Subfolder ranks worse than the rest of the site
-
We have the strangest problem. The blog for our website ranks very poorly:
www.lifeionizers.com/blog = average position in SERPs = 200. The site itself has an average position in SERPs of 12. The blog has a few terms it ranks #1 for such as branded terms and:
is mineral water alkaline = 1.3
kangen water vs alkaline water = 2.6
kangen water pyramid = 1.2
ph of redbull = 1.1 (Used by Google as answer in knowledge graph)
But the blog ranks terribly for most search terms. This blog has about 440 pages of in-depth, well-written authoritative content. Readers are well engaged, the blog has a bounce rate of ~3.5% with average time on page of over 6 minutes. The problem can't be the quality of the content.
Does Google levy penalties against specific subdirectories? Or is this a configuration problem? Bad links have been disavowed.
-
Awesome! Thanks for the update.
-
UPDATE: Organic traffic to the blog has doubled in the last few days. It started going up about 4 days after I unblocked the categories from being crawled. I'm not certain that it's all Google organic traffic, but it sure looks encouraging since the blog hasn't responded to any SEO fixes for nearly two years!
-
I would definitely check out the list on Clarity: https://clarity.fm/browse/technology/wordpress - and for developers it's often best to look in your own network - so I'd ask friends / colleagues for referrals, or you can search your LinkedIn connections as well.
-
Got to work on those blocked scripts. It turns out they are all outside resources:
- Hubspot
- Zopim Live Chat
According to Google, if outside resources are blocked, you have to contact the vendor about unblocking them. I contacted both Hubspot and Zopim, they will get back to us in about 2 days. Thankfully, we didn't have any of our scripts/CSS blocked.
I'm also working on that redirect. It turns out that if I shut it down, and redirect to the 200 OK page, that the blog will then render search result pages that will be indexed. That will give us a massive duplication problem. Its because of this that we did the redirect in the first place.
We're considering getting a Wordpress pro to come in and fix it right. Any suggestions?
-
Great! So glad it's helped so far, please keep us updated
-
You were right about the Fetch and Render. I found tons of scripts and images that were blocked. We're unblocking them all. I'm still working on your other suggestions, we do have a lot of old content. My plan is to leave all the evergreen content, and purge everything else
-
I've unblocked the categories in Wordpress. Let's keep our fingers crossed!
-
Hi - I wouldn't focus too much on that - I would take the suggestions made in my first answer and start with those! You really don't want to block crawling of categories!
-
My mistake, we deleted a page with a similar URL. That page was published on Dec 9th. Three days is not an uncommon lag for Google to index a new blog post. WMT shows that we are only indexed to the 7th of December. Google appears to re-index our site once per week:
Lastest index 12/7
Previous index 11/30
Previous index 11/23
Is this unusual? And thanks for your help! This has been a very frustrating problem!
-
Do you reactivate it? It's still live:
http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss
-
We recently deleted that page. It was ranked at ~1000 in SERPs, so that indicated to us that Google had a major problem with it. Since we couldn't figure it out, we got rid of the page.
-
I just want to add for record, one thing that was really interesting. That is this page: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss
Was cached in Google but not indexed - which is odd. And to me a sign that Google is not crawling and processing the blog correctly. I've attached screenshots since they may very well index the page shortly.
Cache - http://screencast.com/t/cZcGbIHb
Site: search not indexed - http://screencast.com/t/IJQbyMhd
-
Hi - this was an interesting one! But I think I have found some of the issues.
- I'd really let Google crawl the categories. They are currently blocked from crawling in robots.txt - http://www.lifeionizers.com/robots.txt - this is an issue because I suspected part of the problem may be due to crawl efficiency. One reason I say this, is because Google has yet to index a blog post from about 2-3 days ago.
- This is a small thing, but link to the 200 OK version of the blog from your main menu. Right now, it links to /blog but then redirects to /blog/ with the trailing slash. Any little bit friction you can reduce the better.
