Not ranking on Google
-
Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com.
I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site.
1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google?
2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
-
I would suggest you to change:
content='Book your hotel in Malta with Malta hotels online - Competitive prices for hotels in Malta, budget hotels, Malta excursions, transfers and more.' name='description' />
To:
Cuz this is the first time that I see an content to be declared before name.
I dont say that this would help something in your rankings, but better fix it.
-
Thank you for your suggestions Bryan! I will look into the links you shared.
-
Hi Daniela,
**1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? **
Run the seoMOZ report card to make sure your on page data is crawl able without too much error.
Also you have a PMD (Partial Match Domain), these URLs where recently punished if they had low quality links or unnatural link profiles.
2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
I would focus on a clean link profile (anchoring 50%-75% of you links as your Brand name or URL )
There are many ways to earn links. SEOmoz is full of articles to help one rank, however what works in one niche might not work in another.
You can find the best bloggers in your niche (it could be a "malta travel blog") and have them share an article for you.. Maybe give them a free stay if they blog about you.... (This is one example of #RCS)
Hope this Helps.
-
Hi Andrea,
Thanks for your feedback.
I'm definitely with you that it takes time to rank and that it is not easy for people to find us.
We created new sections in the site where we can update content on regular basis - e.g. the About Malta and the News & Events section. I am trying to get a special offer too to make it more attractive for the consumer and instill some word of mouth.
We've done a small PPC campaign on google yet keywords were expensive for the identified keywords in the market we want to reach.
Thank you for pointing out the keyword stuffing issue - I will revise the content again.
With regards to the EMD update- we are adding original content, thus hoping that Google won't see our site as low-quality.
-
Well, if this work you are doing is relatively recent, it can take time to get rankings. Especially if you have limited inbound links - it's not easy for people to find you. So what else are you doing besides SEO to get the word out about your site - blogs? Inbound marketing? What are you doing to drive traffic?
It seems like you may be keyword stuffing "Malta" and "Malta hotels" to the point where it seems spammy - this is a bad thing. It doesn't read naturally for the user. Your main page and why Malta pages also have similar page titles - you may want to tweak that; your main page title tag is really stuffed. And, keep this in mind: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/your-guide-to-googles-emd-algorithm-update/49915/
Just a few initial thoughts.
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
-
Page ranked then disappeared
Recently there have been a a couple of pages form my website that ranked well, in top 5 for a couple of days then they disappear suddenly, they are not at all seen in google search results no matter how narrow I search for them. I checked my search console, there seems to be no issues with the page, but when I check google analytics, I do not get any data from that page since the day it disappeared, and it does not even show up on the 'active pages' section no matter I keep the url open in multiple computers.
Technical SEO | | JoelssonMedia
Has anyone else faced this issue? is there a solution to it?0 -
Dev Site Was Indexed By Google
Two of our dev sites(subdomains) were indexed by Google. They have since been made private once we found the problem. Should we take another step to remove the subdomain through robots.txt or just let it ride out? From what I understand, to remove the subdomain from Google we would verify the subdomain on GWT, then give the subdomain it's own robots.txt and disallow everything. Any advice is welcome, I just wanted to discuss this before making a decision.
Technical SEO | | ntsupply0 -
Getting Recrawled by Google
I have been updating my site a lot and some of the updates are showing up in Google and some are not. Is there a best practice in getting your site fully recrawled by Google?
Technical SEO | | ShootTokyo0 -
How to know which pages are indexed by Google?
So apparently we have some sites that are just duplicates of our original main site but aiming at different markets/cities. They have completely different urls but are the same content as our main site with different market/city changed. How do I know for sure which ones are indexed. I enter the url into Google and its not there. Even if I put in " around " it. Is there another way to query google for my site? Is there a website that will tell you which ones are indexed? This is probably a dumb question.
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Sudden Ranking Drop
One of my clients websites : http://www.renta-vw.co.za experienced a sudden ranking drop on 24/08/2012 for 2 of the Keyword terms : The 2 terms are : cheap car hire cape town cheap car rental cape town. The site ranked top 3 in Googel.de, Google.com, .co.uk, .nl I'm not sure if it is just a 'Google Dance' or something else at play? I checked Webmaster tools and did not see any messages from Google... This is causing a big loss of revenue for my client and after doing extensive analysis, I'm not the wiser as to what the issue is? Please assit. Thanks, Marnus
Technical SEO | | MarnusW1 -
Google has not been visiting my site
Hi I am working on a site at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com and i had the site using a different template and in the search engines for the search term cheap flights gatwick we were fourth and for the term holiday magazine we were 12th in google but now we are not even in google on the first page for the search terms. But now after changing the template in joomla our rankings have gone out of the window. It took me about a day to sort out the site with the new template so i was not expecting any problems with the search engines but for some reason there is. If you put into the search engine www.cheapflightsgatwick.com then you will see that google has not visited the site for four days and also it is not showing the description and instead it is showing details about joomla. Can anyone let me know if there is anything i need to do to sort this out and why google is taking so long to visit my site
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Strange rank behavior
Hi, I was ranked 16th (second page) on google italy for the keyword "realizzazione siti internet" (high and competitive serach volume) on an internel landing page: http://www.spotview.it/soluzioni-web-complete/realizzazione-siti-internet.html and everything went fine, that was my strategy planed for placement of selected keyword.The same page was ranked also for more relating keyworks just few position far from the main keyword. Now starts the strange behavior, suddenly on the end of september google.it decides to switch the landing page to the home page of the site! (absolutely not optimized for "realizzazione siti internet") and the for the others releated keyword the url disappear completely from the serp. Checking back into my link building database I found that some guys of my staff inserted wrong new links with the exact keyword "realizzazione siti internet" pointing to the home! not so good! those wrong links are about 10 with exact keyword and another 10 with releated keyword. So I decided to continue inserting links pointing to the right landing page http://www.spotview.it/soluzioni-web-complete/realizzazione-siti-internet.html to balance and to let google switch back to exact url. moreover I also tried to remove some wrong link with a little rate of succes 😞 Could somebody please tell me why now at about 45 day past the "landing switch error" the problem is not solved? somebody has suggestion or strategies to apply? thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Filolari1 -
My site cannot be found by google at all
I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0