Why, oh why does Google hate us?
-
My URL is:
www.drupalgeeks.orgI have tried my very best to cover all the usual SEO items.... But nothing... We are a legitimate company offering a legitimate service. Ideally we would come up in the results for:
"Drupal Developers"
"Drupal Development" and
"Drupal Designers"Yet, we cannot break the top 50 for any of these....
We have:
Optimized Meta Tags
Written Quality Content
Maintained a Social Presence in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, and Google Plus
Blogged with some consistency
Guest Blogged
Canonicalization
And dozens of other thingsAnd we are all around nice people and a good company....... Why oh why?
Can anyone take a look and see if there is something blatantly obvious I am missing?
Are we using "drupal" too much??
Thank you in advanced for any assistance.
Candice
-
Hopefully. You may find that you have to either get some of those overoptimized links removed, nofollowed or disavowed in order to see improvement. It's a tough call though because you have the potential to do more harm than good.
-
Thanks Marie for the thoughtful response! We will keep on pushing! It's is difficult to build links in high volumes, but hopefully our content will help us.
-
Hi Kevin,
It looks like the answer that I was referencing has been removed, but I'll give you my thoughts on whether or not PageRank affects ranking. The answer that got removed was implying that if you can get a higher PageRank then you will rank higher, but this is not always the case. If you do a search for almost any query, especially localized queries you can see sites that are ranking well that have a PR of 0 or 1.
Also, saying "Get a higher PR" is like saying, "Weigh less" without giving instructions on how to do that. The way you would get a higher PR is by getting good quality links to your site. So, the answer would be to get good links and as a result, your PR would be likely to increase. It is the acquisition of links that helps, not the PR.
-
Isn't it generally accepted that pagerank still affects rankings (I did notice you used really)?
Matt Cutts “PageRank while important, it`s **one of the most important **out of 200 signals that we have, is still one of only 200 signals that we use in ranking.”
-
Hi Candice,
Your problem may lie in overoptimized backlinks. Your top anchors are "drupal developer" and "drupal development". This type of link building worked well in the past, but these days can get you penalized. Without having a deep look it's hard to say whether you've been penalized or whether Google is just no longer giving you credit for those links.
Links are important for ranking and these days the links that count are ones that are naturally earned which are unfortunately hard to get.
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
-
Reviews not pulling through to Google My Business page
OK, a local SEO question! We are working with a plumbing company. A search for (Google UK) shows the knowledge panel with 20+ reviews. This is good! However, if you search for "plumbers norwich" and look at the map, thecompany is on the third page and has no reviews. I've logged into Google My Business, and it says the profile is not up to date and only 70% complete with no reviews. This is odd, as there was a fully complete profile recently. Any ideas on how best to reconcile the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ad-Rank1 -
Penalty from Google due to spam that was not our doing
Hi, My company has enjoyed pretty good rankings for our main keywords in Google for the past 13+ years we have been in business. We have always been very white-hat about our SEO -- always erring on the side of not doing anything rather than risking a penalty. Well, last Thursday, we received the dreaded Google penalty due to a pattern of unnatural links. The hit is devastating - we are not even in the top 50 for our own company name anymore. Through research, we believe we have found the culprit -- and it has nothing to do with any of our own actions. We operate a discussion forum, and there was a link to one of the threads that was being used as the target for a lot of link spam -- Chinese blog comments, etc. We had nothing to do with this, but obviously someone had an agenda and was working on spamming to this page. Who knows - it may have even been the company that was being discussed negatively in the thread, attempting to have us blocked. We discovered it the same day we received the penalty notice, and issued a reconsideration request, detailing what we believe we found. So far, we haven't disavowed any of the links, but I am thinking we should. We have asked Google if they're able to just turn off any link juice for that one page, especially since we don't know who is doing this spamming, and whether they will continue. Has anyone experienced something similar? How does one prevent themselves from receiving a penalty that they had nothing to do with? What is there to keep any competitor from launching a spammy link-building campaign to get their competitor removed from Google? Is there anything we can do to resolve this? Thanks for any and all thoughts...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kylie_rw0 -
Keyword Strategy for outside of the US
I posted a similar question a while go, so I will attempt to articulate my question a little better.... I am the owner of an E-Commerce site that operates in Canada. I have been brainstorming ways to find opportunities and niches for Canadian online shoppers in an industry that is dominated by corporate American E-commerce sites. I saw another Canadian e-commerce site try to combat this issue, and I wanted to get some advice on whether this strategy is sound. Here is an example. Well.ca is a large e-commerce site in Canada. They take a competitive product like a "Tide Lundry Detergent" and include local and intent terms in their page titles. For example "Buy TideLaundry Detergent from Canada at Well.ca - Free Shipping". If a Canadian shopper searches for "Tide Laundry Detergent", they are going to find results for amazon.com, ebay.com, Tide's website, etc.. I would imagine that Canadian shoppers would start to add terms such as Canada, Buy, or online to try to find Canadian sellers. If that is the case, then Well.ca ranks and arguably serves the customer with those intentions much better. I guess my question is, if the dominant search terms in my industry are polluted with irrelevant or American companies (even in Canada), is this form of localization a good idea? The terms don't seem to be searched much according to any keyword research tool I've used, but I know that I add "canada" to my search terms in order to find Canadian results? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Google stripping down Page Titles
When viewing pages indexed by Google, I've noticed the Page Titles have be down stripped as follows: Actual Page Title: CITY Keyword - STATE keyword
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SpadaMan
Google Indexed Page Title: 1 - Domain.com None of the keywords in the actual PAGE TITLE are present; all words have been replaced with a random digit -domain.com. We launched a new version of the site several months back.. Any Idea on what can be causing this?0 -
How to know if your site has been penalized by Google
Hello, One of my clients ranking drop dramatically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ogdcorp
We believe it was due to an upgrade to his site. While the site was live www.clientdomain.com
Work was being done on the new site www.clientdomain.com/new (1 month) I think google crawled the /new link and took as a content duplication since both sites had the same content. Is there a MOZ tool to see if a site has been penalized or any online tool? Thanks0 -
Google Hummingbird Update - Any Changes ?
