Original content, widely quoted - yet ignored by Google
-
Our website is https://greatfire.org. We are a non-profit working to bring transparency to online censorship in China. By helping us resolve this problem you are helping us in the cause of internet freedom.
If you search for "great firewall" or "great firewall of china", would you be interested in finding a database of what websites and searches are blocked by this Great Firewall of China? We have been running a non-profit project with this objective for almost a year and in so doing have created the biggest and most updated database of online censorship in China. Yet, to this date, you cannot find it in Google by searching for any relevant keywords.
A similar website, www.greatfirewallofchina.org, is listed as #3 when searching for "great firewall". Our website provides a more accurate testing tool, as well as historic data. Regardless of whether our service is better, we believe we should at least be included in the top 10.
We have been testing out an Adwords campaign to see whether our website is of interest to users using these keywords. For example, users searching for "great firewall of china" end up browsing on average 2.62 pages and spending 03:18 minutes on the website. This suggests to us that our website is of interest to users searching for these keywords.
Do you have any idea what the problem could be that is grave enough to not even include us in the top 100 for these keywords?
We have recently posted this same question on the Google Webmaster Central but did not get a satisfactory answer: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5c14a7e16c07cbb7&hl=en&fid=5c14a7e16c07cbb70004b5f1d985e70e
-
Thanks very much for your reply Jerod!
Google Webmaster Tools is set up and working. Some info:
-
No detected malware
-
1 crawl error (I think this must have been temporary. Only reported once, and this url is not in the robots.txt now):
- http://greatfire.org/url/190838
- URL restricted by robots.txt
- Dec 10, 2011
-
Pages crawled per day, average: 1102
-
Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds), average: 2116
The robots.txt is mostly the standard one provided by Drupal. We've added "Disallow: /node/" because all interesting urls should have a more interesting alias than that. We'll look more into whether this can be the cause.
Anything else that you notice?
-
-
Hi, GreatFire-
We had a very similar problem with one of the sites we manage at http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/. The website is pretty good, the domain has dozens of super high-quality backlinks (including EDU and GOV links), but The Googles were being a real pain and not displaying the website in a SERP no matter what we did.
Ultimately, we think we found the solution in robots.txt. The entire site had been disallowed for quite a long time (at the client's request) while it was being built and updated. After we modified the robots.txt file, made sure Webmaster tools was up and running, pinged the site several times, etc. it was still being blocked in the SERPs. After two months or more of researching, trying fixes, and working on the issue, the site finally started being displayed. The only thing we can figure is that Google was "angry" (for all intents and purposes) at us for leaving the site blocked for so long.
No one at Google would come out and tell us that this was the case or even that it was a possibility. It's just our best guess at what happened.
I can see that greatwall.org also has a rather substantial robots.txt file in place. It looks like everything is in order in that file but it might still be causing some troubles.
Is Webmaster tools set up? Is the site being scanned and indexed properly?
You can read up on our conversation with SEOmoz users here if you're interested: http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-refuses-to-index-our-domain-any-suggestions
Good luck with this. I know how frustrating it can be!
Jerod
-
Hi GreatFire,
With regard to the homepage content - you really don't have much there for the search engines to get their teeth into. I would work on adding a few paragraphs of text explaining what your service does and what benefits it provides to your users.
I disagree that your blog should be viewed as only an extra to your website. It can be a great way to increase your keyword referral traffic, engage with your audience and get picked up by other sites.
Just because Wikipedia have written about your topic already doesn't mean you should't cover the subject in more detail - otherwise no one would have anything to write about!
As you have the knowledge on the subject, involved with it everyday, and have a website dedicated to it - you are the perfect candidate to start producing better content and become the 'hub' for all things related to the how China uses the internet.
Cheers
Andrew
-
Hi Andrew,
Thank you very much for your response. The two main differences you point out are very useful for us. We will keep working on links and social mentions.
One thing I am puzzled about though is the labeling of the site as "not having a lot of content". I feel this is misunderstanding the purpose of the website. The blog is only an extra. What we provide is a means to test whether any url is blocked or not in China, as well as download speed. For each url in our database, we provide a historic, calendar-view to help identify when a website was blocked or unblocked in the past.
So our website first and foremost offers a tool and a lot of non-text data. To me, expanding on the text content, while I understand the reasoning, sounds like recommending Google to place a long description of what a search engine is on their front page.
If you want to read the history of the Great Firewall of China, you can do it on Wikipedia. I don't see why we should explain it, when they do it better. On the other hand, if you want to know if website X is blocked or not in China, Wikipedia is not practical since it's only manually updated. Our data offers the latest status at all times.
Do you see what I mean? It would be great to hear what you think about this.
-
Hi GreatFire,
Your competitor has a much stronger site in the following two main areas:
- More backlinks (resulting in a higher PR)
- More social mentions
Focus on building more backlinks by researching your competitors domain with Open Site Explorer and MajesticSEO. Keep up your activity in your social circles, and also get going with Google+ if you haven't already.
You should also fix your title tag to include the target keyword at the start - not at the end. So it would read something like 'Great firewall of china - bringing transparency from greatfire.org'
Looking through your site you don't appear to have that much content (this was also mentioned in your Google Support thread) so I would focus on building out the content on the homepage and also further developing your blog. For example your 'Wukan Blocked only on Weibo' blog post is not really long enough to generate you much referral traffic. Larger authority articles of 1000+ words plus with richer content (link references, pictures, Google+ author/social connections) etc will help you far more.