- Because you have a lot of things in that robots.txt file - I would definitely perform some fetch and render tests in webmaster tools. Here's the thing, Google has said if you block CSS or JS from being crawled it will harm your sites ranking - so definitely do fetch and render and make sure that's not the case.
- The order of "Recent Articles" in the main content area in the blog homepage: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/ - don't seem to be "recent" at all. At least they are not in chronological order. This is confusing for me (and others users probably) so likely very confusing for Google. Most would expect the /blog/ homepage to list the most recent posts by published date. Especially since it is labled "recent". If these are supposed to be maybe "popular" I would label it as such.
- Lastly, with this much old content I would do a thorough content audit (directions here or here) of your blog. You should prune old, poor, outdated, low-traffic content just like you'd prune a plant - this will certainly help user metrics signals and keep your indexed:trafficked ratio healthy!
Those are just some of the immediate things I saw. I'd start there.
-
I think that it could just be that the key terms are extremely competitive. I would advise actually having someone take a look at the site in depth. Anything someone says without actually seeing the site is just speculation and maybes. I'm sorry I can't be more help!
-
I have been treating them as separate entities. I've focused on testing the blog, and fixed everything I could find - it had no effect. I've voraciously pursued scrapers with takedown orders etc, it had no effect.
I'm reaching out now, because I'm out of ideas, done everything I could, and nothing has worked. We are considering abandoning SEO entirely because there seems to be nothing we can do to get our rank to improve. I'm hoping someone in here can help me figure out what the problem is before we abandon ship
-
All on the subdomain? Google treats your subdomain as a separate site from your domain. If the penalty was on the subdomain level, that is where you need to focus your efforts. You have to treat them as separate entities.
-
We've seen a lot of Keywords improve significantly (+200 positions improvement in SERPs) but then a week or so later, they simply drop back down to where they were. We've seen other terms improve, and stay improved. We've also picked up about 500 keyword phrases since Penguin 3.0. The site as a whole has improved it's position in SERPs by about 20 positions since Penguin
So the answer is a definite we don't know.
-
Did you have a Penguin penalty by chance? You said you disavowed bad links, but if you were penalized was the penalty removed? I think the terms that you are targeting are extremely competitive and you need to do some more off site op to get them ranking well. Run a competitive SERP and see what page on looks like.
-
Yes, this blog targets specific terms related to alkaline water, water ionizer, ionized water, kangen water. We used to be competitive for all those terms, until Google nuked us. We fixed everything we could find, SEO-wise, but have seen zero improvement for those search terms.
I'd expect that if you improve the copy on a page, and promote it in social, that it should do better than position 200 (Google supplemental index). But SEO optimization on-site has had no effect on how this blog ranks. It improved from 220 to 200 after Penguin ran recently, but that's it
-
Without seeing the site I am not sure what else it could be. Are the blogs targeting specific key terms? If so, did you analyze them to see what metrics you need in order to compete with the people on page 1?
-
Yes, we've built good links for the site, and the blog has acquired good organic links all on it's own. We share regularly on social media and the blog has videos from YouTube on it.
This is the strangest thing. The blog has been built and maintained using white hat techniques, with every effort to provide value to the user, and play by the rules. Yet Google still treats it like we're pushing payday loans or something.
I've been fighting this for a year and a half, with no improvement. As a company, we are at our wits and and may just shut the blog down if this persists
-
The bad links have been disavowed but have any good links been built? Refresh some of those links with good, high quality, relative links. Share some of the pages on social media and add a couple of videos if you can, from Youtube. All of those things should help you.
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
-
Page rank and menus
Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO is this not bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
Ranking go down why ?
