Why are these sites outranking me?
-
I've been hit by every update and have spent thousands of $ and hundreds of hours trying to survive. Survival looks doubtful if I can't get turned around in 4 weeks or less. I have found adwords and google errors and fixed them. Alexa says us-nano.com is the best ranked site. I used my moz bar and they are doing everything wrong, keyword stuffing, no H1's tags, poor design. How are they ranking & I'm not? My duplicate meta tags are from this week when I added alexa and bing ID's to my header to verify my site ownership.
-
Thanks Chris. I did report the bounce rate question and someone else indicated the spammy links. I will start there. I think it might be related to my javascript not working right which gives a poor customer experience? After thinking about it, i did use the meta descriptions extensively throughout the site. I have about 125 product pages and 14 product category pages which i spent a lot of time doing the seo on. for instance, if a customer searches for graphene-nanoplatelets my landing page is https://www.cheaptubes.com/product-category/graphene-nanoplatelets/ which I think is highly optimized and not too spammy and we are the 4th organic result. I have neglected some of the non product oriented pages and shouldn't have. I definitely will revisit SEO but right now code issues and spammy links are my #1 suspects. I finally fixed a lot of the script issues but now the site takes 4 seconds to load which is a deal breaker for mobile and that is 30% of my traffic. I'm trying to find someone I can hire to fix it but last time i did that it led to this situation.
-
No problem, happy to help
This is a common scenario we come across where you've got some rankings and don't really want to change anything through fear of losing them but the truth is, as you've already pointed out, there's no use ranking for terms if the vast majority of your users are going to bounce anyway.
You also run the risk of getting hit by the next Panda increment. It's true that you may see a temporary dip in rankings by making these changes but over the next 6 months, the net result should be well and truly worth it. Don't forget that a real SEO campaign is about conversions, not your rankings.
As for the questions about your bounce rate, I'd say this will be a combination of spam referrers "visiting" your site for 0s (100% bounce rate from these spammers, depending on how they go about it) and the awkward keyword stuffing putting people off the site immediately.
Users are steadily becoming more savvy with this stuff and while they may not understand SEO, they do understand that keyword stuffing = untrustworthy. Obviously I'm not a standard user but the second I see it on a site I leave and regular users are starting to head that way too.
Regarding your meta descriptions, it's true that Google doesn't look at them _however, _you can't ignore the users! It's your second opportunity to sell searchers on why they should click your link in the SERPs over the other ~9.
I've always used W3C without issue for HTML/CSS validation, though I'm not a dev so there could be better out there. It may be that there are deeper issues with the template you're currently using and fixing one symptom on the surface is altering something more detrimental. Unfortunately I'm of little help to you in this area.
-
ok, thanks Christy - now that it appears I might have a handle on the errors and my bounce rate is back above 80% i think i will ask it to the moz community
-
Hi there! I meant this followup question: "I seem to have a high bounce rate but am an online store. Any thoughts on how to reduce it?"
-
ps- there has been some wonky code causing redirects. bing says i still have to many redirects and i'm trying to figure out how to fix that
-
Thanks Chris - You've given me something to follow up on. I do rank well for many keywords, like graphene nanoplatelets, i am the 3rd organic hit and am on the 1st page of google for the keywords I'm trying to rank for which makes me reticent to reduce any overused keywords. I added a WYSIWYG editor to the woocommerce product category pages so they will be the ranking pages. Rankings is the whole reason I spent thousands of $ paying someone to redo my site, but they messed it up so much that I had to spend hundred hours fixing it. I had to take it over to recoup my rankings after the algo updates. If my rankings are good now it seems like it might not be an SEO issue but why the high bounce rate? In January I had 95% bounce rate one day, almost 100% of my visitors bounced? Since then I've been aggressively trying to fix it.
I think the work I've been doing has helped. Last week my bounce rate fell to 18% for 1 day with 700 people per day visiting the site but now its back up to 80% and down to 225 visitors but the site had issues all weekend which i think i've mostly resolved. I've spent the last 4 days trying to fix the theme, it seems to have issues. I might have to retheme it but thought it was better working with a known theme trying to fix it rather than trying to retheme over the weekend. I didn't bother with meta descriptions because the search engines don't check them. us-nano has keywords stuffed their metas, i would think they would be penalized for that. I think you are right about alexa. if you know of any good code validators please let me know. I've been using W3C but the code they provide from html tidy mostly worked but caused other errors.
if you have any other suggestions please let me know. i might be missing something? how do i reduce bounce rate?
