I'm invisible!
-
Dear all,
Earl 2015 i launched www.taobao.nl. Its a platform that shows the products of chinese marketplaces in our local language (auto translated) and provides the option to pay in our local currency & methods.
(i blocked all the auto translated product pages via http://www.taobao.nl/robots.txt)
All content (category pages, general pages etc) are unique and written by us.
In the past I've set up several websites and shops and i know it always takes time and effort to get a site to good positions, but i never experienced that my efforts did not pay of. Until now
The url is not blocked by Google and i see a (very) limited amount of traffic in WMT & Analytics, but the site is >page 30 on its most important keyword 'taobao'. This, while the competition on this keyword is low in my country (google.nl).
My main competitor (taobao.com.nl) seems to do worse on most SEO elements i was able to check, but they rank very well on 'taobao' and all related keywords.
What could be the reason of this very poor ranking and what should i really adjust / improve?
(besides backlinks: i'm working hard on that)Your input is deeply appreciated!!
Sander
-
Update: The bad links have been disavowed and WMT does not mention them anymore (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/external-links).
Also the no-follow tags have been removed.
Still working on high-quality links (:-)) and im trying to add content on a daily basis.
So far no results.
-
Thanks & bedankt
I'll disavow that link in WMT. Useful info!
-
most of your incomming links are from palminvest.nl That business went out of business. Out of business i a very public and bad way.
I would start with preventing that and getting you some good links.
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.taobao.nl
(leuk idee wel verder
-
I wouldn't take too much notice of that as it thinks my site is penalised or sandboxed - which it is neither
It only looks at your homepage, it seems. Tested a couple of others and you definitely can't take anything away from it.
A penalty is difficult to spot if you haven't noticed a sudden drop in traffic. It takes quite a bit of digging.
-Andy
-
Hi All,
I just tried this checker: http://pixelgroove.com/serp/sandbox_checker/ and it seems there might be a penalty on the domain. Does anyone know how i can be sure this is the case and how i can ask Google to re-evaluate?
(there is no warning in Webmastertools, so i can't submit a request for re-evaluation via that way)
Regards,
Sander
-
Hi Andy,
"Have you performed an audit to see if there are issues lurking anywhere that could be causing problems?"
Is there any tool in specific that you can recommend?
Thanks!
Sander
-
Hi Mike,
The thing is that the original product content is Chinese. English would be readable for my Dutch audience, but Chinese is no option.
All content on category pages and general pages are normal unique content in my language.
The site is about 6 months old and the domain has no history.
Regards,
Sander
-
Johannes,
Auto translated content does not have a negative effect on your SEO, just on user readability. Using Google Translate across your entire website will make your website hard to read in those translated languages. Take a page that is translated, and translate it back to English. It is the quickest fix yes, but more work needs to be done with the translator toolkit.
Thanks,
- Mike
-
To be appearing so far down the SERP's, it sounds like a trust issue from Google.
How old is the site? Have you performed an audit to see if there are issues lurking anywhere that could be causing problems? As Hector said, you are no-following links from the menu, but based on what you said above, this is to prevent the fact this information is pulled in from other sites? I suspect problems might start from around here.
From Google, this might seem like a strange way of doing things. There is no harm in allowing the links ( I would not advise no-following these), but you can no-index pages that you worry might get caught up in duplication.
Let Google crawl your site and see the pages you don't want indexed.
-Andy
-
Hi Hector,
Because the product pages have auto-translated content. I understood this has a negative effect on a sites ranking.
Sander
-
Without looking too deep into the site, I see at hrefs.com you only have 10 referring domains, and only 7 of them are not "nofollow".You should focus on a linkbuilding strategy at first.
Also, minimize and join your .js files. You load way too much external files for a site like that.
Why do you block product pages? They are the most importante pages on an ecommerce site.
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's the best way to use redirects on a massive site consolidation
We are migrating 13 websites into a single new domain and with that we have certain pages that will be terminated or moved to a new folder path so we need custom 301 redirects built for these. However, we have a huge database of pages that will NOT be changing folder paths and it's way too many to write custom 301's for. One idea was to use domain forwarding or a wild card redirect so that all the pages would be redirected to their same folder path on the new URL. The problem this creates though is that we would then need to build the custom 301s for content that is moving to a new folder path, hence creating 2 redirects on these pages (one for the domain forwarding, and then a second for the custom 301 pointing to a new folder). Any ideas on a better solution to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
How does educational organization schema interact with Google's knowledge graph?
