Not Ranking - Any Tips?
-
Hi guys,
I have a client site that I've recently come onboard with that was published late last year, not really optimized for anything, and in a moderately, but not very, competitive, search space.
Early April we optimized the home page and a couple of other pages and have since built about 5-6 (high quality, partial match) links to it, and a press release was done mid last month. The only other thing we did was change the site from non-www to www and set this as the preferred domain in Search Console.
Over 6 weeks since that all began, and we're still not on the radar at all for any of our main keywords - nowhere. The only thing we are really ranking for is our brand name, but this is the wrong (press release, not home!) page, and it's bouncing a lot. All of the pages seem to be indexed, and we are ranking for one other (inconsequential) keyword, but 99 is the highest it has reached.
An SEO friend told me to build some citations, but this is not a local business, nor are we trying to rank locally.
Can anyone please suggest why it might be taking so long, and what else I could try? I imagine more links will help, but results from our outreach are hard to predict, so if there were another safe link type that could help me figure out whether this domain is in trouble or not ASAP, that would be ideal.
Thanks very much in advance for any help you can provide.
Ulla
-
Sounds like you've found the issue, or at least the main one. I would wait on the dev site to be removed before starting over with a new domain.
KJr
-
I appreciate your responses so far. My response is almost a uniform yes to all questions. In terms of URL redirection, we simply changed it from non-www to www via htaccess, and in the Wordpress settings - I believe that's all that's required, right?
My developer, however, just reminded me of something, which I now think is causing the issue. BEFORE we published a new version of the site, he accidentally published the development version by not setting up robots.txt correctly, causing a duplicate of the site to get indexed (it still is...)
The reason I didn't sound the alarm bells is that most of the content was subsequently changed on the new version, so I didn't think we'd face any duplicate content issues - however, Google must now associate our domain with another it has indexed of which it WAS a complete copy...
This is obviously pretty bad and I'm 90% confident is causing the issue. My developer corrected the robots issue at the time and is currently requesting the removal of the sites via Search Console, per what this article advises: http://www.thoughtshift.co.uk/what-to-do-if-a-test-or-dev-site-is-indexed-on-google/
...but I have no idea what to do next. Should I abandon ship and tell the client we need to switch domains? Or wait until the dev site is fully removed and see if we start to rank, hoping this was just some sort of algorithmic penalty?
-
Deacyde and Mike have offered some great advice and it's very hard to add to that without being able to look at the site.
If you're comfortable sharing your URL I'd be happy to take a closer look for you, though I certainly understand if you're not.
-
Its only been a month and its a moderately competitive landscape. So its possible it will take some time for all the changes to fully filter through and start ranking you better. Have you done a crawl request on the site, are your pages all indexed, is everything redirected properly that needs to be redirected, is your robots.txt set up properly, and have you seen any growth in important metrics in analytics since the changes were made that might signal to you the changes are starting to work?
-
Hello there,
I'm sure this can be extremely frustrating, especially after all the work you done for it.
Couple things to check off the list:
- Do you have a www and non www version of your site in webmaster tools, even if you decided on the website default being the non www, it's good to have all variations of your web property so you can monitor them.
- Please don't hit me but, are all www urls being redirected, so your older backlinks with the www are leading to your non www pages?
- Are there other on-page SEO issues that could be preventing the site's indexing / crawling as it should be?
- Does the site have any penalties, manual or algorithmic?
- Have you used a keyword rank checker to see where they are ranking? If using only moz's keyword rank checker, they only check up to rank 50, ahref.com only checks to 100 but other tools can go further, serpfox was one I played with, knowing the rank despite how bad it is, can help determine whats going on.
- Also doublecheck that either htaccess or robots.txt are not blocking pages
While this is in no way a complete checklist for figuring your issue out, it's a shot in the dark, since I don't even know what your website is and keywords are. I am sure others can help weigh in as well with other issues to look at, but this should be at the very least a place to start.
