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.
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
-
Keyword difficulty and time to rank
Hello, Is there a correlation between the keyword difficult and the time it takes to rank ? In other words let's say I try to rank for the keyword "seo" and it is going to take 2 years to rank 1 st whereas if I go for "best seo tools in 2018" and it takes just 2 weeks ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
What should I do if same content ranked twice or more on Google?
I have a Bangla SEO related blog where I have written article like "Domain Selection" "SEO Tools" "MOZ" etc. All the article has been written in Bengali language. I have used wp tag for every post. I have submit xml site map generated by Yoast SEO. However I kept "no index" for category. I know well duplicate content is a major problem for SEO. After publishing my content Google ranked them on 1st page. But my fear is that most of the content twice or more. The keywords are ranked by post, wp post tag and Archive. Now I have a fear of penalty. Please check the screenshot and please suggest me what to do. uRCHf yq7m2 rSLKFLG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AccessTechBD0 -
Ranking dynamic landing pages
I have a client and I'm working on a project with their development team. We're creating dynamic landing pages populated with their lead data. Similar to the style of linkedin. For example, someone searches for "demand generation manager" and one of our pages with contact information (some) shows up in the search results. www.leadgenius.com/demandgenerationjobs (or something like that. we have yet to flesh this out). We're also looking into different backlinking strategies to support optimizing the above mentioned pages in addition to their new site launching this month. What is the best way to optimize the dynamic pages as well as the main site in tandem or independently?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intergen0 -
Best tips for getting a video page to rank?
We have a video for our company, located here: http://www.imageworkscreative.com/imageworks-creative-video It's an overview of our company and the services we offer. We'd like to get this page ranking, but we haven't had much luck so far. Our Youtube account does better, but I'm looking for some things we can do on or offsite to get this page to rank. Any tips would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Website losing rank positions after https
Hi there.. we were having a good increase in rankings since using Moz and then we purchased an ssl certificate so our website would run under https... to make sure our website is only accessed through https, we have used a method on .htaccess (appache) to make sure the website is only reached through https, using: RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mszeer
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,QSA] after doing this, from our last crawl perspective, we lost several positions that we were increasing.. what have we done wrong ? we have to fix this asap, please help us...0 -
Rankings and keywords
I have a site www.firewall-cs.com that I have been working on for 4 months. The first 2 months the keywords were going up and then...dropped like a rock! We didn't build the website, but it is a Wordpress site so I can make some changes. For the keywords that have "IT" in them, we haven't been able to recover. It's like Google isn't even reading the home page. The home page slider has the H1 in it and has 3. I have told this to the client. Plus there isn't a lot of content on the page. Is the H1 issue enough for the word "IT Support Orlando" to not rank? Any suggestions would help! Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClickIt0 -
How to rank for difficult terms
I am helping launch a new business venture that sells oak furniture in the UK. The key product terms are along the lines of; oak bed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pretige12
oak dining table
oak chairs etc which are very popular search terms. Im used to being able to hang of local or branded search which arent available in this project. The domain is around 12 months old, it has few inbound links which we are working on now with an overseas freelancer (keeping an eye on them). The pages of the site are unique-content rich and the titles and other meta boxes are ticked. What else would the experts recommend?0 -
Key page of site not ranking at all
Our site has the largest selection of dog clothes on the Internet. We're been (every so slowly) creeping up in the rankings for the "dog clothes" term, but for some reason only rank for our home page. Even though the home page (and every page on the domain) has links pointing to our specific Dog Clothes page, that page doesn't even rank anywhere when searching Google with "dog clothes site:baxterboo.com". http://www.google.com/webhp?source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f4efcaa1b8c328f Pages 2+ of product results from that page rank, but not the base page. It's not excluded in robots.txt, All on site links to that page use the same URL. That page is loaded with more text that includes the keywords. I don't believe there's duplicated content. What am I missing? Has the page somehow been penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBPets0