Google penalising my site? Ranking now outside top 50
-
Hey there,
Was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/help on my current problems with my Google ranking.
I used to be on page one this time last year (still am on yahoo and bing) but Google has pushed me out of the top 50. Since then I built a new site on wordpress with new content but it hasn't made any real difference.
This is my site address: www.elvisimpersonator4u.co.uk
I also have a separate blog here: www.thisiselvis.tv
The blog did have some duplicate writing on it which I removed a few months back but it still hasn't improved my Google ranking. Would a 301 redirect fix this problem properly?
I've done quite a lot of SEO on several pages on the new site to try and improve it but no luck so far. In fact I hope I haven't over optimised! No tools seem to indicate this though.
I have no messages in webmaster tools so there's no obvious penalty, my web hosts keep saying I just need to buy more link builds and content writing from them but I've already done a lot of this and it's made no discernible difference.
If someone could have a look and give me some advice I would be most grateful!
Thanks,
Jim -
Thanks William, I will send a reconsideration request and sort out the anchor text as you've suggested, this is all very useful and I'm learning all the time.
-
If this happened so dramatically and in April it is very likely a Panda/Penguin problem. You should definitely send a reconsideration request to see if you are in penalty.
If it comes back there is no penalty, it may be that Google devalued a lot of the links that you may have.
Your internal linking has a lot of no anchor text, you should use some anchor text for your internal links and using alt="" for your images to describe what is being shown.
-
The main search term is 'elvis impersonator', but also 'elvis impersonators' and 'elvis tribute'.
I first became aware of a significant change last spring (which is when I believe a big google change occured) hence why I was worried it was a penalty of some kind. I wasn't monitoring the situation closely at the time as there didn't appear to be a problem with where I was.
It seemed to just drop from page 1 to something like page 10 if i recall correctly so definitely not a good sign! That was with the previous site design however, i was hoping for better luck with the word press site.
-
Thank you for the heads up and advice on CSS, I'm not nearly an expert in these areas so will have to look up some guides on how to change that in word press.
Do you happen to know of an easy guide that is available to explain this process?
-
Jim,
What Richard said is 100% accurate, when I view your website with CSS, Javascript, and cookies disabled the majority of the important text on your homepage is lost. Your header is an image, "Special package deals" section is an image, your endorsements are in an image, your list that starts with "don't be cruel" is an image. None of the information on these images is crawl-able, and the alt text just has your name and the sections label.
I would recommend using CSS to place live text over the images so the pertinent information is crawl-able.
-
It would be best to let us know what search term you are referring to. Also would help if you know exactly when this dropped, was it sudden or gradually?
-
Hey Richard,
Thanks for your response, the text is highlight-able as I've tried copying and pasting it into word and can do so and edit the text, should I be formatting it differently though? Is google not reading the main paragraphs regardless?
I have a couple of images this is true with text on the main page but that's not a major portion of the writing.
Cheers,
Jim -
I can't see any reason why you would have a link penalty so it must be something else.
You do have one immediately obvious issue on your site. 95% of the text is an image so it cannot be read by Google. You have to fix this!
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
-
Ranking
Hi, I am New Here in community.. My site Ranking Well in google But From Last two month its rank and traffic got down, i am worried about my site. and now when i created a new account on moz and check my site I saw there is a Spam Score: 5 /17 For my domain www.getmp3songspk.com I have Total indexed 1,132,913 url in google indexed Give Me Suggestion How can i remove bad links on my site. Seeking Help.
Technical SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
Google Seeing Way More Pages Than My Site Actually Has
For one of my sites, A-1 Scuba Diving And Snorkeling Adventures, Google is seeing way more pages than I actually have. It sees almost 550 pages but I only have about 50 pages in my XML. I am sure this is an error on my part. Here is the search results that show all my pages. Can anyone give me some guidance on what I did wrong. Is it a canonical url problem, a redirect problem or something else. Built on Wordpress. Thanks in advance for any help you can give. I just want to make sure I am delivering everything I can for the client.
Technical SEO | | InfinityTechnologySolutions0 -
Why isn't my site not searchable from google?
I am having a hard time figuring out why is it that when I search for my website name, it didn't show up in google's search result? Here's a link to my site. I've been twiddling for days looking for answers in my google webmaster tools. Here's a link of the crawl stats from google webmaster tool. As you can see it is actually crawling some pages. However my looking at my indexed status, I am getting 0 as you can see here (http://cl.ly/image/3G1R1p0b3k1P). I've double checked for my robots.txt and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary there. I am not blocking anything. Any ideas why?
Technical SEO | | herlamba0 -
Can someone tell me how in the heck this site is ranking?
Just saw a huge update on the Serps for "SEO Company" and "Seo Firm " and this site has tons of big Google no's no's going to it. www.seospecialists.co it has links coming from Porn and Gambling sites. It is heavily over optimized for both keywords. I won't cry the sky is falling[SEO is broke] but I am curious to know why Google thinks they are worthy to rank that high.
Technical SEO | | MattieMac0 -
What changes do i need to make to my site to get into google news
Hi, when we had the old design, we were in google news but then when we upgraded our site, we had a major problem which forced us to have to redesign our site. Since then we have not been included in google news and we would like to get back in. We only want to be in google news for the following page http://www.in2town.co.uk/Latest-News-Headlines But for some reason, no matter what we do we keep getting knocked back. I would love to know what we should be doing to get into google news and see what the problems are. We have moved to a bigger dedicated server to increase speed so i know it is not that. Any help would be great Also is there an alternative to google news that i can get our site into to generate traffic and to get our news stories straight out to people Hi, Thank you for your note. We appreciate your interest in sharing your content with us. However, when we reviewed your site, we found that we cannot include it in Google News at this time. We have certain guidelines in place regarding the quality of sites which are included in Google News. Please feel free to review these guidelines at the following link: http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40787 We know it can be frustrating to not have more information about this but we appreciate your efforts and understanding. We will log your site for future consideration. Please keep in mind that we will be unlikely to review your site for at least 60 days following this email. Thanks for your understanding and your continued interest in Google News. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
The Google News Team0 -
Google Trusted Ranking effect?
We are looking into getting the google Trusted badge. We meet the requirements and now just deciding if it is worth the time to do it now or later. Has anyone noticed a difference in your organic rankings or PLAs with it. What about conversion rates? Any input would be great!
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0