Website Isn't Ranking & I'm Not Sure Why Based On The Data
-
Hi Moz Community,
I am having an issue that has been killing me for some time and I could really use another opinion. One of my client’s websites hasn't been ranking for some time and I can't put my finger on it. There are no issues showing up in the webmaster tools. If you compare the site with the tops ranking sites for the websites number one keyword, the website is just as good as everyone else. My clients website is the first one on the left in the attachment. We have better quality content but instead of showing up on page 1,2,3 the site is on page 21. I am just at a lost. Anyone have any thoughts outside looking in.Thanks,
Errick -
Hey again!
Please do - I would actually love to hear about the progress if you feel like keeping me in the loop!
My email is in my profile! Good luck, sir!
-
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the look and advice. I will try to make the site look less spammy and let you know how it goes.
Thanks.
Errick
-
Hi Errick
You have some pretty heavy exact match anchor text in your backlink profile for "houston business lawyer". Beyond that - the entire site is built around that phrase - "Houston Business ______" - either lawyer or law service. My opinion - crawlers have caught on to your heavy optimization of this on your site, even your domain name, and it probably tripped spam filters.
I would consider going through your site and easing up on such heavy utilization of "(local) Business (lawyer/service)". The site does have quite a bit of a "spammy" feel. There's no real association on the site to Mastriani Law Firm beside the logo. This is a HUGE opportunity you are missing, as people could be searching for the attorney by name.
I also found http://www.texasdebtdefense.com/ which seems to be the same attorney. The site has the same issues - just to let you know. This particular site also has a pretty bad backlink profile - lots of directories and pretty obvious old-school-SEO link building tactics being utilized. Be careful here too, because both these sites, if they are on the same IP address and have the same WhoIs data, could also trip more spam signals.
Please look at the links I posted above, take an honest assessment of the website as it is, and start optimizing your site in a more natural fashion with branding for the law firm; not just exact match keywords repeatedly. Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
HI Patrick,
Thank you for your response, i going through all the information you just provided.
Thanks,
Errick. -
Hi Errick
This is kind of a difficult question to ask without a link, can you provide a URL?
A couple of things to check:
- Robots.txt & meta robots (Moz)
- Manual actions (WMT Help)
- Do a search of your website URL in Google and other search engines - are you seeing anything?
- Are you a local business? Have you optimized for local? Local SEO (Moz)
- Do you have a lot of thin or duplicate content? How to Do a Content Audit (Moz)
- Have you looked into your backlink profile and looked for issues there? Guide for Link Removals & Risk Mitigation (Moz)
I would also look into these resources:
- On-site ranking factors (Moz)
- Internal Link (Moz - for equity passing reasons)
- Competitor Analysis (Moz - resources to check out other angles of your competitor's sites)
Hopefully this helps - share the URL if you can! Good luck!
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
-
Not ranking
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharonEKG
so our website (www.18brandz.com) has been up for 8 months now and has not been ranking yet, we are indexing, moz crawler SEO issues are regularly fixed and we are down to about 25 non major issues, i started using google lighthouse to optimize and had made changes. we post GOOD quality in house written unique content, we follow an SEO templet of guideline i wrote for titles/meta title tags, structure, site speed has been optimized and as for the moment we rank A OR B with no major issues on all speed checking sites possible (gtmetrix/google speed insights/ webspeed... etc) but nothing. and i cant figure out why we wont rank, our field of digital marketing is a tough one and very competitive , i know, yet not ranking for so long seems odd. our only know fact major disadvantage is the lack of links and no link building strategy. any suggestions? any idea?1 -
'?q=:new&sort=new' URL parameters help...
Hey guys, I have these types of URLs being crawled and picked up on by MOZ but they are not visible to my users. The URLs are all 'hidden' from users as they are basically category pages that have no stock, however MOZ is crawling them and I dont understand how they are getting picked up as 'duplicate content'. Anyone have any info on this? http://www.example.ch/de/example/marken/brand/make-up/c/Cat_Perso_Brand_3?q=:new&sort=new Even if I understood the technicality behind it then I could try and fix it if need be. Thanks Guys Kay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London0 -
Google W.M.T Missing Meta Title on AJax Pages... Weird!!
