Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
-
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
-
Well I'd say that the nonindex issue Gareth pointed out, and the major markability error I discovered are your two biggest concerns initially. But yeah, once the dust settles, the other issues I point out are all a concern. Unique content that's specific to each page is quite important to long term SEO success.
-
Wow Alan - I'm surprised at how quickly you were able to find so many issues -- HUGE thank you!!!! Egad I had no idea about this stuff - especially the videos - I wrongly assumed that because the videos are stored on the backend in a single location, that having them placed in multiple areas was fine. I cannot thank you enough for pointing these errors out -- I really appreciate your expert advice!
-
Once you fix the noindex, here's some other stuff. It's a "quick hit - what stands out" kind of an audit to see if there are any really obvious red flags.
1. Odd Links
Looking at the source of your POS Nightclub and Bar page I found some odd things going on related to links. Specific examples:
A) You've got a link off to the right side of the page just under the main navigation bar (under the "News" link). This link is titled "News" and it rotates different links to different news items. One of them goes to a site called Spoke.com and the rest go to other DInerware.com pages.
Each of these links has a link "title" attribute that appears to contain the intro text of whatever it's pointed to. The problem here is it's significantly filling content at the source level that's totally irrelevant to the page. If this is happening on the entire site,there's a lot of topical dilution.
While this issue itself shouldn't be a problem big enough to be concerned with, I do believe its harming your sites quality from a topical perspective. And since this is stuff only search engines see, or is only seen when hovering over whatever individual article is viewed in the rotator, it's not good to have so much content there. Not good at all.
Also, the Spoke directory isn't exactly a high quality directory. So linking there isn't helping your site's perceived trust aspects.
2. Apparent mass repetition of video content
Am I correct in that you've got some videos posted to multiple pages of the site? Causing serious duplicate content problems? Many pages seem to have almost no unique text while having several videos. If these are then shown on more than one page, not only do you lose out from a lack of HTML text based content (a significant factor), but you get hammered by the duplication.
3. Links to PDFs
I see links to PDFs in the right column of the Product Training page, and none of them have the php code at the end of them. Yet within the page itself, PDFs have it http://www.dinerware.com/pdf/DinerwareCFGManual.pdf?phpMyAdmin=6e28a551fa44f2aa65e57201d6164da9
What's that about?
4. Markup Language Fail - The biggest problem
When I run your site through the W3C Markup Validation check, it fails and can not process. This alone means you've got a site coding problem that's most likely causing serious problems with search engines.
Go to http://validator.w3.org and enter in http://www.dinerware.com/pos-product/training/
I doubt the complete breakdown that I got when submitting that URL is temporary - and if you see it too, that's a critical issue.
-
No problem!
-
HOLY SMOKES!!! Gareth - thank you so SO SO much! I'm not a back-end web person, but will get the right folks on it asap - wonder how that mistake could have been made -- I'm grateful to you!
-
Hi Jeanie, I just had a quick look at your site and noticed you have noindex, nofollow on all of the pages I checked. You may want to adjust this as you're telling the search engines not to index these pages. Take a look at your source code and you'll spot it quite easily.
-
http://www.dinerware.com - Thanks, Alan
-
Jeanie - what's your site? Can't offer help without knowing that.
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
-
What are some best practices for optimizing alternate versions of a brand name?
What are the best methods for ensuring that the correct spelling/formatting of a brand name rank in the SERP when an alternate formatting/spelling of the brand name is searched. Take for example the brand name (made up for example purposes), "SuperFry". Many customers search using the term "Super Fry" (with a space). To make things worse, not only does Google not return the brand name SuperFry, but it also auto corrects to another brand name "Super-Fri". Is there a common best practice to ensure the customer finds the intended brand name when they simply add a space in the search term? I assume a quick fix would be to create an ad words campaign for the alternate spellings/formatting. What about an organic solution? Perhaps we could create a special page talking about the alternate ways to spell the brand name? Would this solution send mixed signals to Google and potential hurt the over all rankings? Thanks much for any advice!
Technical SEO | | Vspeed0 -
Can Googlebot crawl the content on this page?
