranked me and to my surprise no result in the first 15 position was an article, just apps and software downloads. It is not that is wrong. Let´s say that we are talking about an area similar to instagram software (although it doesn´t rank in this keyword). I´m not asking about my site. I simply want to know if the web apps (social sites) and mobile apps are taking over the content in serps. Is it that now you can´t go for a high place in the rankings (for certain keywords) if you are not a social site or an app? Thanks!
Keyword Research | | enriquef0 -
How to find easy keywords to rank for?
We've got fantastic results from a keyword here. After we signed up for SeoMoz, we found that, for luck, this was a very easy keyword (1%) to rank for. How can I find more easy keywords?
Keyword Research | | BrunoReis0 -
Checking history of keyword rankings
When working on a new client how can we look in to the history of keyword rankings? I would like the last 2 years but they have been tracked by me for only 1 month?
Keyword Research | | dynamic080 -
Keyword Ranking Information
Recently I received an email from an SEO marketer with the following ranking information for my site (image attached) ( link to image http://imgur.com/CAo4D) I am sure he ran some sort of tool to this ... Is there any tool , which can give a list of low ranking articles in my site which have high search traffic CAo4D
Keyword Research | | iamnew1 -
Two for the price of one: Can I rank for multiple keywords when only targeting one keyword?
If I'm optimizing for a specific keyword, is it accurate to assume that by ranking for that specific keyword that I will also be able to rank for similar or root keywords merely by ranking for the original keyword? For example, if I'm targeting 'free online bucket list' is it safe to assume that I will also be able to inadvertently rank for 'online bucket list' or 'free bucket list'? Can I assure clients of this? Or if I'm targeting 'Colorado grocery store' should I also naturally rank for 'grocery store Colorado' and not need to make both of these my targeted keywords?
Keyword Research | | derrickkuhn0 -
Rankings got dropped
We were ranking no 1 on couple of keywords in our countries local Google Search but from last 3-4 days we have dropped to 2-3 though we havent made any changes. Any suggestion? http://www.pakwheels.com Google: www.google.com.pk Keywords: Used Cars Cars for sale
Keyword Research | | razasaeed0