What is wrong with my site?
-
I could use suggestions/input.
My site is consistently being beaten by doorway pages with zero to no content. In fact, on the keyword "lawrenceville plumber" I am being beaten by a KID with a blank wordpress installation.
I really need help determining what my issues are and what I can do to help. According to all of the graders, ranks, etc my site is great. I have written tons of unique content, have added a blog unique articles and self-helps.
Please help!
My site is www.akinsplumbing.net.
Thanks!
-
Wouldn't worry too much about keyword density. It was possibly a factor in the early age of search engines. But today there's no correlation.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-myths-that-scare-seos-but-shouldnt-whiteboard-friday
-
Hi Chuck,
Sorry to hear you're having ranking problems. If your site has been around for awhile, it's usually it's a combination of several factors that come into play.
Short of doing a full site audit, I did notice that a lot of your anchor text seems highly optimized:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?page=1&site=www.akinsplumbing.net%2F&sort=domains_linking_page&source=phrase&target=domainAnd a lot of your links come from the same few sites, including the footer of the aforementioned tattoo parlor. These links are generally found site-wide, in the footer, such as on this page:http://www.dec-international.com/products.html
Also, OSE shows a lot of links from related sites like this: http://bestathensplumber.com/contact-us/ (although it looks like the link has bee recently removed). These are apparently sites owned by your company.
The takeaway is Google will most likely devalue these links, and may even penalize you for not only over-optimization, but for too many inter-linking sites (link-network) If you own multiple sites, it's okay to interlink them a little bit, but in a way that's natural and included in your editorial content.
My best advice would be to try to trim some of these links, and work to replace them with hard-fought editorial links.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Okay, I got my keyword density to 3% and 3.5%. That's about the best I can do. Having plumbing in your company name makes it hard, but I figured out a work around.
Any other suggestions guys? I really appreciate the help. This has hurt us pretty bad!
-
I do my business' SEO. I own a bankruptcy firm, so we're in the same boat SEO wise. I've found that content really helps you move up the rankings. I have a competitor with thousands of inbound links who used to beat the hell out of me, but he never added content.
I blog regularly. It's tough to get in the habit. I try to write three 500 word posts at a time and then schedule them to publish every other day. It helps you Google that you have a fresh site. It also helps you hit the long tail searches like "hair clog in drain."
Also, I second Quilbur. Having two closely related sites can hurt you.
-
The ranking problem is more recent. I will adjust the density to closer to 2% . I was told to stay around 2-6%, but you aren't the first person to advise that. The Plumbing keyword is difficult because it's in our company name.
-
Hi Chuck,
Along with what Johannes mentioned, I noticed that you have two websites.
- Akins Plumbing
- Akins Plumbing and Septic
While these sites are different, the content is very similar and so, you my be beating yourself up with the two. Also, I noticed you have many many links to a tattoo parlor, that may not be helping much either.
A few years ago, I had two sites in a situation such as yours. I got rid of one to save the other. Worked out great! Thats just my two cents.
Best of luck
-
Hello chuckakins,
I noticed that the keyword density for your homepage is a little bit too high.
- plumbing has 6.79 %
- atlanta has 6.04 %
- plumber has 4.53 %
To avoid to be filter for over optimization (especially since Penguin), try to bring the keyword density to a natural level. Around 2 % should be good.
Even though you seem to have a good amount of incoming links and Google in honoring that with a PageRank of 3, a lot of incoming links have the keywords plumbing, atlanta and plumber in their anchor text (-> Opensiteexplorer). To Google that might not seem like the links are build naturally.
Did you always have ranking problems or is that something more recent?
Hope this helps you a little bit.
Johannes
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
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Google favoring old site over new site...
Hi, I started a new site for a client: www.berenjifamilylaw.com. His old site: www.bestfamilylawattorney.com was too loaded up with bad links. Here's the weird part: when you Google: "Los Angeles divorce lawyer" you see the old site come up on the 21st page, but Google doesn't even show the new site (even though it is indexed). It's been about 2 weeks now and no change. Has anyone experienced something like this? If so, what did you do (if anything). Also, I did NOT do a 301 redirect from old to new b/c of spammy links. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Link juice site structure?
If we have a top nav with contact us, about us, delivery, FAQ, Gallery, how to order ect but none of these we want to rank and then we have the usual left hand nav.are we wasting juice with the top nav and would we be better either removing it and putting them further down the page or consolidating them and adding an extra products tab so the product pages are first.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Seo flash site
Hey. Would hear whether it is possible to SEO a website which is flash site cms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agger0 -
Magneto site with many pages
just finsihed scan to a magento site. off course I am getting thousand of pages that are dynamic. search pages and other. checking with site command on Google I see 154,000 results which pages it is recommended to block? some people are talking about blocking the search pages and some actually talking about allowing them? any answer on this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Acquisition of a new site in the same field.
Hello, I work with SEO for a company that just bought another in the same field. What is better to do? Just a 301 domain? Make 301 per page for a related page (more than 10,000 URLs, i'am afraid that this may be interpreted as blackhat ) or make crossdomain canonical tag urls related to (I believe this is not good, because the pages are not fully equal). thank's
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | j0a0vargas0 -
Site dancing
Hi guys I have a site which is dancing. I mean one day is on position 20 , if I put more backlinks is falling, after rising again,, I dont know what is going on. The site is 2 years old, pr 2, authority 35. Why this is happening? Usually when he appears again is ranking higher, but today he disappear totally from rankings. Maybe return tomorrow? But anyway why is dancing? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Indexing an e-commerce site
Hi all, My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category. The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress. In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress? More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site. I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jenga110