Low on Google ranking despite error-free!?
-
Hi all,
I'm following up on a recent post i've made about our indexing and especially ranking problems in Google: http://moz.com/community/q/seo-impact-classifieds-website
Thanks to all good comments we managed to get rid of most of our crawl errors and as a result our high priority /duplicated content decreased from +22k to 270. In short, we created canonical urls, run an xml sitemap, used url parameters in GWT, created h1 and meta description for each ad posted by users etc.
I then used google fetch a few times (3 weeks ago and last week) both for desktop and mobile version for re-approval. Nothing really improves in google rankings (all our core keywords are ranked +50)since months now: yet yahoo and bing organic traffic went up and is 3x higher than google's.
In the meanwhile we're running paid campagins on facebook and adwords since months already to keep traffic consistent, yet this is eating up our budget, even though our ctr and conversion rates are good. I realize we might have to create more content on-site and through social media, but right now our social media traffic is already around 50% and we are using more of twitter and google+ as well since recently.
Our organic traffic is only 14%; with google only a third of that. In the end, I believe this breakdown should look more something like organic 50%-70%, (paid)social,referral and direct traffic. 50%-30%...
I can't believe we are hit by a penalty although this looks like it is the case. Especially while yahoo and bing traffic goes up and google does not. Should I wait for a signal once our site is "approved" again through GWT fetch? Or am i missing something that i need to check as well to improve these rankings?
Thanks for your help!
Ivor
ps: ask me for additional stats or info in a pm if needed!
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for your valuable input. We will work on it and revert whenever I have additional questions.
Bedankt :-)!
Ivor
-
To be honest, I don't think that it's the duplicate pages which are the biggest problem, but at this point rather the on-page. Most of your potential users will search for "<> for sale in <<location>" so you should try to make sure that these kind of pages exist, with on-page elements. It will also help to make your site more flat - currently 46% of your pages are >=5 clicks from the home page. </location>
A part from that, personal ads sites tend to get a lot of traffic from long tail keywords, so the more ads you have, the more potential you have to attract traffic. Unfortunately, if you don't have a lot of traffic, you won't get a lot of ads, so it's a bit of a vicious circle you're in. When I crawled your site, I found about 450 HTML pages (unique), which remains quite small.
Not sure how the competition is in Spain, but normally it's a quite competitive market you're in, with a lot of players which are well established since quite a few years. So even if you do everything right, they will still beat you because they have a better link profile & reputation. It could be a better to focus on one specific niche (cars, motorcycles, boats,... ) and be really great on that niche, and expand to other niches once the first one gains momentum.
Social factors have some importance, but remember that these links are no follow, and that Google is not indexing all of Facebook.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi DC1611,
Thanks for your answers. It is true that we need to optimize further these pages, although I don't understand why few of these duplicates relative to our overall site would cause such problems? Just wandering when and how we will be recognized for improved ranking, as keyword optimization is not the only factor? Social factors f.ex. should also be of equal importance at least? Given the amount of combinations that arise out of our queries on-site, it is a huge challenge to optimize for them...Nevertheless we are working on updating our major landing pages that have missing descriptions...
Btw useful tool you mentioned, Screaming Frog, does give a thorough overview and a bit more useful than pulling out csv reports constantly from other crawling solutions.
-
I noticed you're Belgian, you could also check what other sites are doing like Markplaats, 2ehands,.... in terms of site structure and on-page optimisation. Crawling them with a tool like Screaming Frog will certainly give you some inspiration. I don't know the Spanish sites for personal ads, but check them as well. If you use Semrush you can check for which keywords they rank, how their landing pages look like and how they are optimised.
-
Hi,
You still have some duplicates - for each page the https & http version exists - I would choose the https version & redirect the non-https version to this one.
There are a lot of pages which have no H1or an H1 that doesn't really add value. Title idem - not always covering the content:
Example: http://www.mercadonline.es/anuncios-sevilla -
Title: Resultados de la búsqueda - MercadOnline.es
H1: missingApart from this - I guess your target audience is looking for quite specific info (like BMW for sale Sevilla) - as far as I can see you don't really have optimised pages for these queries. A potential landing page for this query would be: http://www.mercadonline.es/ads/motos-motocicletas/12162 - but Title, H1, Metadescription are not adapted
Title: Motos, motocicletas - 12162 - MercadOnline.es
Meta description: En Mercadonline.es encontrará diariamente una amplia gama de motos y motocicletas - 12162
H1: Vehículos=> try to adapt these to make it more specific to the corresponding search query.