Hi all, I've read the posts in Google about Ajax and javascript (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en) and also this post: http://moz.com/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really. I am trying to evaluate if the content on this page, http://www.vwarcher.com/CustomerReviews, is crawlable by Googlebot? It appears not to be. I perused the sitemap and don't see any ugly Ajax URLs included as Google suggests doing. Also, the page is definitely indexed, but appears the content is only indexed via its original source (Yahoo!, Citysearch, Google+, etc.). I understand why they are using this dynamic content, because it looks nice to an end-user and requires little to no maintenance. But, is it providing them any SEO benefit? It appears to me that it would be far better to take these reviews and simply build them into HTML. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Why are some pages now duplicate content?
It is probably a silly question, but all of a sudden, the following pages of one of my clients are reported as Duplicate content. I cannot understand why. They weren't before... http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal
Technical SEO | | MarketingEnergy
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma Thanks for any help in the right direction 🙂 | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| | <colgroup><col style="mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 17225; width: 353pt;" width="471"></colgroup>
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma |0 -
GWT crawl errors: How big a ranking issue?
For family reasons (child to look after) I can't keep a close eye on my SEO and SERPs. But from top 10 rankings in January for a dozen keywords I'm now not in top 80 results -- save one keyword for which I'm ~18-20.
Technical SEO | | Jeepster
Not a sitewide penalty: some of my internal pages are still ranking top 3 or so. In GWT, late March I received warning of a rise in server errors:
17 Server Errors/575 soft 404s/17 Not Founds/Access Denied 1/Others 4
I've also got 2 very old sitemaps (from two different ex-SEO firms) & I'm guessing about 75% of the links on there no longer exist. Q: Could all this be behind my calamitous SERPS drop? Or should I be devoting my -- limited -- time to improving my links?0 -
Don't reach to make our site back in rankings
My URL is: http://tinyurl.com/nslu78 Hi, I really hope someone can help because my site seems to be penalized since last year now. Because we were not SEO experts but doctors and wanted to do things in a white hat way so we have given our SEO strategy (on-site and off-site) to the best US SEO agencies and now we are penalized. We was ranking on the 1st page with 15 keywords and now we don't even are in the first 10 pages. I know that our sector is suspicious but we are a real laboratory and our site is 100% transparent. I understand that a lot of people can think that we are all the same but this is not true, we are not a virtual company that don't even show their name or address, we show name, address, phone number, fax, email, chat service, VAT number everything so please help us. We have spent 3 months analysing every paragraph of google guidelines to see if we were violating some rule such as hidden text, link schemes, redirections, keyword stuffing, maleware, duplicate content etc.. and found nothing except little things but maybe we are not good enough to find the problem. In 3 months we have passed from 85 toxic links to 24 and from 750 suspicious links to 300. we have emailed, and call all the webmasters of each site several times to try to delete as many links as possible.We have sent to google a big excel with all our results and attempts to delete those badlinks. We have then sent a reconsideration request explaining all the things that we have verified on-site and off-site but it seems that it didn't worked because we are still penalized. I really hope someone can see where the problem is.
Technical SEO | | andromedical
thank you0 -
Roger bot taking a long time to crawl site
Hi all, I've noticed Roger bot is taking a long time to crawl my new site. It started on the 28th Feb 2013 and is still going. There aren't many pages at the moment. Any ideas please? thanks a lot, Mark.
Technical SEO | | caterfor1 -
Domain structure for US Local Sites
We are planning on opening localized versions of our website throughout the world and in the US. For countries these websites will be: www.site.co.uk www.site.fr etc.... For the US would it be better to add the states onto part of the domain name or use a sub-folder. What is the advantage/disadvantages of each? Meaning, should it be: nj.site.com or site-nj.com
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Would removing or making non relevant links no follow boost a site?
Hi, I have just been checking out the backlinks for a prospective new client. It appears they have a number of links that are totally irrelevant to their nature of business and I was wondering if they would improve in the rankings etc if I removed them or made them no follow instead? Or would I simply just be throwing away crucial link juice? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Benjamin3790