Strange rankings on new website
-
HI All
My website is 10 years old, and has decent rankings. The domain is www.advanced-driving.co.uk
I have recently had a major overhaul of the site, before it was very outdated, with lots of duplicated content. My main keywords are "advanced driving course" and "advanced driving courses" both of which I am on page 1.
However, since I have been live with new site - (5 days) I am not ranking for some easy win keywords. I have submitted new content thought webmaster tools, and whilst some content is ranking, others are not. The content not ranking is fresh and unique ( have used copyscape on all new pages).
For example my homepage is on page 1 for "advanced driving courses london" - around rank 6. So I hand made some content titled advanced driving courses london to provide more of an exact match, outlining our courses in London and the routes we take - http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/defensive-advanced-driving-courses-london/
However, this page which is unique does not rank at all....I have done this with another website and it worked well, but google is not understanding this at all.
Also I am now on page 1 for "advanced driving course" but not for "advanced driving courses" - well I am but the page for the plural keyword is a page not really related - surely Googles semantic search should realise course and courses are the same!
I suspect that Google is still getting used to my new website? No errors or anything in Webmaster tools...
Can anyone confirm this - or outline if I have done something awful..!!
Thanks
Rob
-
Another strange (frustrating!) thing is that there are other websites with little content, few links and a low Moz rank who outrank me for locational based terms i.e: "advanced driving courses london" "advanced driving courses berkshire" "advanced driving courses cheshire"....
We all offer these courses around the UK, but Google doesn't "get" my site does this - I have even created a locational page search accessible from the homepage....
-
Hi Dirk
The only fluctuations was when I had to delete a large number of pages when I took over the site as they were in conflict with my business, but other than that no massive drops in ranks. All the pages do include Analytics, and I can see all in Analytics too...Some visit the forum, other the skid pan training page, some driving tips etc etc....
-
Hi CleaverPhD
Here is my responses:
1. These pages (advanced driving regions, driving lessons) were actually in conflict with my business (advertising competitors) and so had to be deleted. I removed them from Wordpress, and are no longer on the website so I could not 301 them...I have only recently bought the website.
2. You can see the traffic reports and Driving Instruction from homepage - if you click "Tips" and then at the footer of that page you will see both.
I am doing more internal linking but to be honest I think, from the outset, the website is clearly linking...maybe I am wrong..
-
Two things I found when using the Wayback Machine to look at your site
- Did you setup 301 redirects from old to new content?
https://web.archive.org/web/20150225025506/http://advanced-driving.co.uk/
I pulled links to various and random advanced driving groups and they 404ed vs 301
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/advanced-driving-lessons/region5/
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/advanced-driving-lessons/region6/
Also on the page for driving lessons
https://web.archive.org/web/20150219123145/http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/
I pulled links to various and random advanced driving lessons and they 404ed vs 301
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/norwich/
http://www.advanced-driving.co.uk/driving-lessons/liverpool/
Looks like you did not properly migrate the URLs from the old site to the new site. You should be seeing 404 errors in Google Search Console and so that can be a starting point to find what pages need to be updated. It sounds like you tracked rankings for pages on the old site, start with those URLs and make sure they are 301ed to the correct new URL.
- Site structure
On the new home page, you are not linking into any of the pages such as your Driver Instruction and Traffic Reports page. Likewise, your header and sidebars used to link into your content. Your new design is cleaner, but you pretty much blew up your previous internal linking structure. Google will use your internal links to find pages to crawl and also to determine what pages are important on the website. I see much much less of this on the new site. You may want to consider updating how your internal linking is structured so that you are showing your users and Google what your most important pages are.
Good luck!
-
If you check your rankings in Search Console - do you see major fluctuations after the relaunch?
How do you track traffic - in the forum you seem to use Google Analytics. The other pages however do not contain an analytics tag.
Dirk
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
-
How to find the redirects on website
I want to find the complete internal redirects on website. Just internally linked. How to find such?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Our website is not being indexed
We have an issue with a site that we can't get to the bottom of. This site: (URL removed) is not being properly indexed. When we do a search for (URL removed) in google.com.au. The site appears as the 4th listing with the following title and description: (Title removed) A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We have checked the site's robots.txt and can see its been now implemented correctly: (URL removed) About a week ago, we also went into Webmaster Tools and submitted a request for Google to recrawl our site. We are unsure what the issue is that is causing the site to not be properly indexed and how to resolve it. Any assistance on this topic would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Ranking drop
Hello there, Based on Moz's rank tracker our keywords ranking have been dropping in ranking. Does anyone know what might be the cause? We have been building quality "white hat" links which are very relevant to our niche Thanks, Robert
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
I want my website to rank on the first page for a very competitive keyword
I am a WordPress designer and can service national clients. I want to rank on the first page for the keyword WordPress designer. This is a highly competitive keyword MOZ gives it a 68% difficulty. I rank locally in nj for WordPress designer nj and a multitude of local WordPress based key words. I rank on page 10 of serps doing a private browsing session. Some of my national competitors rank on the first page with not many links in. How could i be so low on the serps for the base keyword WordPress Designer but for local WordPress designer nj be number 1 everytime? What should be my best plan of attack if i want to Rank much higher for this one specific keyword hopefully page 1. I think this one keyword could increase business greatly so it is a top priority for me. I appreciate all advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Rankings Tanked since new Site redesign land new url Structure ? Anything Glaringly Obvious I need to check ?
Hi All, I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago. My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website. We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore. Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store. Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords. We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right. Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?. I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ? Or is all this expected when doing such changes ? Any advice greatly appreciated .. Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
New website strategy concerning Google Spider
Hello, I have a question concerning a new website. What should I do, SEO wise? Should I place all my content on my pages at once? And thus let the spider crawl everything at once? Or should I place my content in different phases? So the spider could crawl my pages multiple times in some days/weeks time? Or do both ways come to the same result? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarikeP0 -
How long for new pages to rank
Hi Guys, Our website has some really good serps for our established keyword phrases some of which are quite competitive. We recently acquired and have begun selling some new brands through our online shop and launched new pages for these brands around 2 months ago. They are quite competitive ("merrell shoes" and "timberland boots" for example in google.co.uk) terms. Do you think we should get some keyword rich links built into these new pages from external sites such as blogs - or is there chances of ranking well driven more off our overall site authority/link profile? In other peoples experience, what is a typical realistic timeframe to start getting meaningful serps on new pages/keyword phrases (I know that is hard to answer - but ball parks figures appreciated). Thank you everyone in advance. Kind Regards (and happy thanksgiving to our US friends)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConradC
Conrad Cranfield0