Hey Mozers, I was looking through my Google Web Masters Tool under HTML Improvements. It looks like I have 2,200 pages missing Meta Titles and I was about to lose it thinking HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN! I came to realize that the pages were "Ajax Pages". This is specifically a checkprice pop up and I dont want this page crawled by google. It looks like to google I have over 2k pages missing Meta Titles and they are all "check price pop ups". How would you suggest I block this. I thought about going the easy route and removing the subfolder and putting it in the Robots.txt document and I'm scared of that because we use AJax for a bunch of calls. I'm also scared of putting in the head <metaname="robots" =="" noindex,nofollow"="">because it requires hard coding</metaname="robots"> I Know i'm not the first to come across this issue, Any Ideas??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
website Based in India But need traffic from Europe and North America
We are based in India but have all our prospective clientele in Europe and North America. The problem is ; despite all our efforts we are getting almost 60% traffic from India which is not our target region. We have already tried following hosting our website on US server adding GB and US language tags webmaster target region only allows one country so we cannot set the target there Apart from this any other suggestion? Prashant
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TPS20130 -
I'm Looking SEO Person for my project.
Hi Guys. I'm looking seo person who can help me in my project. I'm losing ranking day by day from last 2 months. For more detail and price please PM me. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KLLC0 -
No longer showing for 'money' phrases but long tail combinations rank high?
I hope someone can shed some light on this as I've been pulling my hair out so much there's hardly any left! Background: 12 year old website that for about 10 years had Top 3 rankings for 100's of phrases but rankings first dropped off August 2011. Panda seemed to be the cause but finding the exact issue is hard. We are an online travel agent and every hotel page has duplicate content copied from other websites. This has not been changed although lots of sections in the site still rank well, so do the hotel pages themselves. Lots of internal duplicate issues have been resolved but with no effect. Our old style link, link, link all day long with our 2-word main key phrase as anchor text has given us an unnatural backlink profile but no message has been left by G about this in WMT (yet). Internal link structure is poor with all pages linking back to the homepage with our 'money' 2-word phrase in 3 places. Penguin wiped two thirds of all our backlinks back in May 2012. Why then, do we still rank for our 'money' phrase on the homepage when it has some extra words included and becomes long tail? e.g. CityName Apartments (money phrase) - Now ranks page 2-3 CityName Apartments to rent for the night - Ranks #2 on Google in all countries To make things more confusing other pages rank really well for similar money phrase e.g. CityName Apartments Offers - Ranks 2nd on 185,000,000 results (not homepage) It seems only the homepage is effected (where 95% of inbound links point) but if the site wide duplicates or unnatural link profile was flagged it would effect more than one page of the site. Wouldn't it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lchoice0 -
I'm afraid I may have messed up my site's organization
So I recently started working on an existing site for a company, and I'm afraid I may have done something to lose some backlinks. So to start off, say the website is www.domain.net and when I arrived domain.net and www.domain.net showed up as two separate sites so I changed my web.config file to direct all domain.net to www.domain.net The homepage was called default.asp, and I wanted the homepage to always show up as www.domain.net instead of www.domain.net/default.asp. Of course they both showed the same thing but I couldn't figure it out. So I removed www.domain.net/default.asp from indexing and changed the my internal links to the homepage to point at www.domain.net instead of simply pointing at the file default.asp. So now www.domain.net/default.asp still brings up the page, but I want it to revert to www.domain.net. I'm also a little worried because I noticed that one of my incoming links points at www.domain.net/default.asp and it doesn't get passed along to www.domain.net and I think i may have damaged my sites SEO I guess this is a very complicated and roundabout way of saying this, but how can I get www.domain.net/default.asp to take you to www.domain.net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcrabill0 -
Our site has been penalized and it's proving to be very hard to get our rankings back...
So I have a question. We have used nearly every trick in the book to rank our site, including a ton of white hat stuff.... but then also a lot of black hat practices that resulted in us dropping in the rankings by about 30-40 positions. And getting back to where we were (top 10 for most keywords) is proving to be nearly impossible. We have a ton of great content coming off of the site and we actually offer a quality product. We follow most of the guidelines advocated here on SEOmoz. But the black hat stuff we did has really taken a toll. And it's gonna be pretty much impossible to go back in time and erase all of the Black Hat stuff we did. So what should we do? Should we design a completely new website with a new domain? What can be done to help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0