Hello, Thank you , if you help us our web url www.prismpharmamachinery.com before some time very top ranking but now going down 5-7 pages in google any SEO expert can help for that Regards pooja
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Poojath0 -
Site's disappearnce in web rankings
I'm currently doing some work on a website: http://www.abetterdriveway.com.au. Upon starting, I detected a lot of spammy links going to this website and sort to remove them before submitting a disavow report. A few months later, this site completely disappeared in the rankings, with all keywords suddenly not ranked. I realised that the test website (which was put up to view before the new site went live) was still up on another URL and Google was suddenly ranking that site instead. Hence, I ensured that test site was completely removed. 3 weeks later however, the site (www.abetterdriveway.com.au) still remains unranked for its keywords. Upon checking Web Master Tools, I cannot see anything that stands out. There is no manual action or crawling issues that I can detect. Would anyone know the reason for this persistent disappearance? Is it something I will just have to wait out until ranking results come back, or is there something I am missing? Help here would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Homepage not ranking in Google AU, but ranking in Google UK?
Hey everyone, My homepage has not been ranking for it's primary keyword in Google Australia for many months now. Yesterday when I was using a UK Proxy and searching via Google UK I found my homepage/primary keyword ranked on page 8 in the UK. Now in Australia my website ranks on page 6 but it's for other pages on my website (and it always changes from different page to page). Previously my page was popping up at the bottom of page 1 and page 2. I've been trying many things and waiting weeks to see if it had any impact for over 4 months but I'm pretty lost for ideas now. Especially after what I saw yesterday in Google UK. I'd be very grateful if someone has had the same experience of suggestions and what I should try doing. I did a small audit on my page and because the site is focused on one product and features the primary keyword I took steps to try and fix the issue. I did the following: I noticed the developer had added H1 tags to many places on the homepage so I removed them all to make sure I wasn't getting an over optimization penalty. Cleaned up some of my links because I was not sure if this was the issue (I've never had a warning within Google webmaster tools) Changed the title tags/h tags on secondary pages not to feature the primary keyword as much Made some pages 'noindex' to try and see if this would take away the emphases on the secondary pages Resubmitted by XML sitemaps to Google Just recently claimed a local listings place in Google (still need to verify) and fixed up citations of my address/phone numbers etc (However it's not a local business - sells Australia wide) Added some new backlinks from AU sites (only a handful though) The only other option I can think of is to replace the name of the product on secondary pages to a different appreciation to make sure that the keyword isn't featured there. Some other notes on the site: When site do a 'site:url' search my homepage comes up at the top The site sometimes ranked for a secondary keyword on the front page in specific locations in Australia (but goes to a localised City page). I've noindexed these as a test to see if something with localisation is messing it around. I do have links from AU but I do have links from .com and wherever else. Any tips, advice, would be fantastic. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdaptDigital0 -
Is it Wortwhile to have a HTML site map for a Large Site
We are a large, enterprise site with many pages (some on our CMS and some old pages that exist outside our CMS). Every month we submit various an XML site map. Some pages on our site can no longer be found via following links from one page to another (orphan pages). Some of those pages are important and some not. Is it worth our while to create a HTML site map? Does any one have any recent stats or blog posts to share, showing how a HTML site map may have benefited a large site. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
High ranked web site on Google GONE - but webspam team says nothing wrong
We purchased several weeks ago a .org blog that has been highly ranked (number 1 on competetive keywords) for at least a year. it is a blog We moved the blog to our IP range and it went from #1 on top keyword and first page on another to the home page just gone. Now there was a secondary page indexed that stayed on page 5 for the keyword the home page was ranked #1 but the home page (which was high ranked page is just gone) We wrote the Google Webmaster team for reconsideration but they wrote back and said the web spam team said nothing wrong. A contact of mine who works for one of the most well known SEO compaines in the world says because we moved it the site could disappear for a week or so but the "algos would realize" and return it to that top spot soon. Does anyone know anything about moving a site to new IP and issues that can result?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TBKO0 -
Questions about turning my wordpress site into an ecommerce site. Experience needed.
I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0