-
I think the first mistake here is judging the success of a site by Alex rank. IMO, this stat means absolutely nothing since "traffic" can come from anywhere.
We have great rankings including #1 for our toughest term in this state yet if we look at Alexa, we're heavily outranked by Indian SEO firms and dodgy directories.
If you've been hurt by multiple updates over the years, this suggests there are a lot of problems with your site that need to be fixed. Trying to turn this around in 4 weeks is highly improbable, particularly if you have been penalised in the past.
Assuming it's cheaptubes.com, there are quite a few issues I can see immediately:
- Page titles - e.g. the page title on the home page is currently Welcome | Cheap tubes | Cheap Tubes
- Meta descriptions - e.g. Home page meta description is Cheap Tubes Inc Home page
- Fairly thin content - Most pages seem to have ~400ish words and quite a few pages seem to over-use keywords or "Cheap Tubes" - e.g. the Products page starts with Cheap Tubes Inc Online Shop -> Welcome to Cheap Tubes Inc Online Shop!
- I've only had a quick glance at your backlink profile but this seems rather questionable as well. There are a lot of .ru, .tk and .jp links in there. These may be relevant but unlikely
I'd expect that fixing up these elements would see some decent improvements for you reasonably quickly, though seeing real traffic improvements in 4 weeks is still highly unlikely.
Helpful Resources Page Titles
-
Thanks Chris - i've been in WP hell since posting that. I fixed an error but crashed part of the site, no mobil nav and other theme issues. I've been working all weekend trying to get back to where i was thursday. the folks who made my theme weren't on their game i guess. They resent me an updated version of my theme but when i try to validate it at W3C it validates at 2%. The theme as I've edited validates 10-11% so it didn't make sense for me to go backwards and lose several months SEO work and validate worse when I'm trying to clear the errors. I've been validating code and uploading it, checking the site, then the next. I broke the site several times but have it back. I will check the plugin. Right now I'm trying to figure out why I have 151 404 errors according to screaming frog, they look like this. https://www.cheaptubes.com/
I'm also trying to figure out how to fix the theme files i couldn't get to validate or the ones that did validate and still crashed my site....ugh
-
Assuming your site is cheaptubes.com, run it through Googe's Page Speed Insights and look at the scores.
Looks like you could help those low scores quite a bit just by optimizing the images. PSI even provides those optimized resources for you. Google says site speed is a ranking signal although it may not be a significant one. Still it seems pretty easy to fix the "low hanging fruit" and just clean this up. If you want to do more as to JS and CSS files, have a look at the Wordpress plugin "Autoptimize". I have had good luck with it and it is well supported by the author.
Best!
-
Thanks Christy - i did ask one question - how are they out ranking me?
-
the java errors may be resolved. I found out the folks who made my theme don;t know how to call for java
That is something someone hardcoded into your theme.
./cheaptubes/footer-home.php:
./cheaptubes/header.php:
./cheaptubes/layout.php: <script<br>src="js/vendor/modernizr.js">
./cheaptubes/layout.php:Those three files all show you something that is basically the wrong way
to include javascript.A QUICK fix is this:
Edit the files footer-home.php and layout.php
In all cases where you have this:</script<br>
-
Hi there, and welcome to the Moz Forum!
This is a great question, and deserves its own thread, actually. Would you mind starting a new thread with this question? (Asking one question per thread makes it easier for folks with questions similar to yours to find it when searching the forum. It also keeps the forum nice and tidy, and gives your question the best chance of being thoroughly answered.)
Thanks so much for your cooperation.
Christy
-
Bounce rate is normally a signal that the user is quite unhappy for some reason.
You could always look to do a little heat-mapping to see how people are using your pages, where they are clicking or try some live user testing to see what people don't like about the site.
-Andy
-
Send me a PM with your site details and I will run a few checks for you and see if I can see anything glaring.
It will also help if I know when you noticed the drops as this will help rule out / target any penalties.
-Andy
-
i seem to have a high bounce rate but am an online store. Any thoughts on how to reduce it?
-
Thanks Andy
We've been around longer than us-nano but not nanoamor. Us-nano links appear spammy. when I looked in alexa there was a lot of red for spam links. We all have about the same internal linking. I am far out ranking them in organic search now. None of this makes sense. I am fighting for survival now and so far nothing I've done has brought customer inquiries back up. My rankings dropped in Nov but I launched the new site in Sept. I did find problems in adwords where I didn't update links but those are fixed weeks ago. I fixed the 404 errors.
