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Site not ranking in Google but comes up #1 in Yahoo and Bing
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Hi everyone,
I've been working on SEO for this site for about 2 years and for some reason the site has just tanked in google. However it shows up #1 in yahoo and bing for the same search.
Phrase: "commercial foundation repair mn"
If anyone can shed some light on the issue I would really appreciate it. They do have a sister-site: american-waterworks.com that may be causing issues as they link a lot of content to amww but not the other way around.
Thanks
Eric
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Hi Eric,
more info on the over optimization penalty here.
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_Few issues - _
Titles are too keywords focused
Meta descriptions are same site wideHowever, as Ryan has clarified, ranking in Google is a different ballgame altogether. And one more thing, I cannot find your website listed in Google Local. Get your website listed in Google Local as it might help your website rank high in some local terms.
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Simply put don't make your pages for SEO, make them for your users/visitors, do your main SEO offsite.
Time and time again though, we've experienced the google high - bing/yahoo low or the google low - yahoo/bing high.
It would seem each search engine reviews the others and do not want to display the same results, after all, what would be the point?
So figure out which one you want to target and go for it with whatever methods that get you up there. I think it'd be quite hard to get #1 for all search engines, unless of course your a site like wiki.
Good luck!
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Thanks for the replies,
I haven't been involved in the SEO community as much lately, can you elaborate or point me to a resource about the "over optimization penalty"?
Thanks
Eric
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Eric, try focusing on one location at a time in your title tag . At present you are trying to target 3 states ( MN, IA, WI) on the home page title tag. Build backlinks for the MN key phrase from quality sites. Be very careful with the over optimization penalty while you work with the on page factors.
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Bing and Google are two independent companies. They often evaluate site rankings very differently for various reasons. A few items I noticed:
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your sister site, american-waterworks.com already ranks on the first page of Google results for the given phrase.
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the nfsmn.com links prominently to the american-waterworks site from the home page
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Google frowns on a single company / site owner trying to rank multiple sites for the same term
There are many possibilities. Further analysis is needed to determine the root issue in your particular case. There are clearly other sites attempting to rank for the same term. The nfsmn site has hardly any links, it links out to multiple other sites from its home page and the content quality and site architecture aren't that good. I would not expect the site to rank #1 in Google for anything other then a perfect match for a non-competitive keyword.
I also noticed the american-waterworks site does not rank on the first page of Bing, yet it does in Google. Each search engine may recognize these sites are related and choose the site they feel is best suited for the term to rank.
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