Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
-
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq
When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords.
Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools.
The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request.
From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules.
I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again?
Thoughts, suggestions???
I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search.
-
Hi Thomas,
I was wondering how you got on with this issue? Since it has been 5 months have you started to rank higher?
Also, what were the types of links to your site (e.g. www.domain.com/?id=123456)?
Thanks, Jason
-
Hi Thomas,
I fear there is some additional clean up work to do. If I do a site:yourdomain.com - there are more than 5000 results. A bit surprising, because your site only has 30 pages that can be indexed.
If I go to page 4 of the results I see some strange stuff appearing like "madame alexander "travel with style" alex doll - yourdomain" - the link goes to a 400 Bad Request page. If you click on the Google message 'show similar results' at the bottom of the results - there seem to be several hundred of these pages. The vast majority of links in the index seem to be these old urls. As they all seem to be in one folder -you should request removal of this folder in Webmaster tools.
Apart from that, and probably less important, I would also consider removing your slogan in your page title - I fear you're overdoing it a bit with one of your keywords which also appears twice in your slogan. Check also the images - a lot of them are quite heave & could slow down the site.
Difficult to tell if you should continue on this domain or put it on another - I would first try to remove this light pages from the index, wait a month & see what it brings;
rgds,
Dirk
-
Thanks for the response. To clarify. We launched this site on this domain in Nov of 2014, so it's been a couple months now. I do understand that things take time, I tell my inbound clients 6 months to see real results. This is a bit different since we can't even get basic rankings.
"Have you resubmitted the site in every available fashion (sitemap, 301 redirects, URL fetching) to Google?" - Yes fetch done, a few times... Sitemaps submitted and auto updated with each new blog post, robots.txt includes a link to the sitemap. Google has recrawled the site multiple times since we launched. I can do a site: and see all our pages, they just won't rank us for keywords (even simple ones).
The other domains didn't add value. All social profiles are pointing to our main domain.
We've also done a couple PR's since the site launched, which of course rank too.
It's unfortunate, but I figure that I might just need to wait for an update, which they seems they are further apart now.
-
Wow, lots of info here lol. Lets begin with the basics.
It sounds like you have had a lot of domain changes, edits, moves etc. Does Google know that your site is the "final and latest" version? Have you resubmitted the site in every available fashion (sitemap, 301 redirects, URL fetching) to Google?
Also, since you have changed to domain, any of your other authority may have been lost, especially since you state that "with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404)." Some of the other sites may have had weight or authority, even if they were a bit spammy. I doubt they were being as harmful as you think, or you would have gotten a warning / penalty.
Now you are in the position of essentially starting over fresh, with little to no links, or mentions. Even if you get good "seo scores" your competitors have years of links and mentions under their belt, not to mention domain stability. Here is a starting point:
1. See if any of the old domains had domain authority or pagerank. If yes, 301 redirect to your new site.
2. Look for any pages that are indexed highly for the old domains, and 301 to the appropriate places on the new site.
3. Look at any and all social profiles connected to any of the old domains. Make sure to update to include the new URL
4. Same with directories and citations. Makes sure all display the new URL. Also look for new citations and backlink opportunities. You need to create a push of new trusted (not spammy) link to send a signal the site and URL exist.**Also wanted to add that sometimes you can see an initial spike in rankings after launching a new site. Generally, the real results will come at arount the 30-45 day mark, once things have had time to settle, and Google has had time to fully recrawl your site.
-
If there was no manual action, I can't see any option but to wait for the next update. In terms of whether to wait - or bite the bullet & bail on the domain, it's a gamble either way. If it were me I'd wait, but then how long do you wait... Tough one.
With regards a 301 passing on any penalization, I think that's a gamble too. In theory I think the answer is yes the good the bad & the ugly will follow the 301, but in practice the answer appears to be "sometimes."
Sorry I can't be more helpful!
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
-
Do we need to Disallow profiles from discussions or forums?
Hi, We have a forum where users create different threads like any other community...ex..Moz. Thousands of pages are getting created. New threads and comments are Okay as they have relevant content. We are planning to "Disallow" all profile pages as they do not help with content relevancy and may dilute the link juice with thousands of such profile pages. Is this right way to proceed? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Too many wordpress redirects impact Rankings?