Hope this helps;
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
News Errors In Google Search Console
Years ago a site I'm working on was publishing news as one form of content on the site. Since then, has stopped publishing news, but still has a q&a forum, blogs, articles... all kinds of stuff. Now, it triggers "News Errors" in GWT under crawl errors. These errors are "Article disproportionately short" "Article fragmented" on some q&a forum pages "Article too long" on some longer q&a forum pages "No sentences found" Since there are thousands of these forum pages and it's problem seems to be a news critique, I'm wondering what I should do about it. It seems to be holding these non-news pages to a news standard: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en For instance, is there a way and would it be a good idea to get the hell out of Google News, since we don't publish news anymore? Would there be possible negatives worth considering? What's baffling is, these are not designated news urls. The ones we used to have were /news/title-of-the-story per... https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/2481373?hl=en&ref_topic=2481296 Or, does this really not matter and I should just blow it off as a problem. The weird thing is that we recently went from http to https and The Google News interface still has us as http and gives the option to add https, which I am reluctant to do sine we aren't really in the news business anymore. What do you think I should do? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise
A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches. Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
How to recover google rank after changing the domain name?
I just started doing SEO for a new client. The case is a bit unique as they build a new website and for some reason lunched in under another domain name. Old name is foodstepsinasia.com and new one is foodstepsinasiatravel.com OLD one is a respected webites with 35 in MOZ page authority and with +15000 incomming link (104 root domains) NEW one is curently on 0 The programmer has just that build the new website has set it up so that when people write or find the old domain name it redirect to the front page of the new website with the new domain name. this caused that my friends lost a lot of their rankings was so I believ it was a very bad solution. But I also think I can get most of the old rankings back, but my question is what to do now to get as much back of the rankings as fast as possible?? A) I believe I must change the domain name back to foodstepsinasia.com on the new website ? O B) Should I on the old website try finding the url of the pages with most page authority and recreate these urls on the new website or should i redict them to a page with related content? Looking forward to feedback from someone who have experience with similar cases. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Video SEO for Google
I was wondering what the prime factors were to make something rank for a video on Google. Does anyone have any suggestions? I think that length may be important, but I don't know what the ideal run time is. Hypothetically for local SEO, would I be better off doing a tag like "Mercedes Buffalo NY" or do individual tags of "Mercedes" and "Buffalo" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Dropped from Google?
My website www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk appears to have been penalised by Google. I ranked fairly well for a number of venue related searches from my blog posts. Generally I'd find myself somewhere on page one or towards the top of page two. However recently I found I am nowhere to be seen for these venue searches. I still appear if I search for my name, business name and keywords in my domain name. A quick check of Yahoo and I found I am ranking very well, it is only Google who seem to have dropped me. I looked at Google webmaster tools and there are no messages or clues as to what has happened. However it does show my traffic dropping off a cliff edge on the 19th July from 850 impressions to around 60 to 70 per day. I haven't made any changes to my website recently and hadn't added any new content in July. I haven't added any new inbound links either, a search for inbound links does not show anything suspicious. Can anyone shed any light on why this might happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Single, high ranking pank disappears from Google?
Hi all, The question I have concerns a high ranking page on my site that has disappeared from Google. It was in the top 5 for the target keyword and it currently ranks 3 on Bing. I recently migrated my domain (one month ago), but it seems to have gone very well. No other pages have taken a hit like this. The 301 redirect is in place and working well. I've used the Moz Tools to see if anything is weird, but it all looks fine. Oh, and yes, I did check Google Webmaster Tools - no messages and other related pages on my site are ranking on the second and third pages for the terms. Also, the site is consulting services - nothing dodgy. Any ideas? Why just this one page? What are my options? Thanks for any advice you may have. John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendlymachine0 -
Is Google mad at me for redirecting...?
Hi, I have an e-commerce website that sells unique items (one of a kind). We have hundreds of items and the items are rapidly sold. Up till now I kept the sold items under our "sold items" section but it started to get back at me as we have more "sold" than non sold and we are having duplication problems (the items are quite similar besides to sizes etc.). What should we do? Should we redirect 100 pages each week? Will Google be upset with that? (for driving it crazy) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Will Google Visit Non-Canonicalized Page Again and Return Its Page's Original Ranking?
I have 2 questions about canonicalization. 1. Will Google ever visit Page A again if after it has been canonicalized to Page B? 2. If Google will still visit Page A and found that it is not canonicalizing to Page B already, will the original rankings and traffic of Page A returned to the way before it's canonicalized? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalsources.com0