Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google
-
We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings.
When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now.
The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored.
If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.
-
Not a problem, happy to help
-
Thanks so much Mike! Got that export and appreciate you helping us here!
-
Yup, all looks good now - the page has index, follow
I'm going to send you a private message here on Moz with a Screaming Frog crawl export, which I carried out just to check there were no instances of 'noindex' left on any pages... All looks fine from the noindex standpoint.
-
Sorry for the late reply, checking now for you
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your help!!
Could you check now to ensure it is OK? A change was made and I believe the source code no longer contains the line:
However, when I look to create a sitemap through a sitemap generator to add to Webmaster Tools, I am still unable to do so, which makes me think that perhaps the problem has not been resolved.
Your further assistance here would be most appreciated.
-
Hi Gavo.
I think I've spotted your issue!
Looking at https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/robots.txt I can see that you're all good now, HOWEVER...
view-source:https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/ Check your source code and you'll notice an inline noindex tag!:
Also, checking another page: view-source:https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/services/ I get the same meta tag.
This makes me think it's sitewide... So, as you;re running WordPress:
- In wp-admin, go to Settings > Reading, then untick the box that discourages search engines.
Once you've done that, the following optional steps won't hurt and may speed things up
- Submit a new sitemap
- Use the fetch & render, as Kevin recommends
- Personally, and this is entirely conjecture on my part, I'd use Google's page speed & mobile friendly testing tools, as I find that 'seems' to help (I've not bothered verifying by running tests & checking the access log files to bot activity etc - as it only takes a few seconds to do so not worth the time. Maybe I'll check out of curiosity at some point though!)
** As there's been a couple of errors with indexing, once you've done this change, I'd recommend running a full site crawl (Moz's tools or Screaming Frog is cool too) and check for any other noindex pages!**
EDIT: In case you don't have Screaming Frog, let me know when you've updated the WordPress setting and I'll run a crawl for you and ping you a list of any pages that are still showing noindex tags, if any exist
-
Have you submitted your pages for "Fetching" through Webmaster Tools? Check when you were last crawled by Google, make some content upgrades and re-submit. That always gets us indexed within 48 hrs.
I use the Moz Page Optimization tool as a guide to edit our product pages, that helps immensely.
KJr
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
-
How do i beat my spammy competitors? they are ranking on page 1 of google!
my competitor is ranking on page 1 of google. he has 3.4 million backlinks and 1400 refering domains. he has aquired these backlinks from various websites, but he doesnot have links from his niche . how do i beat my competition with less backlinks because if i follo his technique, it would a takea lot of time and people to build backlinks one of my strategy is to get .edu links second strategy is to have 6000 word content and rank for really low competition keywords related to my website.( my competitors website has 1500 words content!) any other strategy you can suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | calvinkj0 -
Fetch as Google
I have odd scenario I don't know if anyone can help? I've done some serious speed optimisation on a website, amongst other things CDN and caching. However when I do a Search Console Fetch As Google It is still showing 1.7 seconds download time even though the cached content seems to be delivered in less than 200 ms. The site is using SSL which obviously creams off a bit of speed, but I still don't understand the huge discrepancy. Could it be that Google somehow is forcing the server to deliver fresh content despite settings to deliver cache? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
How does this company rank this page?
If you Google the keyword "used iPhone 5," the URL ranking #1 in the SERP is the following: http://buy.gazelle.com/buy-used-iphone-5/ This page has zero content on it and a button on it that takes you to a category page with the iPhone 5 pre selected. My question is **how does this page outrank the sites products pages? **I ran a backlink analysis and don't see any links pointing to that URL. Also, **how does this site deal with its duplicate content issues? **If you look at the following URLs, you'll see a bunch of duplicate content in the "Key Features" section below the fold. http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-at-t http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-sprint If you think about it, this site will have different product pages for each variations of cellphone carrier and cellphone storage capacity. So for an iPhone 5, they will have 15 pages! Any insight into this would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cody_West0 -
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers
Does anyone know how to appear with snippet that says something like: Jobs 1-10 of 80 in the beginning of the description on Google? e.g. like on: https://www.google.co.za/#q=pickers+and+packers Any markup that could be used to be listed like this. Why is some sites listed like this and some not. Why is the adzuna.co.za page listed with Results 1-10 while some other with Jobs 1-10 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | classifiedtech0 -
Homepage bombed from rankings
I'm working on a site that has historically had issues ranking the homepage. We cleaned up some on page issues and then it went into a high and low pattern - page 4 then page 12 etc (was static around page 9 before), settling at page 6. The link profile was not good and there were a high level of links that should have been no-follow as they were clearly looking paid for - we addressed this along with some other poor links. This effectively dropped ranking down to page 23, but not unexpected considering the very big drop in followed links. Meanwhile we have embarked on a fresh steady link building strategy with nice clean links, varied anchor text coming from varying DA domains, smattered with a few no-follow links - strongly focussing on being as natural as possible. At the Penguin update the homepage has totally disappeared. Frustratingly just after the update (same day) we removed a 301ed old domain from the profile. This was the old company URL which we discovered had a lot of spam linking associated with it. An oversight - there were other 301 domains that were removed some time ago which were totally unrelated to the main site and we were told all other domains were simply bought and redirected to stop hijacking - all but this were. Considering the work we have done would it be good assumption this domain 301 could be the underlying factor? So far organic traffic is steady, in fact a tad up. What would you guys do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
How can I improve my rankings in Google with help of seomoz
Hey guys, I have joined seomoz today and set up campaigns for my sites. I got reports about keyword rankings, errors, notices etc. But I am still confused about how to use seomoz in order to improve my rankings. My point is does seomoz provides any services for improving position in google or simply seomoz provides only reporting? These reports are good but my ultimate goal to join seomoz is to improve my rankings for my each website and each post. Please help. BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
Google Places Alternatives
Hello, I have been looking into Google places alternatives. Any suggestions? On a related note. I am based in the UK and looking to add a UK business to Bing Local but having read this thread ( - http://www.bing.com/community/maps/f/12264/t/653672.aspx -) I don't think it's possible. Anyone had any luck or experience? Cheers dj
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Suddenr Ranking Drop
Hello all . Im experiencing a sudden ranking drop for one of my websites . Keyword = Green Tea Search Engine = google.lk URL = www.eswaran.com/greenTea.html This page was at 7th on 1st page . Since coupe of weeks back its moving backwards . I didn't even do any link building for this page other than doing little changes to titles tags . What would be the reason for such a issue ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Osanda0