Australian search - ZERO visibility and stumped
-
Fair warning, this is going to be long, but necessary to explain the situation and what has been done. I will take ANY suggestions, even if I have tried them already.
We have a sister site in Australia, targeting Australian traffic. I have inherited what seems to be an incredible rat's nest. I've fixed over two dozen issues, but still haven't seemed to address the root cause.
NOTE: Core landing pages have weak keyword targeting. I don't expect much here until I fix this. The main issues I'm trying to resolve first are with the unusual US-based targeting, and the inability of the homepage to rank for anything.
The site is www[dot]castleford[dot]com[dot]au. Here's the rundown on what's going on:
Problems:
-
The site ranks for four times as many keywords in the US as it does in Australia.
-
The site ranks for a grand total of 5 keywords on the first page for AU keywords.
-
The homepage, while technically optimized on-page for "content marketing agency", and with content through MarketMuse, has historically ranked between 60-100, despite having a fairly strong DA with fairly weak competitors, based on AHREFs keyword difficulty, and Moz keyword difficulty. Oddly, the ranking has gone up to 5-7 for three day spurts over the past year.
-
Infrequent indexing of homepage (used to be every 2-3 weeks, I've gotten that down to 1 week).
Sequence of events:
-
November 2017 - they made some changes to their URLs - some on the blog and some on the top nav LPs. Redirects seem okay.
-
November 2017 - Substantial number of lost referring domains, not many seem to be quality.
-
January 2018 - total number of AU ranking keywords more than halved.
-
May/June 2018 - added a follow inbound link sitewide to an external site that they created. 20k inbound links with same anchor text to homepage. Site has a total of 24k inbound links.
-
July-Sep 2018 - total number of US ranking keywords halved
-
November 10 - I walked into this mess.
What's been done:
-
Reduced site load speed by over 150% (it was around 20 seconds).
-
Create sitemap (100 entry batching) and submit to GSC.
-
Improved MarketMuse score for the homepage.
-
Changed language from "en-US" to "en-AU"
-
Fetch and render - content is all crawlable and indexed properly.
-
Changed site architecture for top nav core landing pages to establish clear hierarchy.
-
All version of GSC created, non-www and www http, and non www https and www https
-
Site crawl - normal amount of 404s, nothing stands out as substantial.
-
http to https redirect okay.
-
Robots.txt updated and okay.
-
Checked GSC international targeting, confirmed AU.
-
No manual links penalty
I'm clearly stumped and could use some insights. Thanks to everyone in advance, if you can find time.
-
-
Well, seems that GSC contradicted this report. I don't think that's the issue.
-
Incredibly helpful. Thank you very much!
-
Hey Irene,
Here are a few things to take a look at:
1. Internal linking structure (see image attached via screaming frog) - the homepage is the 5th most internally linked page. Increasing that, should help with ranking it
2. Have you done local SEO work in Austrailia - claimed locations via a tool like https://www.yext.com
3. Build links from .com.au sites to help Google see where you are located.
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
-
Product photo links appear in search results
Since I'm new, I don't have any information. Product photo links appear in the search results. Is this a problem? because when you click on the link, it does not take you to a page, but to a blank page with only a photo. What should I do for this situation?
Technical SEO | | UgurKarabulut0 -
:8088 showing up on end of URL in natural Google search results
Hello All, Wondering if anyone has seen this before and might know what it is and how to get rid of it. As you can see on the attached image, when we search one of our popular keywords on google.com.au (doesn't happen on google.com btw) it has the following added on to the URL :8088 The link works fine, but it looks like an error message to anyone searching for us. The text for the listing comes from the home page meta info in the back-end of our site (Magento) but there isn't anything that looks out of place? Any ideas appreciated! Brian@CostumeBox.com.au 8088.JPG
Technical SEO | | costumebox0 -
How to remove my cdn sub domins on Google search result?
A few months ago I moved all my Wordpress images into a sub domain. After I purchased CDN service, I again moved that images to my root domain. I added User-agent: * Disallow: / to my CDN domain. But now, when I perform site search on the Google, I found that my CDN sub domains are indexed by the Google. I think this will make duplicate content issue. I already hit by the Panguin. How do I remove these search results on Google? Should I add my cdn domain to webmaster tools to request URL removal request? Problem is, If I use cdn.mydomain.com it shows my www.mydomain.com. My blog:- http://goo.gl/58Utt site search result:- http://goo.gl/ElNwc
Technical SEO | | Godad1 -
Should I nofollow search results pages
I have a customer site where you can search for products they sell url format is: domainname/search/keywords/ keywords being what the user has searched for. This means the number of pages can be limitless as the client has over 7500 products. or should I simply rel canonical the search page or simply no follow it?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
Increase Search Ranking for CEO
Hi guys My company CEO is concerned that when her name is googled pictures of a glamour model appear in the image results area. The glamour model shares a second name with our CEO and this is why the model's images are appearing. I have been asked to rectify this situation. My CEO has a linked in page and twitter account which are underused but no personal page on our company website. I was thinking of buying the url for the CEO's name and optimizing a small site for her name with bio etc and links to twitter, lined in etc. Would this be the best strategy? Thanks Gavin
Technical SEO | | gavinr0 -
How to prevent directory from being accessed by search engines?
Pretty much as the question says, is there any way to stop search engines from crawling a directory? I am working on a Wordpress installation for my site but don't want it to be listed in search engines until it's ready to be shown to the world. I know the simplest way is to password-protect the directory but I had some issues when I tried to implement that so I'd like to see if there's a way to do it without passwords. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0 -
Site Disappeared off of Search
A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking. I did some checking and can't see a problem. She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install. I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either. When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well. She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated. This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible. Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland
Technical SEO | | kdaly1000 -
How can i get the Authors photo to show in the Google search result?
I added the rel="author" tags to the blog posts last week and updated the authors page with a link to the Google+ account, but I have yet to see the authors photo surface in the Google Results. Example URL: http://spotlight.vitals.com/2011/10/dr-richelle-cooper-testifies-against-dr-conrad-murray-in-trial/ Can anyone identify what else needs to be done?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0