Looking at all 3 sites I think ours looks better than us-nano. maybe we're tied with nanoamor. All Us-nano did was combine keywords into page titles like carbon-nanotubes-graphene, We've put all like products in the same category where they belong. my company is 11 years old. I should be able to get my traffic back. I used to kick both of their butts rankings wise.
They both have a ton of text links on their home pages, we have images and text links. I think it looks much better for page design and for a better user experience. Isn't that what the updates that hit me were supposed to be targeting?
-
Hi,
There are so many possible reasons why they are ranking above you. Google doesn't look at the use of H1's and on-page basics like this, as a strong signal but will look at your content in depth.
I always ask everyone to look at their site first. Take a step back and ask yourself if it is answering the questions people are searching for. If you look at your site and your competitors side by side, apart from the basics, do you think they deserve to be there?
You might find they have a lot of strong links or are doing well with their internal linking or perhaps they have been around longer and have more trust in Google's eyes?
Without actually knowing your site it is a little awkward to give you any real critique that might help.
-Andy
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
-
Two long established sites with similar audiences, what do we do?
Hi guys, We operate two long established and reasonably well ranking sites — our company website which was built on a keyword domain: market-stalls.co.uk (approx 15 years online) and our online store which was established several years later on a different domain: tradersupplies.co.uk (approx 9 years online). (At the bottom of this post I've attached real world traffic and turnover figures that demonstrate the issue we're facing) The problem is... The above sites target very similar audiences and keywords and both rank fairly well but I know are likely competing against eachother We're a small company (8-10 employees) and we (or rather, I) don't have the time or resources to blog, build back links, manage opseo and all the social channels etc for both sites. I'm struggling to cope with one. The question is... Do we abandon the original company site (market-stalls.co.uk) in favour of pooling all our resource in to improving rankings for our online store (tradersupplies.co.uk). All our social media presence relates to tradersupplies.co.uk. We don't have any social channels for market-stalls.co.uk. Ironically, the only blog we have is established on market-stalls.co.uk — set up a couple of years ago in the hope to pull ourselves back up the rankings — but it hasn't been updated in over a year due to time restraints. Or do we attempt to keep both sites operational, despite a lack of resource? That would likely include a fairly sizeable overhaul of market-stalls.co.uk to bring it up to date with modern design standards, establishing social media channels for market-stalls.co.uk, creating a blog on tradersupplies.co.uk, and regularly updating two blogs and two sets of social media channels with unique content. Sounds like a pretty huge job right!? Obviously, had we been setting up our business in 2017 and having read the many community posts on the subject of multiple websites, we wouldn't be splitting our time between two websites and would be focussing solely on building one highly ranking site. But unfortunately we're not in this position and we're in a quandary because we don't know whether or not we should let our original, highly ranking company site drop off the radar in favour of focussing on building traffic to our online store. This situation arose out of a decision to establish our online store on a different domain to our company website. Back in 2007 I rebuilt market-stalls.co.uk and spent a lot of time optimising it. The site blew up and we were ranking very well for all kinds of keywords related to market stalls In 2009 we opened our online store tradersupplies.co.uk which sells all of the products advertised on market-stalls.co.uk and then some By using "buy now" buttons on market-stalls.co.uk which redirected to tradersupplies.co.uk, our original site was driving a large amount of traffic and sales to tradersupplies.co.uk. At it's peak it was driving almost £6,000 GBP a month in sales. This has since dropped to around a third/quarter of this total. As the business grew we began to run short of time to maintain market-stalls.co.uk and it has inevitably slipped down the rankings This has also had a direct impact on the referral traffic and resulting sales on tradersupplies.co.uk. I've attached below the analytics which show the drop in referral traffic to tradersupplies.co.uk and the drop off in sales. I have a feeling I know the answer to this debacle but I'm keen to hear the opinions of those that may have found themselves in this position before! UPDATE: I've just had a call with our Magento developer halfway through writing this post ... he has suggested we transfer all content from market-stalls.co.uk over to CMS pages on our Magento powered online store, and create 301 redirects. Apparently this will carry the weight of market-stalls.co.uk over to tradersupplies.co.uk. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? turnover.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | tinselworm0 -
Link Activity to site keeps decreasing
Recently I have started seeing daily declines in the total inbound links to my site. 4 of my top 5 sources are all experiencing pretty significant declines and in fact, Pinterest has declined from a high of 16,295 links in Nov '15 to a current number that is 8,479 on 1/6/16. Any ideas on what could be causing these declines? I did upload a new sitemap in Nov, could this be the cause?
