My Domain Authority is high but don't rank in serps
-
So i'm a beginner/intermediate SEO and uptil about 3 weeks ago i enjoyed Top 3 rankings for all my keywords(VIrtual Assistant,Virtual Assistants, Virtual Personal Assistant,Virtual Personal Assistants and so on) for my site www.247VirtualAssistant.com. All of a sudden i dropped in rankings and can't figure out why. I ran a link analysis and nothing looks like it changed, in fact i still command much higher domain authority than my competition, but i'm stuck on the bottom of the 2nd page. I can't tell if i'm being penalized, if the other sites all of sudden just outperformed me or something else is happening here. I've also noticed a lot of "dancing" in my serps, I've been in 2nd last position on the 2nd page, then 1st of the third page, then last on the 2nd page and so on. Can someone please help me make sense of this?? Thanks!
Thomas, a very confused an desperate website owner
-
I'm not 100% sure of the latest follow vs nofollow ratio guidelines, but running your homepage URL through OSE suggests that maybe too many of your top links are nofollow (18 out of your top 50) - most seem to be fairly spammy blog type comments. Perhaps try and target less spammy links?
Just trying to be helpful, please don't take it the wrong way.
Brad
-
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense and it's something I've wanted to combat for a little while. I beleive i can fix the copscape problem by just rewritng all my content but duplicate content on my site itself("Would you like to know more about Virtual Assistants? Fill out the form below for a FREE consultation!") comes from my contact form which is on most of my pages. Do i need to have a unique version on each page?
Thank you! This site and this community rocks!
-
Hi Shajan,
I've only taken a quick look at your homepage but it looks as though you might well be over optimising. The phrase "virtual assistant appears" 38 times on the page which is too much considering the amount of text on the page. It doesn't read very naturally. There was a great post on SEOmoz a couple of weeks back which you might want to take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730
Hope that helps,
Brendan.
-
Sounds like you could have been caught up in the latest panda update or you have some other quality related issues. As a quick check I ran your homepage through copyscape.com and it came back with 10 or more matches and I tried googling a chunk of your text which came back with more than 100 other matching sites:
Google this in the double quotes to see what I mean:
"Would you like to know more about Virtual Assistants? Fill out the form below for a FREE consultation!"
You have uniqueness issues for starters so looks like you have been filtered my friend. I would give this a read for starters:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
Then make an honest appraisal of your site and your content. A batch crawl with copyscape would be a good idea and then just remove or rewrite the weak or duplicate stuff and you will make your way back into the rankings if everything else is straight.
Hope it helps
Marcus
-
I don't think you're being penalized, you wouldn't just drop one page down. I suggest you take a good look at all the recent changes you've made on and off site. This could be the case of some of your links being lost or devalued.
Higher DA does not guarantee better ranking, it does help your pages to rank better but you still have to optimise them for your keywords.
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
-
Old pages not mobile friendly - new pages in process but don't want to upset current traffic.
Working with a new client. They have what I would describe as two virtual websites. Same domain but different coding, navigation and structure. Old virtual website pages fail mobile friendly, they were not designed to be responsive ( there really is no way to fix them) but they are ranking and getting traffic. New virtual website pages pass mobile friendly but are not SEO optimized yet and are not ranking and not getting organic traffic. My understanding is NOT mobile friendly is a "site" designation and although the offending pages are listed it is not a "page" designation. Is this correct? If my understanding is true what would be the best way to hold onto the rankings and traffic generated by old virtual website pages and resolve the "NOT mobile friendly" problem until the new virtual website pages have surpassed the old pages in ranking and traffic? A proposal was made to redirect any mobile traffic on the old virtual website pages to mobile friendly pages. What will happen to SEO if this is done? The pages would pass mobile friendly because they would go to mobile friendly pages, I assume, but what about link equity? Would they see a drop in traffic ? Any thoughts? Thanks, Toni
Technical SEO | | Toni70 -
Buying a domain to 301 redirect for increased rankings
A large competitor has recently purchased a large marketing company that specializes in their industry. As a part of this acquisition they obtained ownership of www.digitalsherpa.com, which is now 301 redirecting some 50K links to www.costar.com/. When I did a site:www.digitalsherpa.com search all of the origin URLs had title tags from the costar site in place of their own. My question is: Does this violate Google spam guidelines? search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Adigitalsherpa.com&oq=site&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i65j69i60j0l2.1919j0j7
Technical SEO | | Reis_Inc.0 -
Can I use high ranking sites to push my competitors out of the first page of search results?
I'm looking at a bunch of long tail low traffic keywords that aren't difficult to rank for. As I was idly doing a boring task my mind wandered and I thought.... Why don't I ask lots of questions about these keywords on sites such as Moz, Quora, Reddit etc where the high DA will get them to rank for the search term? The results on a SEO site or Q&A site won't be relevant and so I'd starve my competitors of some of their leads. Of course I'm not sure the effort would be worth it but would it work? (and no, none of my long tail keywords are included in this post)
Technical SEO | | Zippy-Bungle3 -
What should I do with a large number of 'pages not found'?
One of my client sites lists millions of products and 100s or 1000s are de-listed from their inventory each month and removed from the site (no longer for sale). What is the best way to handle these pages/URLs from an SEO perspective? There is no place to use a 301. 1. Should we implement 404s for each one and put up with the growing number of 'pages not found' shown in Webmaster Tools? 2. Should we add them to the Robots.txt file? 3. Should we add 'nofollow' into all these pages? Or is there a better solution? Would love some help with this!
Technical SEO | | CuriousCatDigital0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
Which carries more weight Google page rank or Alexa Rank?
And how come do I see websites with Google PR of Zero and Alexa Page Rank in the top Thousands rank?
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
How can I use a keyword based domain to rank for my existing site?
Hi everyone, From my understanding if your keywords are in your domain name it can help you rank for the keyword. My site www.pixelchefs.com was affected from the latest Google Algorithm changes, as I used my main site as a testing ground for all my back linking. Our site was a single page with Jquery slide, late February the same time with the Google algo changes we uploaded our new site, larger site with lots of pages and info. Result of that was that home page has PR3 and all other pages PR0. Well I don't really depend on Google for any work as most of my work comes from referrals.......but While searching for names for my private page I came across the domain name www.DesignOrlando.com, The specific keyword gets 22,210 view per month according to Google analytics and also contains part of the keyword for all the keywords I am after. I want to use the domain name for my main site but i am not sure what is the best way to forward the domain so Google can start reading my site as DesignOrlando.com Any Suggestions will be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | alex_pixelchefs0 -
.COM vs .CA rankings - .CA ranks on Google.com
Hi SEOMOZers, We have a fairly large retail client with both .COM and .CA domains. Each of the sites are almost identical in design and, in most cases, content (these would be product pages). The .US site has been live for nearly 2.5 years while the Canadian probably over a year younger or so. Both sites are hosted in the US. What we're starting to see as of the last few months are searches that used to rank .COM product pages now rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com. We've checked Webmaster Tools for each site and they target the appropriate country. With nearly all examples we've seen, we haven't noticed any more links pointing to the Canadian page, and where this is becoming a widespread occurence we're not convinced it's a linking issue. My question is why Google might see both versions but rank the Canadian page above the US page on Google.com for a search being performed in the US? Does anyone have any ideas on why this may be happening?
Technical SEO | | HarborOneBank0