Our website cms is WordPress. We have recently changed the URL pattern of our blog pages which resulted in hundreds of crawl errors in Google search console. Even though we don't have any broken links; old pages have been reported at Google. We are trying to redirect the old URLs to new which will be handled by auto redirects or manual redirects. Will so many redirects impact on website? I don't mean about internal redirects. I mean about redirects made for the cause of reclaiming non existing pages referred from external sites
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Dramatic drop in SEO rankings after recovering from hacking
A few months ago my client's website was hacked which created over 20,000+ spammy links on the site. I dealt with removing the malware and got google to remove the malware warning shortly within a week of the hacking. Then started the long process to do 301 redirects and disavowing links under Webmaster tools over these few months. The hacking only caused a slight drop in rankings at the time. Now just as of last week the site had a dramatic drop in rankings. When doing a keyword search I noticed the homepage doesn't even get listed on Google Maps and for Google Search instead the inner pages like the Contact Us page show up instead of the homepage. Does anyone have any insight to the sudden drop happening now and why the inner pages are ranking higher than the homepage now?
Algorithm Updates | | FPK0 -
Advice regarding latest Google Algo Update please, if possible...
Hi there I wonder if anyone can advise on this. Since the latest google update on 1st Sept or whenever it rolled out, we noticed an initial spike in hits on our site, which was great. However now we are noticing levels going back to where they were and less people visiting the site. It also seems to be very sporadic. So we have a period of say a couple of hours with no one on the site, then suddenly loads visiting. We have also noticed a big dip in enquiries, despite the site having roughly the same amount of visitors. All our stats on Moz, Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Serpfox and various other rank trackers are showing that we have had an increase in visibility on our tracked keywords. There is a definite spike on all, but where is our traffic and where are our enquiries? Usually we are able to work out where the problem is when updates occur but with this we have no idea. We are utterly baffled. Is this normal? Is this just fluctuations and will settle down? Has anyone else noticed weird things happening? If anyone has any ideas or experience of this then would be most grateful for any advice. Feeling rather desperate at the moment. Many thanks in advance. Clojo
Algorithm Updates | | Clojobobo0 -
What happened on September 17 on Google?
According to mozcast: http://mozcast.com/ and to my own stats, Google had a pretty strong algorithm update on September 17. Personally I have experienced a drop of about 10% of traffic coming from Google on most of my main e-commerce site virtualsheetmusic.com. Anyone know more about that update? Any ideas about what changed? Thank you in advance for any thoughts! Best, Fab.
Algorithm Updates | | fablau1 -
Poor rankings in Bing/Yahoo
Hello, A site I'm working on ranks well in Google, but does poorly in Bing/Yahoo. Is there anything I should look at? Thanks,
Algorithm Updates | | PLP0 -
Problems with Google results
Hi Everybody, I ve been dealing with this issue for a while now. i have a multilingual website: www.vallnord.com When a search for Vallnord in Google it always shows the result in Catalan, but it does not show what I specified in the meta description, it displays what it crawls from the home page. I have 2 problems here: It is not showing my meta description. What can I do? It is not showing the language from which the search was made. Example: if you search from Google.com and your default language is english it should been displayed the result from the english HTML. www.vallnord.com/en but it is not like this. It is always the catalan (default language of the site) the one that is displayed. I have tried several things already: Inserting the Hreflang function Changing the descriptions Resubmitting the sitemap via Google Webmaster I can not figure out what is going on because if you search: "Vallnord Castellano" it will display the spanish URL but still not the proper description. Moreover if you search: "www.vallnord.com/es" on google , it will display the proper URL and description. FYI, I am using 301 redirects for the languages: es.vallnord.com it is the sames as www.vallnord.com/es In addition to this, If using Yahoo search engine there is no problem. it will show the proper language. from yahoo.com the first result is in english and from yahoo.es the first result Spanish. So any idea what would be the problem?And furthermore, any Idea which would be the solution? Thanks in advance, Guido.
Algorithm Updates | | SilbertAd0 -
Are you getting any action from Google +1 ?
If you have added google plus one to your website you can check on the impact by visiting your webmaster tools account. In your GWT account you will see a left menu item for "+1 Metrics". If you click on "Search Impact" you can see the CTR change attributed to +1. Anybody seeing anything there yet?
Algorithm Updates | | EGOL0