Reporting & Analytics | | ctripp10100 -
UA Codes on Multiple Sites
Someone came in and set up Google Analytics code on one of our clients' sites before we got there and it is showing data from an outside website that the code is also on. Does anyone know the best way to find out what that other site is so we can remove this code from both sites? Thanks as always MOZ friends!
Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing0 -
High Bounce Rate on traffic generating area of our site
Hi, Our eCommerce site currently includes a blog section known as Igloo which we have filled with unique and helpful content that is useful to a fair few people, not just customers of ours. It currently attracts a large number of visitors (more than the actual eCommerce side of the site in actual fact) organically who aren't currently customers of ours. Very few of these turn in to paying clients so it's not really a money spinner but it has worked quite well from a linkbait perspective / traffic generation perspective and undoubtedly a few of these people do end up making a purchase on the actual shopping end of our site. We're look at ways to encourage these people finding help on this free resource to take a look at our homepage and hopefully make an order but in the meantime I am worried that there may be a few downsides to us creating this content: Google may see us more as a help site than a shopping site. Since selling products is where we make our money this could ultimately be a bad thing. Our bounce rate is REALLY high (I'm talking around 94%) on the help site versus around 20% on the eCommerce site. I guess people land on the article they want, read it and then disappear. Would this bounce rate skew our entire site stats and ultimately result in decreased performance in the SERPS. I would appreciate your opinions and, in the event you do feel it may be hurting us overall perhaps some suggestions on how to mitigate the effects? Many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Site account in Google Analytics
Hello I have a question about my site account. On 2014, during a week, my ID tracking of Google Analytics was removed of the site, in this period the volume of users and sessions is lower than the other weeks. But I don't understand why are the sessions and users still reporting during this period without ID Tracking
Reporting & Analytics | | Arkix0 -
Had suspicious spike in Adsense clicks, next day site ranking tanks
Yesterday, one of my sites had extreme Adsense clicks for several hours in the morning, which brought it up to CTRs of around 120%. My normal CTR is about 10-15%. It added several hundred dollars income over and above my normal amount. After that, it went back to normal. I have waited to see if Google would adjust the income down, as someone or some bot seemingly clicked the heck out of the site's ads. Nothing has been adjusted; it's been 24 hours. Question #1: what usually causes this type of insane clicking to occur (i.e. competitors messing me?) Then, today I noticed something else disturbing. I cannot find my site in the top 100 SERPs for the main keyword. I was at #1 for a couple years, then, when I changed themes from Thesis to Genesis (site otherwise exactly the same) a couple months ago, I bounced around various positions on the first page. In the last couple weeks we've been bouncing between the teens and the thirties. Two days ago we were at #15. (the site is still indexed when I use "site:" to check. It seems awfully coincidental that yesterday I had the Adsense click explosion, and today I'm not even in the top 100 for the first time in my pretty stable two-year history, and have no idea how far behind 100 I am. I went to Google Webmaster Tools and see no errors or warnings relating to this. Adsense has not sent me any messages. So... Question #2: does Google search apply some sort of penalty to site that have suspicious Adsense clicking? By the way, I don't have any funny business going on with any bad SEO practices, it's all above board, and I have thousands of real readers each day Liking and commenting on the pages. It's a very real site. Note: I have been checking the ranking each day via a Google Incognito window and searching for the term. Of course I use MOZ but I do the Incognito search for a quick real time check, which I've found to be accurate.
Reporting & Analytics | | bizzer0 -
One big site for a loose theme or multiple sites for each specific theme?
Hi, Our company produces content related to one loose overall theme. Within that we write content and sell products on three specific sub-themes. Some of our customers cross over and have an interest in two or all three themes and others are only interested in one. At present we have one site covering reviews of products relating to all three sub-themes... ....and three other sites offering how-to guides and tutorials dedicated to each sub-theme. We do not have a lot of time to commit to SEO and so we are considering merging the content we have on all three subjects into the one site covering them all. Each of these sub-themes could have websites in their own right and my worry is that it will be harder to rank for these subject specific terms if the content is not on a site dedicated to that subject. But of course if they were all together then any links we build will be consolidated into one big site. Does anyone have any experience of this or have any advice on what the best thing to do would be? Thanks for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | frantan0 -
For an optimized site, any available stats / guesstimates on what is avg % of traffic to homepage vs. second-level pages?
I'm interested in passing this info on to a client who experienced a period of time when an incorrect GA code was installed on their homepage. They were able to get Google stats on second level pages only. This is a site that gets 80 + % of visits from organic search engine referrals. They do minimal advertising. Thanks in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | alankoen1230