Conduct the relevant keyword research for your blog posts in the same way you did with your root domain. This will keep your website niche focused and generating lots of similar 'china firewall' terms.
Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Andrew
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
-
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
Syntax: 'canonical' vs "canonical" (Apostrophes or Quotes) does it matter?
I have been working on a site and through all the tools (Screaming Frog & Moz Bar) I've used it recognizes the canonical, but does Google? This is the only site I've worked on that has apostrophes. rel='canonical' href='https://www.example.com'/> It's apostrophes vs quotes. Could this error in syntax be causing the canonical not to be recognized? rel="canonical"href="https://www.example.com"/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ccox10 -
Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently?
Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently? Same for an occasional capitalized FREE in meta description. Anybody had experience with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Scraped content ranking above the original source content in Google.
I need insights on how “scraped” content (exact copy-pasted version) rank above the original content in Google. 4 original, in-depth articles published by my client (an online publisher) are republished by another company (which happens to be briefly mentioned in all four of those articles). We reckon the articles were re-published at least a day or two after the original articles were published (exact gap is not known). We find that all four of the “copied” articles rank at the top of Google search results whereas the original content i.e. my client website does not show up in the even in the top 50 or 60 results. We have looked at numerous factors such as Domain authority, Page authority, in-bound links to both the original source as well as the URLs of the copied pages, social metrics etc. All of the metrics, as shown by tools like Moz, are better for the source website than for the re-publisher. We have also compared results in different geographies to see if any geographical bias was affecting results, reason being our client’s website is hosted in the UK and the ‘re-publisher’ is from another country--- but we found the same results. We are also not aware of any manual actions taken against our client website (at least based on messages on Search Console). Any other factors that can explain this serious anomaly--- which seems to be a disincentive for somebody creating highly relevant original content. We recognize that our client has the option to submit a ‘Scraper Content’ form to Google--- but we are less keen to go down that route and more keen to understand why this problem could arise in the first place. Please suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ontarget-media0 -
Building "keyword" backlinks
Looking for some opinions here please. Been involved in seo for a couple of years mainly working on my websites and picking up the odd client here and there through word of mouth. I must admit that up until a few months back I was guilty of using some grey methods of link building - linkvana, unique article wizard and the such. While no penalties were handed out to my domains and some decent rankings gained, I got tired of always being on the lookout for what the next Google update will do to my results and which networks were being hit, and so I moved a lot more into the 'proper' way of seoing. These days my primary sources for backlinks are much more respectable... myblogguest bloggerlinkup postjoint Guest Blog Finder http://ultramarketer.com/guest-blogger-finder/ - not sure where i came across this resource but it's very handy I use these sources alongside industry only directories and general word of mouth. Ironically I have found that doing the word by hand not only leads to results I can happyily show people (content wise) but also it's much quicker and cheaper. The increased authority of the sites means far fewer links are needed. The one area I still am having a little issue with is that of building keyword based backlinks. I now find it fairly easy to get my content on a reasonable quality site - DA to 40 and above, however the vast majority of these sites will allow the backlink only as the company name or as a generic read more type thing. This is fine and it is improving my website performance and authority. The trouble I am finding is that while i am ranking for the title tag and some keywords in the page, I am struggling to get backlinks for other keywords. In an ideal world every page on the site would be optimised for a different keyword and you could then just the site name as anchor text to build the authority of that page and make it rank for it's content, but what about when you (or the client) wants to rank the home for a number of different keywords, some not featured on the page. The keywords are too similar to go to the trouble of making unique pages for, and that would also add no value to the site. My question really then, after a very long winded way of getting there, is are others finding it much more difficult to gain keyword based backlinks these days? The great thing about the grey seo tools, as mentioned above, is that it was super easy to get the backlinks with whatever anchor text you wanted - even if you needed hundreds of the thing to compensate for the low value of each!! Thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
What is a "good" dwell time?
I know there isn't any official documentation from Google about exact number of seconds a user should spend on a site, but does anyone have any case studies that looks at what might be a good "dwell time" to shoot for? We're looking on integrating an exact time on site into or Google Analytics metrics to count as a 'non-bounce'--so, for example, if a user spends 45 seconds on an article, then, we wouldn't count it as a bounce, since the reader likely read through all the content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Mobile Site - Same Content, Same subdomain, Different URL - Duplicate Content?
I'm trying to determine the best way to handle my mobile commerce site. I have a desktop version and a mobile version using a 3rd party product called CS-Cart. Let's say I have a product page. The URLs are... mobile:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon
store.domain.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog#products.view&product_id=857 desktop:
store.domain.com/two-toned-tee.html I've been trying to get information regarding how to handle mobile sites with different URLs in regards to duplicate content. However, most of these results have the assumption that the different URL means m.domain.com rather than the same subdomain with a different address. I am leaning towards using a canonical URL, if possible, on the mobile store pages. I see quite a few suggesting to not do this, but again, I believe it's because they assume we are just talking about m.domain.com vs www.domain.com. Any additional thoughts on this would be great!0