Hi there! I was just wondering if the granular options of the Organization schema, like Educational Organization (http://schema.org/EducationalOrganization) and CollegeOrUniversity (http://schema.org/CollegeOrUniversity) schema work the same when it comes to pulling data into the knowledge graph. I've typically always used the Organization schema for customers but was wondering if there are any drawbacks for going deep into the hierarchy of schema. Cheers 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Corbec8880 -
I'm in Canada and building a website for the US...approach?
Hi there - we already have a Canadian website for the company and we're building one for our American branch. From an SEO perspective what is the best approach here? We have already purchased a .com domain and the company is branded a little different in the US than in Canada. How do I tell Google that this site is American and should be served primarily to the American audience? Should I be tagging duplicate content with rel=canonical (for similar pages like the About us section for instance) or does that matter here? Hope you guys can help. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MelcorDev0 -
A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
I'm trying to go through my site and add microdata with the help of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. I have a few questions that I have not been able to find an answer for. Here is the URL I am referring to: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-chicago My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant? It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it? How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page? If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out? I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body? Any other tips would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa0 -
Need help on SEO for my site. Can't figure out what is wrong.
My site, findyogi.com, isn't ranking well in google SERPs. For some good content and matching keyword, my pages are ranking 200+ whereas other sites that have similar or lower authority are ranking in top 10. I must be doing something fundamentally wrong but can't seem to figure out what. I am not looking at ranking 1 on google right now but my pages don't appear even on page 2-4. Sample Keyword- "Samsung galaxy s4 price in india" . Matching page - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/samsung/samsung-galaxy-s4-b94a37/price Please help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | namansr0 -
Killing 404 errors on our site in Google's index
Having moved a site across to Magento, obviously re-directs were a large part of that, ensuring all the old products and categories linked up correctly with the new site structure. However, we came up against an issue where we needed to add, delete, then re-add products. This, coupled with a misunderstanding of the csv upload processing, meant that although the old urls redirected, some of the new Magento urls changed and then didn't redirect: For Example: mysite/product would get deleted re-added and become: mysite/product-1324 We now know what we did wrong to ensure it doesn't continue to happen if we weret o delete and re-add a product, but Google contains all these old URLs in its index which has caused people to search for products on Google, click through, then land on the 404 page - far from ideal. We kind of assumed, with continual updating of sitemaps and time, that Google would realise and update the URL accordingly. But this hasn't happened - we are still getting plenty of 404 errors on certain product searches (These aren't appearing in SEOmoz, there are no links to the old URL on the site, only Google, as the index contains the old URL). Aside from going through and finding the products affected (no easy task), and setting up redirects for each one, is there any way we can tell Google 'These URLs are no longer a thing, forget them and move on, let's make a fresh start and Happy New Year'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
My website hasn't been cached for over a month. Can anyone tell me why?
I have been working on an eCommerce site www.fuchia.co.uk. I have asked an earlier question about how to get it working and ranking and I took on board what people said (such as optimising product pages etc...) and I think i'm getting there. The problem I have now is that Google hasn't indexed my site in over a month and the homepage cache is 404'ing when I check it on Google. At the moment there is a problem with the site being live for both WWW and non-WWW versions, i have told google in Webmaster what preferred domain to use and will also be getting developers to do 301 to the preferred domain. Would this be the problem stopping Google properly indexing me? also I'm only having around 30 pages of 137 indexed from the last crawl. Can anyone tell me or suggest why my site hasn't been indexed in such a long time? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAndy0 -
404'd pages still in index
I recently launched a site and shortly after performed a URL rewrite (not the greatest idea, i know). The developer 404'd the old pages instead of a permanent 301 redirect. This caused a mess in the index. I have tried to use Google's removal tool to remove these URL's from the index. These pages were being removed but now I am finding them in the index as just URL's to the 404'd page (i.e. no title tag or meta description). Should I wait this out or now go back and 301 redirect the old URL's (that are 404'd now) to the new URL's? I am sure this is the reason for my lack of ranking as the rest of my site is pretty well optimized and I have some quality links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750