Google has update with the new alogrithm and did you see any effects and as they are not revelaing the techinicaly how they work ? What's your opinion ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Esaky0 -
Google Penguin Penalty
Howdy Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
We have been battling our way the Google penguin penalty and have just received our 3 knocked back reconsideration request. I posted a find on here the other day about a simple change of page title made our site jump back up... In the meantime I've built 1 hight quality link back to our site and we have moved again from #50 to #46.Have Google ever removed a penalty without telling you?Should we ask for another reconsideration request?Thanks,
Scott0 -
Is there a way to contact Google besides the google product forum?
Our traffic from google has dropped more than 35% and continues to fall. We have been on this forum and google's webmaster forum trying to get help. We received great advice, have waited months, but instead of our traffic improving, it has worsened. We are being penalized by google for many keywords such as trophies, trophies and awards and countless others - we were on page one previously. We filed two reconsideration requests and were told both times that there were no manual penalties. Some of our pages continue to rank well, so it is not across the board (but all of our listings went down a bit). We have made countless changes (please see below). Our busy season was from March to May and we got clobbered. Google, as most people know, is a monopoly when it comes to traffic, so we are getting killed. At first we thought it was Penquin, but it looks like we started getting killed late last year. Lots of unusual things happened - we had a large spike in traffic for two days, then lost our branded keywords, then our main keywords. Our branded keywords came back pretty quickly, but nothing else did. We have received wonderful advice and made most of the changes. We are a very reputable company and have a feeling we are being penalized for something other than spamming. For example, we have a mobile site we added late last year and a wholesale system was added around the same time. Since the date does not coincide with Penquin, we think there is some major technical driver, but have no idea what to do at this point. The webmasters have all been helpful, but nothing is working. We are trying to find out what one does in a situation as we are trying to avoid closing our business. Thank you! Changes Made: 1. We had many crawl errors so we reduced them significantly 2. We had introduced a mobile website in January which we
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
thought may have been the cause (splitting traffic, duplicate content, etc.),
so we had our mobile provider add the site to their robots.txt file. 3. We were told by a webmaster that their were too many
links from our search provider, so we have them put the search pages in a
robots.txt file. 4. We were told that we had too much duplicate content. This was / is true, as we have hundred of legitate products that are similar:
example trophies and certificates that are virtually the same but are
for different sports or have different colors and sizes. Still, we added more content and added no index tags to many products. We compared our % of dups to competitors and it is far less. 5. At the recommendation of another webmaster, we changed
many pages that might have been splitting traffic. 6. Another webmaster told us that too many people were
linking into our site with the same text, namely Trophy Central and that it
might have appeared we were trying to game the system somehow. We have never bought links and don't even have a webmaster although over the last 10 years have worked with programmers and seo companies (but we don't think any have done anything unusual). 7. At the suggestion of another webmaster, we have tried to
improve our link profile. For example,
we found Yahoo was not linking to our url. 8. We were told to setup a 404 page, so we did 9. We were told to ensure that all of the similar domains
were pointing to www.trophycentral.com/ so we setup redirects 10. We were told that a site that we have linking to us from too many places so we reduced it to 1. Our key pages have A rankings from SEOMOZ for the selected keywords. We have made countless other changes recommended by experts
but have seen no improvements (actually got worse). I am the
president of the company and have made most of the above recent changes myself. Our website is trophycentral.com0