Ranking For Misspelling of Primary Keyword
-
I have been baffled for the past few months for ranking for the misspelling of our primary keyword BELIZE in the Google U.S. Serps.
We are nowhere to be found, but are ranking for the misspelling BELIZ (without the final "e").
We have been online since 1995 on page one everywhere. 11 months ago we did a site redesign changing over to WP as a CMS.
We changed all pages from widget-example.html to widget-example and properly 301ed all pages after deleting the old pages.
Then we accidentally de-indexed the site for a month due to a robots.txt error. This has been corrected 4 months now.
We shared this on the Google Webmaster forums and some kind folks helped with advice - nothing major in our opinion but we implemented most of the tips given.
We are doing fine everywhere with all search engines and Google itself in other areas Google.ca Google.bz Google.mx for example.
But in our primary market is the U.S. where the majority of our readers are - tourists and retirees looking for our information - we do not exist.
The joke is that searching for BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serps has us on Page One. It is a joke that is NOT funny - or maybe some human evaluator made a mistake or is playing a sick joke?
We have done a reconsideration request in case there was a manual penalty and we received the no manual penalty form letter.
I notice increasingly in Google Live Analytics people typing in our full domain name - I guess out of frustration not getting the site when inputting the primary keyword.
I find that I can write a new article and in a couple of weeks it ranks in the top couple pages. Many other pages are found via long-tail only.
I find it intriguing that yesterday I wrote a very small article, a press release actually, and today searching for the misspelling BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serp the root domain is ranked #2 and the snippet and image displayed is from this little article which is nothing really great.
I am new here. Thanks to anyone who can help.
The site:
-
Hi Mat
Being trying the GA and this is giving me a headache but looking at a tutorial on the web I am looking for Panda and/or Penguin and entered the dates given and will try to attach it here.
-
I'll ask again : When did it drop?
When ranking changes occur is important information in determining the cause. Although google updates continually big changes tend to get noticed and documented. If your ranking changes coincide with a known update (my guess is still one of the penguin updates) this will tell you what Google consider to be wrong and therefore how to fix it.
-
We have been on Page One on Google US from inception since 1995.
We notice on GWT about 2,000 backlinks from a defunct link directory. This goes up and down depending on the weather. Right now it has fallen to about 600. Here is a sample link:
http://caribbeanlinks.com/opensearch?query=Belize Cruise&hitsPerSite=4&lang=&hitsPerPage=20
We never asked to be linked there and have written several times but no response.
@NAKULGOYAL - we do well on long tail for example:
retirement in belize
living in belize
belize offshore banking
getting married in belize
belize maya
top ten things to do in belize
and many others
@mattbennet
I see your point but I do not believe we could be NOWHERE to be found for our main keyword - as stated above we have been on page one for our main keyword since 1995.
-
I looked at your backlink profile in OSE. You have the anchor text "belize" linked from a large amount of domains and with a very high amount of links. The domains linking with just the anchor text "Belize" take up nearly 23% of your link profile from linking domains. The amount of links coming to your site with the single keyword "belize" take up about 35% of your total incoming links. This is just for "Belize" and not the other various you have such as "Belize online" etc.
This is my person post-panda opinion, but I think this is likely to raise red flags with Google. It may look "over-optimized". I don't think submitting a site reconsideration requests would help - in fact, I fear it will only hurt as now Google will be reviewing all this information manually.
Second:
Your primary keyword is "belize" which is highly competitive. You may want to focus on something like "Belize Vacations" or "Belize Travel"
I just want to verify:
Have you ever ranked for the single term "belize" in the US?
Are you experiencing a decline in visits from other keywords which have historically performed well?
-
Ranking for the misspelling could be a red herring. They are by their nature far less competitive terms, so a site that can't rank for more competitive terms may do well on misspellings. Likewise for the long tail terms.
However, what you are saying does make me wonder a bit about penguin penalties. Do you know when you dropped out of the SERPs for your main term? Check back through analytics and see if you can pin it down to a week. I'd imagine it would be pretty obvious when it happened.
