I'm invisible!
-
Dear all,
Earl 2015 i launched www.taobao.nl. Its a platform that shows the products of chinese marketplaces in our local language (auto translated) and provides the option to pay in our local currency & methods.
(i blocked all the auto translated product pages via http://www.taobao.nl/robots.txt)
All content (category pages, general pages etc) are unique and written by us.
In the past I've set up several websites and shops and i know it always takes time and effort to get a site to good positions, but i never experienced that my efforts did not pay of. Until now
The url is not blocked by Google and i see a (very) limited amount of traffic in WMT & Analytics, but the site is >page 30 on its most important keyword 'taobao'. This, while the competition on this keyword is low in my country (google.nl).
My main competitor (taobao.com.nl) seems to do worse on most SEO elements i was able to check, but they rank very well on 'taobao' and all related keywords.
What could be the reason of this very poor ranking and what should i really adjust / improve?
(besides backlinks: i'm working hard on that)Your input is deeply appreciated!!
Sander
-
Update: The bad links have been disavowed and WMT does not mention them anymore (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/external-links).
Also the no-follow tags have been removed.
Still working on high-quality links (:-)) and im trying to add content on a daily basis.
So far no results.
-
Thanks & bedankt
I'll disavow that link in WMT. Useful info!
-
most of your incomming links are from palminvest.nl That business went out of business. Out of business i a very public and bad way.
I would start with preventing that and getting you some good links.
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.taobao.nl
(leuk idee wel verder
-
I wouldn't take too much notice of that as it thinks my site is penalised or sandboxed - which it is neither It only looks at your homepage, it seems. Tested a couple of others and you definitely can't take anything away from it.
A penalty is difficult to spot if you haven't noticed a sudden drop in traffic. It takes quite a bit of digging.
-Andy
-
Hi All,
I just tried this checker: http://pixelgroove.com/serp/sandbox_checker/ and it seems there might be a penalty on the domain. Does anyone know how i can be sure this is the case and how i can ask Google to re-evaluate?
(there is no warning in Webmastertools, so i can't submit a request for re-evaluation via that way)
Regards,
Sander
-
Hi Andy,
"Have you performed an audit to see if there are issues lurking anywhere that could be causing problems?"
Is there any tool in specific that you can recommend?
Thanks!
Sander
-
Hi Mike,
The thing is that the original product content is Chinese. English would be readable for my Dutch audience, but Chinese is no option.
All content on category pages and general pages are normal unique content in my language.
The site is about 6 months old and the domain has no history.
Regards,
Sander
-
Johannes,
Auto translated content does not have a negative effect on your SEO, just on user readability. Using Google Translate across your entire website will make your website hard to read in those translated languages. Take a page that is translated, and translate it back to English. It is the quickest fix yes, but more work needs to be done with the translator toolkit.
Thanks,
- Mike
-
To be appearing so far down the SERP's, it sounds like a trust issue from Google.
How old is the site? Have you performed an audit to see if there are issues lurking anywhere that could be causing problems? As Hector said, you are no-following links from the menu, but based on what you said above, this is to prevent the fact this information is pulled in from other sites? I suspect problems might start from around here.
From Google, this might seem like a strange way of doing things. There is no harm in allowing the links ( I would not advise no-following these), but you can no-index pages that you worry might get caught up in duplication.
Let Google crawl your site and see the pages you don't want indexed.
-Andy
-
Hi Hector,
Because the product pages have auto-translated content. I understood this has a negative effect on a sites ranking.
Sander
-
Without looking too deep into the site, I see at hrefs.com you only have 10 referring domains, and only 7 of them are not "nofollow".You should focus on a linkbuilding strategy at first.
Also, minimize and join your .js files. You load way too much external files for a site like that.
Why do you block product pages? They are the most importante pages on an ecommerce site.
