Why isnt this site ranking?
-
I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks.
Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions.
Thoughts on the matter?
-
Moz shows many of my other clients with local keywords like that. I see vonderhaar in the map listings but not organic results
-
It doesn't look like moz counts local results, but I still have moz pulling http://www.vonderhaar.com/ at 33rd for "Cincinatti Fireplace Cleaning" with http://www.vonderhaar.com/mantels.php.
-
Moz rank tracker shows both not being in the top 50
-
I'm seeing them on the first page for both "Cincinnati chimney repair" and "Cincinnati chimney cleaning" which appear to be your 2 main keywords. These are both showing in the local pack.
-
The blog was hacked yesterday. All of those blog posts were up for less than an hour and promptly deleted. So I highly doubt they had any impact on the rank.
I 100% agree that this site is ugly and not well formatted. But the client is unwilling to change that or pay for a design. So we have to try to build a house on a bad foundation to begin.
Most pages have header tags
And while I see all of these things as issues, I am more concerned with why the site would rank and then suddenly disappear entirely. Backlinks are obviously a big thing, but it is a small local niche site where I can say that a large portion of the companies also do not have backlinks or even an seo company helping.
The site gets "A" grades on their moz on page reports for keyword targeting so I feel they should at least be somewhere to be found.
-
Here are a few items:
http://www.vonderhaar.com/blog/vlgbx32493/ << today's date
http://www.vonderhaar.com/blog/o8c6b1bf0f/
http://www.vonderhaar.com/blog/010zdvi4r6/
I'm guessing the site had the wrong permissions, and someone was ablt to get into it.Tons of links to beuy oreos and Jordan shoes. Many of these pages have a lot of unnatural links to questionable sites with exact anchor text.
Could be they dont have a manual action yet, but I wouldn't leave it this way. Check the folder that these posts are coming from, and delete it if possible. Set new permissions of 0644 and for coding files 0444 if it will still allow the site to load. Sometimes a 444 is too strict, and will not allow a user to access the site, depending upon your file setup.
Another thing I noticed is that none of the pages that arent spam are optimized well. Take the homepage for example:
Vonderhaar's offers chimney cleaning and fireplace repair for your home. If you're in the Cincinnati area and need masonry work, call us today!
vs a competitor's description:
American Chimney and Masonry offers chimney sweeping and chimney repair services to the greater Cincinnati Ohio area for over 30 years. A+ Rating by the BBB and over 85,000 customers
Bit more organized, a bit more direct.
Compare this site to a competitor. The site you are managing doesnt have any compelling reasons for a user to contact them:
http://www.vonderhaar.com/
http://amchimney.com/ <<< number 1 organically
http://www.karlmattesco.com/chimney_installation.html <<< number 3 organicallyI used to work at a company that stated that the design of the site had nothing to do with how many leads the client got. I dont work there anymore.
Backlinks are also a large contributor to a site's ranking. If you say it has a poor or non-existant backlink profile, could be a large reason of why it doesn't rank.
NO HEADER TAGS:
seo-browser reportThis is how search engines see your site. Lack of header tags isnt good for users, as it doesnt separate your content, nor for SEO because it doesnt make the page summary evident and clear.
Lack of google authorship:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http://www.vonderhaar.com/There are many other reseaons why its not ranking, but that should give you a good place to start. You need to analyze your competitors and give the site more focus.
-
The site is years old. It used to rank alright but has been dropping a lot
-
The blog just launched too. I will have to look into how they got hacked.
-
Looks like you may have been hacked at some point. Go to Google in incognito mode, and type site:vonderhaar.com and start going back a few pages. This page is an example of a blog page that is filled with spam http://www.vonderhaar.com/blog/kprsd40080f/. Looks like it might have just happened, as I see today's date on at least one of the posts.
-
Hey,
i look at your site and also googled your web address and it is coming up, how long ago did you launch the website? Have you done anything to market it?
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
-
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making : ![Red ford truck](2554.jpg) changed to ![Red ford truck](6842.jpg)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
Spammy sites that link to a site
Hello, What is the best and quickest way to identify spammy sites that link to a website, and then remove them ( google disavow?) Thank you dear Moz, community - I appreciate your help 🙂 Sincerely, Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
REPOST: How much does "overall site semantic theme" influence rankings?
Hello everyone on the new cool Moz! I've optimized sites before that are dedicated to 1, 2 or 3 products and or services. These sites inherently talk about one main thing - so the semantics of the content across the whole site reflect this. I get these ranked well on a local level. Now, take an e-commerce site - which I am working on - 2000 products, all of which are quite varied - cookware, diningware, art, decor, outdoor, appliances... there is a lot of different semantics throughout the site's different pages. Does this influence the ranking possibilities? Your opinion and time is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
Optimal site structure for travel site
Hi there, I am seo-managing a travel website where we are going to make a new site structure next year. We have about 4000 pages on the site at the moment. The structure is only 2-levels at the moment: Level 1: Homepage Level 2: All other pages (4000 individual pages - (all with different urls)) We are adding another 2-3 levels, but we have a challenge: We have potentially 2 roads to the same product (e.g. "phuket diving product") domain.com/thailand/activities/diving/phuket-diving-product.asp domain.com/activities/diving/thailand/phuket-diving-product.asp I would very much appreciate your view on the problem: How do I solve this dilemma/challenge from a SEO standpoint? I want to avoid DC if possible, I also only want one landing page - for many reasons. And usability is of course also very important. Best regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sembseo0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Site dropped rankings when changing host from US to Spain
My site was ranked very well in the UK & US for multiple keywords but we changed hosting from the US to Spain and since then the rankings in the US & UK have dropped between 5 to 35 positions on all keywords and are showing no signs of returning 3 weeks later. What can be causing this? The site was down for about 3 to 5 hours a few days before we transferred hosting (this is why we changed hosting due to the previous hosting being down too often). It does seem as though the new location of the hosting server seems to be affecting rankings but I need confirmation on this or any other ideas why the rankings may have dropped. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | authoritysitebuilder0 -
Can you advise why my site get outranked by sites with way less authority and so on
Hello SeoMoz, As a new member I first want to thank you guys for your service, seomoz is by far the best resource and toolbox I have ever found. I have a question, or more of a request if you could advise me on what I do wrong.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DennisForte
I have a website: www.letsflycheaper.com with a Domain Authority of 80, and my target keywords are keywords like: cheap business class, business class flights.
My target page is: www.letsflycheaper.com/business-class.php. With all my keywords I am page 2 and I have a real hard time getting on the first page, but if I look at my competitors like: www.wholesale-flights.com with a Domain Authority of 'just' 50, crappy backlinks and so on, they are all on the first page with almost all of my keywords that I want to target. What do I do wrong? Can you maybe give me a couple tips on where I should focus on more? Hopefully you guys can help me... Kind Regards, Ramon van Meer0