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
-
January 2016: Massive Rankings Fluctuations
Hi guys. For past 2.5-3 weeks We've been experiencing lots of changes in our rankings, unfortunately, mostly going down. Our website is regexseo.com. I Know there was a January 12 "core update" in Google Algorithms, but there is no any specific information I can find. Now, here is what doesn't make sense to me and it's the same reason I'm worried if we are doing something wrong (or not doing something right? 🙂 - we've been rankings for "web design houston" in positions 2-4 for years, and recently after months of work we finally got to positions 4-6 on "seo houston". But during last two weeks we got down to beginning of the second page 😢 Our backlink profile is growing, traffic to website is growing over all and stable to main landing pages (+/- 5%), new content is being released/updated every week, nothing stupid or drastic is being done. All the metric tools are saying we are "supposed" to do really good. Now, while we are going down, our competitors have some fluctuation (+/-2 positions, but not anything close to what we are experiencing). Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK2 -
Strong Site, Pages, Ranking Low
Hey Mozers This is a question which has been bugging me for a while now I have an authority site in my niche which has a stronger DA than pretty well every competitor, but certain sections of the site underperform. For instance, when you search for 'Jerusalem Dead Sea tour', my item, http://www.touristisrael.com/tours/jerusalem-dead-sea-day-tour/ does not appear in the first few pages. I have a page that appears on the first page, but it is less relevant than this product page. This is an example, there are tens of cases like this. So the question is, am I signalling to Google not to rank these pages, and is there something I'm missing with regards to strengthening product pages in this tour section? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben100010 -
Ranking go down why ?
Hello, Thank you , if you help us our web url www.prismpharmamachinery.com before some time very top ranking but now going down 5-7 pages in google any SEO expert can help for that Regards pooja
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Poojath0 -
Tips do join 2 domains
I would like to move all my old domain content ( dicasdogoogle.com.br) with more than 1200 tutorials pages to a new one (seomartin.com)... and then unify them. I´m using wordpress in both but the permalinks are different... Any tips 4 me folks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
A question of rankings (with actual domains)
Working with the main site featured in this Open Site Explorer comparison (you'll need a pro account to view this), and have been for quite some time. Recently we've slid behind Ebay (huge brand, I get it), but the other competitors don't really make sense to me. Main phrase is pontoon boats, and maybe I'm too close to this, but we seem to be in the best shape overall in terms of the domain, the page itself, and even our social media is pretty successful (we're closing in on 5,000 likes and have a pretty engaged audience). More internal linking is an opportunity, but I'd like another set of eyes (or several for that matter) to weigh in on opinions. I'm a bit stumped. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
Home page mysteriously not ranking at all
Hey everyone, I'm baffled by a situation. I started working on www.hushabyephotography.com almost 3 months ago. The first thing I did was changed the address (was previously blog.hushabyephotography.com) and updated all of the links pointing from the old name to the new "www" and used 301 redirects for canonicalization. Have also built some additional links, added content to the site, and performed on-page optimization to rank for the primary key phrase "san diego newborn photography". But ranking is no where to be found, I searched for the key phrase, and at rank 190 is a random subpage, not even the home page. The listing had also disappeared from Google Places a few weeks ago after the client updated their listing (which I believe was the result of the known Places bug (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap). I'm at a loss here for ideas, as I've never failed to at least have a site on the radar. There aren't any spam links so I don't think any penalties are the result. One last thing, it ranks on page 2 in both Bing and Yahoo... Please help me out Mozzers!!! 😕
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Ranking a site in the USA
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use? With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google. Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
One Website - Local + National Ranking
If a client (e.g. a winery) wants to rank both nationally and locally, what are some best practices for doing this on one Website? So the goal is to: Rank nationally for their wines, wine varietals, etc.so they're found by restaurants, distributors, customers (could include national directories, content creation ,etc.) Rank locally for their tasting room and wines for people looking locally or looking at that specific region (this could also include include Google places, local directories, etc.). I'm wondering if the site would need to be subdivided (or "siloed") where one section is heavily focused on national and another is on regional? Also, for the home page, which focus would be most important (maybe national because it's harder)? Thanks a for any ideas! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DirectionSEO0