Round 3 & still no indexing for varicose veins :-(
-
Greetings from 11 degrees C partly suuny Wetherby
Every so oftem you hit an SEO mission that just consistently hits a brick wall. For the third time i'm investigating why this page:
http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/ fails to even reach the bottom of page 3.Ive gone back to basic and ran an SEO audit of sorts in an attempt to see if I'd missed anything. Here is the audit:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/audit-for-moz.jpg
So my question is please:
From a technical SEO perspective is there anything wrong with this page http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/ to explain why it does not rank for target term "Varicose Veins"
Thanks in advance,
David -
Morning Nick,
A big thank you for taking time out to look at this. You've confirmed a vague hunch that the site architecture is inherently jinxed and morre importantly given me hope i can get the dismal ranking sitution out of the mire
Have a great weekend & thank you again
-
Hi there David
From looking at the site, some past experience and Matt's responses, my view would be there are a few challenges facing you:
On a prior project, I came to understand that 'phlebology' is one of those highly spammed and abused areas of search that has all sorts of people trying to gain high ranking positions with poor quality sites, so there's probably a higher-than-normal barrier to entry for anyone new or new-ish into the market. Given the potential volumes of traffic out there, neither the spamming nor barrier to entry are that much of a surprise, so you have your work cut out for you!
I don't think the scrolling widget at the footer of your site will be doing you any favours as it links out to separate domains that are immediately redirected, which might look very suspect to search engines, and it's obviously there to create a number of links out. I'd strip them off.
I think you'd be far better to adjust the overall navigation of the site so that users and search engines can clearly flow from the top-level navigation down to the VV page (and others). At the moment the architecture seems somewhat awkwardly arranged and I would recommend re-organising it so there's a flow from the top down that follows the advancing detail of the content e.g.
Home
- Veins
-- Varicose Veins
--- Varicose Veins Sub-Topic
(repeat for all other topics!)
At the least better links in the main content on the Home Page, the For Patients Page and the Veins page down to the VV page would help a great deal. The VV page is presumably one of the most important on the site so the internal link structure should reflect that.
There is nothing on the 'For Patients' or For Specialists pages (http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/for-patients/ & http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/for-specialists-outer/) which will act as a red flag to Google. Those pages should act as high-level content resources, providing links down to lower pages.
Content-wise you're competing against some very high quality pages and I think you'd be best to review those and have a serious conversation with your client to show that (being blunt about it) a relatively short page summarising VV isn't going to have a great chance of really competing with a very high quality page from Patient.co.uk that goes into great detail on the condition, provides simple diagrams and is written by someone with a pretty high profile. I would encourage you to read into what Google is saying - if they are returning long, detailed high-quality pages at the top of the search results, that's what you need to provide to compete.
Link-wise there's a lot to do as you're competing with some of the most authoritative sites on the web - Wikipedia, NHS…without the great quality content you're going to struggle to gain links…chicken and egg as so much of SEO is, but that's where the fun is.
You could do a lot more on the Authorship and 'News' side and I'd recommend: pulling all the news into a 'News' or 'Blog' section that sits right at the top-level of the site architecture; the articles could have better pseudo-meta data e.g. a better by-line, a better date of publication and some categorisation.
On the authorship side, creating a Google+ profile for Mr Mark Whitely and linking the content he has published up to the profile will do you no harm at all. The same would go for anyone else publishing on the site.
Technically (and this might be a temporary blip with our connection) the site seems a bit slow to load, perhaps worth looking into.
In short, there are some navigational issues, there are some content issues, but you have what is the ultimate source of content - surgeons, so with effort there's no reason the site can't do well.
Hope that helps.
-
Ah I see - I personally think having it as a footer link will not help in the way it would as part of your main navigation which for a start would put it above the fold so search engines would give it more weight and also the fact that it will carry across your sites navigation..
Did you see the addition I made to the response above re your homepage?
-
Hi Matt, yes we put a scrolling link nav in the footer of the homepage routing thru to the varicose page.
-
Looking at opensiteexplorer.org your page only has a page authority of 13 and inbound links to your page look few and far between - have you thought about trying to build on this to help with your page ranking?
Have you thought about giving a direct link to varicose veins using this anchor text from your homepage http://www.collegeofphlebology.com because from what I can see getting to the page you are trying to rank for a competitive term it would appear that is several levels down the navigation structure of your site - unless I have missed it at a quick glance?
I would also say that your homepage appears to have a title that is targeting varicose veins and treatments but you don't appear to mention varicose veins in your body text and it isn't a specific link in your navigation which would help...
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
-
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
All of my pages are indexed except for 1\. How could that be?
Yesterday we were ranking #4 for our main keyword and today we're not even indexed. Not robots.txt issue, we've just added a rel canonical to page and submitted our sitemap again. What else could we do?
Technical SEO | | paulb.credible0 -
ATG & Endeca Integration & SEO implications
Does anyone have any first hand experience or must have recommendations around ATG & Endeca integration? I am somewhat familiar with ATG and the Oracle ATG guide, but if anyone has any specific SEO considerations they'd like to share? i.e. jumpservlet and SEO URLs Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Should i index or noindex a contact page
Im wondering if i should noindex the contact page im doing SEO for a website just wondering if by noindexing the contact page would it help SEO or hurt SEO for that website
Technical SEO | | aronwp0 -
What is the most effective way of indexing a localised website?
Hi all, I have a website, www.acrylicimage.com which provides products in three different currencies, $, £ and Euro. Currently a user can click on a flag to indicate which region they are in, or if the user has not manually selected the website looks at the users Locale setting and sets the region for them. The website also has a very simple content management system which provides ever so slightly different content depending on which region the user is in. The difference in content might literally be a few words per page, like contact details, measurements i.e. imperial to metric. I dont believe that GoogleBot, or any other bot for that matter, sets a Locale, and therefore it will only ever be indexing the content on our default region - the UK. So, my question really is if I need to be able to index different versions of content on the same page, is the best route to provide alternate urls i.e.: /en/about-us
Technical SEO | | dotcentric
/us/about-us
/eu/about-us The only potential downside I see to this is there are currently a couple of pages that do have exactly the same content regardless of whether you have selected the UK or USA regions - could this be considered content duplication? Thanks for your help. Al0 -
Domainchange & Relaunch
Hi SEOMOZERS, We are planning to do a relaunch (new content, new design) + a domainname change (because it contains a keyword). Some of my team members think it is best to do the domain change already on the old-version to see if there might be some problems. Whereas I think it would be best to implement the domainchange on the new version because otherwise it can be suspected we did the domainchange only for SEO purposes. What are you guys thinking? Thanks Gregor
Technical SEO | | GregorHendrych0 -
Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?
We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr
Technical SEO | | dim_d0 -
Some site pages are removed from Google Index
Hello, Some pages of my clients website are removed from Google Index. We were in top 10 position for some keywords but now I cannot find those pages neither in top 1000. Any idea what to do in order to get these pages back? thank you
Technical SEO | | besartbajrami0