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
-
Crawl and Indexation Error - Googlebot can't/doesn't access specific folders on microsites
Hi, My first time posting here, I am just looking for some feedback on a indexation issue we have with a client and any feedback on possible next steps or items I may have overlooked. To give some background, our client operates a website for the core band and a also a number of microsites based on specific business units, so you have corewebsite.com along with bu1.corewebsite.com, bu2.corewebsite.com. The content structure isn't ideal, as each microsite follows a structure of bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx, bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx and so on. In addition to this each microsite has duplicate folders from the other microsites so bu1.corewebsite.com has indexable folders bu1.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx but also bu1.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx the same with bu2.corewebsite.com has bu2.corewebsite.com/bu2/home.aspx but also bu2.corewebsite.com/bu1/home.aspx. Therre are 5 different business units so you have this duplicate content scenario for all microsites. This situation is being addressed in the medium term development roadmap and will be rectified in the next iteration of the site but that is still a ways out. The issue
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImpericMedia
About 6 weeks ago we noticed a drop off in search rankings for two of our microsites (bu1.corewebsite.com and bu2.corewebsite.com) over a period of 2-3 weeks pretty much all our terms dropped out of the rankings and search visibility dropped to essentially 0. I can see that pages from the websites are still indexed but oddly it is the duplicate content pages so (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx or (bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4/home.aspx is still indexed, similiarly on the bu2.corewebsite microsite bu2.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx and bu4.corewebsite.com/bu3/home.aspx are indexed but no pages from the BU1 or BU2 content directories seem to be indexed under their own microsites. Logging into webmaster tools I can see there is a "Google couldn't crawl your site because we were unable to access your site's robots.txt file." This was a bit odd as there was no robots.txt in the root directory but I got some weird results when I checked the BU1/BU2 microsites in technicalseo.com robots text tool. Also due to the fact that there is a redirect from bu1.corewebsite.com/ to bu1.corewebsite.com/bu4.aspx I thought maybe there could be something there so consequently we removed the redirect and added a basic robots to the root directory for both microsites. After this we saw a small pickup in site visibility, a few terms pop into our Moz campaign rankings but drop out again pretty quickly. Also the error message in GSC persisted. Steps taken so far after that In Google Search Console, I confirmed there are no manual actions against the microsites. Confirmed there is no instances of noindex on any of the pages for BU1/BU2 A number of the main links from the root domain to microsite BU1/BU2 have a rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute but we looked into this and found it has no impact on indexation Looking into this issue we saw some people had similar issues when using Cloudflare but our client doesn't use this service Using a response redirect header tool checker, we noticed a timeout when trying to mimic googlebot accessing the site Following on from point 5 we got a hold of a week of server logs from the client and I can see Googlebot successfully pinging the site and not getting 500 response codes from the server...but couldn't see any instance of it trying to index microsite BU1/BU2 content So it seems to me that the issue could be something server side but I'm at a bit of a loss of next steps to take. Any advice at all is much appreciated!0 -
All urls seem to exist (no 404 errors) but they don't.
Hello I am doing a SEO auditing for a website which only has a few pages. I have no cPanel credentials, no FTP no Wordpress admin account, just watching it from the outside. The site works, the Moz crawler didn't report any problem, I can reach every page from the menu. The problem is that - except for the few actual pages - no matter what you type after the domain name, you always reach the home page and don't get any 404 error. I.E. Http://domain.com/oiuxyxyzbpoyob/ (there is no such a page, but i don't get 404 error, the home is displayed and the url in the browser remains Http://domain.com/oiubpoyob/, so it's not a 301 redirect). Http://domain.com/WhatEverYouType/ (same) Could this be an important SEO issue (i.e. resulting in infinite amount of duplicate content pages )? Do you think I should require the owner to prevent this from happening? Should I look into the .htaccess file to fix it ? Thank you Mozers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
Why isn't the Google change of address tool working for me?
Last night I switched my site from http to https. Both sites are verified in Webmaster Tools but when I try to use the change of address it says- Your account doesn't contain any sites we can use for a change of address. Add and verify the new site, then try again. How do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
There's NO reason these sites should be beating mine...Or is there?
Hi Over the past 10 months, my internal page rankings (previously excellent) have plummeted. I'm now trying to recover them. I haven't received an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Also, I used to have hundreds of internal links to each of these 21 pages using the same exact-match anchor text eg, Tuscany real estate, Umbria real estate, etc. I changed this about 6 months ago. So why am I still ranking poorly for these (only moderately competitive keywords) behind sites with poorer metrics? 1) Keyword: lake como real estate My page here – **http://tinyurl.com/d34k8m ** -- used to rank No1 or No2 neck-and-neck with this page www.immobiliarevacanzelago.com/. He's still No1 but I’m down to about No13. Yet when I look in Open Site Explorer virtually all my metrics beat his.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Multiple Locations Google Places (URL's)?
I'm managing a restaurant chain with 10 locations. Can they all share the home page url of the corporate site in Google Places or is it better to link each location url separately? Meaning can I use www.company.com for all locations in Google places for all locations or is it better to go with www.company.com/location.html for each location. The page authority of the home page is 60 while individual location pages the page authority is in the 20's. Hope this makes sense. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YMD
Gary0 -
'Select your country' page leading to high Temporary Redirects
Hello all, I manage an ecommerce website and product prices are shown depending on what country you select. When a user does a product search or lands on a product page, they are immediately redirected to a 'select your country' page. After selecting their option, the user is redirected back to the product or search result page. The problem I face is that, this is leading to a high 'Temporary Redirects' list in my crawl diagnostic page. Looking at the list of temporary redirects, 90% are users being bounced to a 'select your country' page. Any advice to tackle this? Have you guys faced anything similar? Thanks Cyto
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Can literally any site get 'burned'?
Just curious what people think. The SEOMOZ trust on my site has gone up, all while Google is dropping us in rankings for lots of keywords. Just curious if this can happen to anyone or once you are 100% 'trusted' you're good. We went from 120,000 page views down to about 50,000. All while doubling content, improving the design(at least from a user perspective), and getting more natural links. Seems counter intuitive to Google's mantra of ranking quality. I would guess 'authority' sites never get hit by these updates right? So when you make it you've made it.(at least from a dropping like a rock perspective, obviously you have to keep working). I'm guessing we just need a bunch more quality links but would hate to work on building links, quality content, trust etc for it to be something so finicky long term.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astahl110