Who is beating you on Google (after Penguin)?
-
Hi,
After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google. I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this.
The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories.1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering. Now it is not the homepages that are beating me. In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do.
2) Nobodies. Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old.
Has anybody else noticed this? I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web. Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO?
If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building. But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.|
Thanks!
-
For long tail queries I don't worry about junk sites beating me. Because I know that I will get them over time.
-
Hi Egol,
Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate your insight.I forgot to add that I am actually seeing this more for my long-tail keywords. Luckily not for my primary keywords where I am still ranking pretty well (#1 for most). But the confusing part is that the sites I am being beaten by don't seem to be optimized for these long-tail keywords either. In fact, one of the sites is only 3 months old and a lot of his content is stolen from other sites.
But not to whine, I know this is part of the game, I just wanted to know if this was something other people were seeing as well in order to make a game plan. I am still planning on being in a holding pattern for about 2-3 more months to get more info on Penguin. But every little bit helps.
Thanks.
-
I see what you describe on four types of sites:
-
new sites
-
sites that need better on-page optimization
-
older sites that have not gained a lot of popularity
-
sites that are being held back by some problem
-
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
-
Google image search
How does google decide which image show up in the image search section ? Is is based on the alt tag of the image or is google able to detect what is image is about using neural nets ? If it is using neural nets are the images you put on your website taken into account to rank a page ? Let's say I do walking tours in Italy and put a picture of the leaning tower of pisa as a top image while I be penalised because even though the picture is in italy, you don't see anyone walking ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Does Google ignore duplicate meta descriptions?
Hi there SEO mozzers, I am dealing with a website that has duplicate meta descriptions (we know is bad).As a punishment, Google totally ignores the meta descriptions and picks content from the website and displays it in SERP. I already read the https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description but I was wondering if there is more information/knowledge out there. Any tips are appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Europarl_SEO_Team0 -
Disavow post Penguin update
As recent Penguin update makes quick move with backlinks with immediate impact; does Disavow tool also results the changes in few days rather than weeks like earlier? How long does it take now to see the impact of disavow? And I think still we must Disavow some links even Google claim that it'll take care of bad backlinks without passing value from them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Google Penalty or Not?
One of my sites I work with got this message: http://www.mysite: Unnatural inbound linksJune 27, 2013 Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to mysite.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site. But, when I got to manual actions it says: Manual Actions No manual webspam actions found. -- So which is it??? I have been doing link removal, but now I am confused if I need to do a reconsideration request or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Organic Google Sitelinks - can I edit?
A client just contacted me saying a competitor is threatening legal action threatened against a page description in a Google sitelink (just double checked and its in the serps results too). I checked the site and the content doesn't appear on that page or anywhere else on the site. I also added a Meta description to that page to see if that will have an effect. The page is the home page and I don't really want to demote it. Is there anything else I can/should do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | agua0 -
Quantity or quality in Google+ authorship?
Hi folks, here goes a (hopefully) easy one for the local authorship gurus. For our blog content strategy we currently have two inhouse contributors. Both have decent Google+ profiles and one is in the process of really establishing authorship/influence by submitting guest posts to several industry sites, sharing content in Google+, engaging in conversations in twitter, etc. Posts by this latter contributor already rank page 1 for the main keywords. We now have a new content contributor who is a retired employee from the company and a good friend. He has written excellent content that will be published in our blog in the coming few months. He does not have a Google+ profile but he can have one if we ask him to, but he is not going to use it for anything other than writting on our blog. He does not mind having his content published under any of our current Google+ profiles. Question: should we include this new content under our current profiles or should we create a new Google+ profile for this new contributor knowing that it will be an 'empty' profile? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TIBA0 -
Google +1 and Yslow
After adding Google's +1 script and call to our site (loading asynchronously), we noticed Yslow is giving us a D for not having expire headers for the following scripts: https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GKLA
https://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com... 1. Is their a workaround for this issue, so expire headers are added to to plusone and GA script? Or, are we being to nit-picky about this issue?0 -
Why do i not receive google traffic?
over the 4-5 months i have published over 3000 unique articles which i have payed well over 10 000usd for, but i still only receive about 20 google visitors a day for that content. i uploaded the 3000 articles after i 301 redirected the old site to a a new domain (old site had 1000 articles, and at least 300visits from google a day), and all the old conetnt receives the traffic fine (301 redirect is working 100percent now and pr went from 0 to 3pr) articles are also good ranging from 400-800 words. 90 percent of them are indexed by google, most of them have been bookmarked to digg reddit etc website domain is over 10 years old - alltopics.com why google doesnt send me the traffic i deserve?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rxesiv0