Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Website stuck on the second page
-
Hi there
Can you please help me. I did some link building and worked with website last couple of months and rank got better but all keywords are on the second page, some of them are 11th and 12th.
Is there anything I did wrong and google dont allow the website on the first page? Or should I just go on.
It just looks strange keywords are on the second page for 2 weeks and not going to the first page for any single day. The website is quite old, around 10 years.
Anyone knows what it is or where I can read about it?
-
How's your internal linking structure?
Do a site: domain.com check to see how Google perceives your internal linking. Are your relevant pages on the first page of your site search? If not, you may have an internal linking problem.
To check this I used a web based program to find all the outbound internal links of each page on my website (only 200 pages). I then transferred this data into Excel where I sorted it by page. From here I was able to see that my most important pages had 20 less links than the unimportant pages in front of it. I then went through my website adding additional links to my important pages, using the same keywords I was trying to rank them for, until they had the most internal links pointing at them.
Internal linking is typically a problem with websites that didn't plan ahead for SEO.
-
You must look at ranking in the SERP's as a popularity contest, so-to-speak. Backlinks by way of websites and social mediums are votes and can/will determine your placement in the search results.
Your chosen keywords/phrases might be extremely competitive, as well. When starting out with a site, it's best to select some niche, lower volume keywords, which are often more long-tail than the aggresive, highly-competitive 1-3 word keyphrases. Trust me, going for the gusto right off the bat will only leave you more and more frustrated as the years go on. You can always adjust your keywords down the road once you've established a good roll of backlinks and visitors to continue being more competitive.
And as I mentioned in an earlier post today, don't just focus on Google. There are other search engines out there as well, and you'd be making a large mistake in focusing solely on Google for SERP's as Bing/Yahoo holds a decent market share, too.
Keep trucking. SEO is an art-form. It's not something just anybody can do on a whim and expect to get to #1 overnight. It might be wise to invest in an SEO team to help get you pointed in the right direction.
- Marc
-
Hi Albere
It sounds like you've done some good work to progress as far as you have. I'd suggest to keep going and not give up, if what you've been doing has worked then keep doing more of it.
I've seen on many an occasion that it does take time and perseverance to jump from the second page to the first.
Try performing a competitor link analysis if you haven't already, look for any linking opportunities. See if you can improve the anchor text of any existing inbound links that you have.
Check your on-page and on-site attributes with the SEOmoz toolset. Ensure those keywords that you are targeting and included in your Meta Title, Description, H1 tag and throughout your page content (without over-doing it, everything in moderation).
Have a read of "A New Way of Looking at Ranking Factors" and check out the periodic table of ranking factors within it.
Keep producing fresh, relevant, interesting valuable content and share it socially across the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Do some online PR and share your content, this helps with acquiring new natural links.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
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
-
If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Google indexed wrong pages of my website.
When I google site:www.ayurjeewan.com, after 8 pages, google shows Slider and shop pages. Which I don't want to be indexed. How can I get rid of these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
I have a large travel site that has over 140,000 pages. The problem I have is that the majority of pages are filled with dupe content. When Panda came in, our rankings were obliterated, so I am trying to isolate the unique content on the site and go forward with that. The problem is, the site has been going for over 10 years, with every man and his dog copying content from it. It seems that our travel guides have been largely left untouched and are the only unique content that I can find. We have 1000 travel guides in total. My first question is, would reducing 140,000 pages to just 1,000 ruin the site's authority in any way? The site does use internal linking within these pages, so culling them will remove thousands of internal links throughout the site. Also, am I right in saying that the link juice should now move to the more important pages with unique content, if redirects are set up correctly? And finally, how would you go about redirecting all theses pages? I will be culling a huge amount of hotel pages, would you consider redirecting all of these to the generic hotels page of the site? Thanks for your time, I know this is quite a long one, Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0