-
I see that you have variant anchor text links, which is good. I see an opportunity to try and give your links some internal juice. Can you get Belize and related keywords linked internally to respective pages ?
Other then that, I would continue to build content and links. I see you are ranking #2 for the misspelling, but nowhere for the correct spelling. It's not any kind of error, but the competition. You have the perfect domain. I think all you have to do is keep on building it.
The reason why your rankings could have dropped is the competition from what I have seen so far and the fact that Google has been trying to take reduce the effect of Exact Match Domains. In this case, you just need "strength" to be ranking #1.
How do you rank for other keywords/long tail etc ?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Page rank and menus
Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO is this not bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
Primary versus secondary keyword
Hello, Can someone give a example of what primary and secondary keywords are and how to implement that in a sentence ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics2 -
A single page from site not ranking
Hello, We have a new site launched in March, that is ranking well in search for all of the pages, except one and we don't know why. This page it is optimised exactly the same way like the others, but still doesn't rank in Google. We have verified robots.txt for noffollow, noindex tags, we have verified if it was penalized by Google, but still didn't find nothing. Initially we had another site and was on the topic of this page, but we have redirected it to the new one. In case this old site was anytime in the past penalized by Google, could it be possible that the new page be influenced by this? Also, we have another site that ranks on the first position, that targets the same keywords like the page that does not rank. It was the first site we launched, so it is pretty much old, but we do not have duplicate content on them. Maybe Google doesn't like the fact that both target the same keywords and chooses to display only the old site? Please help us if you have any ideas or have been through such thing. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniela.pirlogea0 -
Ranking Suggestions
Hi There, I am currently working on this site: completesteamclean.ca to rank as high as possible for "carpet cleaning windsor" on Google.ca and I can't seem to make any head way against the other websites ranking. I've optimized the page, created social media accounts for activity, even invested in Google Adwords and Facebook ads to try to boost my presence. Does anyone have any suggestions on any tactics/revisions I can make that may help boost my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
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 -
Keyword Ranks Jumping all over? Top 10 to 40 back to top 5?
So thanks to MOZ I now can track my very large website which has several hundred pages built for specific keywords. The problem is that If I have a page built for a keyword like "equipment transport" for example, and one week that keyword will rank top 5 and the next week in the 40's and then all the way back up to top 5 or 10 again. Google is bouncing these pages/keywords around like a trampoline would. How do I stop this. Do I need to make changes to slow down how often I want the pages to be crawled? In my research this is what I am hoping the problem is because my 1200 page site has no consistency on a 1000 keywords. One week 350 increase and the next week 600 decrease. And I track each keywords changes week to week in an excel sheet. Feedback would be greatly appreciated, because until I can get these pages to quit bouncing around so much a lot of my efforts are pretty much a waste as I can seo a top 5 ranked page/keyword that is ranked 40th the next week and back down to top 5 because of the lack of consistency.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwebb0070 -
Optimising a page for multiple keywords
I remember reading a question a while back about seo for a page targetting multiple keywords but I'm blowed if I can find it now.... I have a page which is optimised for one phrase and want to add 5-6 phrases/keywords... obviously I can't stuff the all the keywords in the page title or the header 1 tag. So I have written the content to mention the other keywords trouble is not wanting to compromise the quality of the page so of the keywords/phrases I have only been able to use once in the content. I assumed as the phrases are all on the same topic/area that this should not really matter. Apart from link building with the correct anchor text is there anything else I should be doing? The other option is to create custom pages for the keyword but again I am not keen on this idea.... Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Ranking
Hi All, I have been working on a car insurance site which targets US market. we have been doing all types of links to the site like - good related directory links, related blogpost and reviews. the site is updated daily with a fresh unique content. what more is needed to get it to the first page. we are currently ranking in the range of 40 - 50 on the page 4 or page 5. we have also recently done a redesign with a new cms, done a good press release but not seeing much of changes. please if anyone in the same industry or with some experience can suggest us. we are using all white hat seo & I can understand the amount of competition in this niche. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markyseo0