Indexed by Google but only ranking in Bing and Yahoo

[White_Shark_Media]

I have a website nativeamericanpalmhut.com that has been up and running for months. The sitemap was created and submitted in GWMT and the site was indexed pretty quickly. Here's where I'm lost all of the pages are indexed but only the homepage ranks and only for the exact match domain query "Native American Palm Huts". What's even more confusing is that Google Analytics and HotJar Analytics are both showing hundreds Google organic search traffic coming to the site on multiple pages (not just the homepage). This on top of the fact the that website is ranking well for several different terms in Bing and Yahoo lead me to believe this is a Google search specific problem.

I have checked the backlinks to see if maybe there was a penalty on the domain but couldn't find any record of it. I've searched the Moz Q&As, Countless Google forums, etc with no luck. I'm scratching my head at the moment so if anyone has any ideas on what could be causing the problem that would be great.

[jheath]

Thank you! I have a question related to what you've posted here.

I saw that my landing page report in Moz said that I had received traffic to a very strange page: how.to.travel.and.make.42023834.money.online.for.free.with.maps.ilovevitaly.com It has absolutely nothing to do with my site (www.drugjustice.com). I couldn't find it anywhere until I followed your instructions and found it under Hostname.

Is there any way to get rid of it? Is it hurting my SEO? I also have a russian site (the address is all in Cyrillic) that I'd like to ditch.

I have some traffic going to a hostname "not set." Is there anything I can do to fix that?

Thanks so much!

[MiriamEllis]

Glad if it helped to get some brainstorming going! It's just a thought, and I understand that the company chose the brand, but hopefully with strong enough content, that may overcome any confusion that may be any part of this scenario.

[White_Shark_Media]

Hey Miriam,

Thanks for taking the time. I had been trying to solve this as if it was 100% a technical SEO problem so I appreciate you thinking outside of that box. I'm going to put your theory to the test built some content relevant to their name and see if that gains any traction. I thought the same thing and agree with you that their name is confusing considering they want to target tiki huts, but it's their name and their branding so I don't have much say in that dept.

I'll keep you posted!

[MiriamEllis]

You're receiving really excellent technical feedback here from the community checking for potential technical issues, and it seems like you've ruled a lot of this out. So, I'm going to make a comment which may seem a bit different, from a user viewpoint rather than a technical one.

Visiting your site and seeing that you were in Florida, I thought that perhaps 'Native American Palm Huts' (the name of the business) might have something to do with the palm structures called Chickees that are traditionally built by the Seminole Indians in your state. See: http://www.semtribe.com/Culture/Chickee.aspx. The designation 'Native American' immediately makes me think that a business is talking about a product that is Native-made (which is a term protected by the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Arts_and_Crafts_Act_of_1990, a truth-in-advertising law).

And, at first, I saw this statement on a couple of pages of your site that made me wonder if your company is an Indigenous one making these Chickees for local tribes, "We Do Major Construction for the Native Americans."

But, on further perusal of the site, I think I understand that what the company actually makes is the types of huts typically associated with Polynesia - tiki huts/bars. Interestingly, as I looked into this a little more, I saw that you may have some competitors who are using Chickee and Tiki interchangeably, or, at least linking the 2 structures together though they originate in very different parts of the world ... like here: http://www.bigcypresstikihuts.com/tiki_hut_history.aspx

What all of this is making me wonder about is whether the company name, and the practice of referring to the products as Native American, and other semantic keyword combinations might be:

1. Confusing to users (it was to me at first).

2. Confusing to bots (sending signals to them that you are trying to rank for something traditional/historical rather than a completely different commercial product).

3. In compliance with the Indian Arts & Crafts act (is your company Native-owned?). If you are Native-owned, I would definitely suggest highlighting this as an excellent feature of the business. If you are not Native-owned, you may need to consider re-branding, or, at least, do some careful study of that law.

I also want to take a minute to mention that the site is not especially well optimized from a purely Local SEO perspective, but it may be that you've decided to go after the state rather than specific cities. I wouldn't overlook Local SEO, as it could cut down some of your competition as you work toward ranking for broader geography.

I do think there's some growing room here, both in terms of improving your existing content and developing new content as you go along. The site is pretty small, and rather than an image gallery (which has no text) you could be building well-written project showcases which would have local relevance and considerably expand the website.

Finally, anecdotally, I want to share that I have seen cases in which the brand of a business was either too generic or too random to send a good signal to the bots that a user was looking for that specific, commercial business rather than some other sort of known term. For example, if you had a swimming pool business that was named just "Florida", it would be a stretch to convince Google that people searching for 'Florida' are actually looking for your company rather than the state. That's an extreme example, and your business name does contain the keyword phrase 'Palm Huts' but I mention it because the language we use can sometimes send signals to both humans and bots that we may not have considered.

Something to think about, and I hope these first impressions as a new visitor to your site may be helpful.

[ChrisAshton]

Wow, that's incredibly confusing! I can't even find any images in the SERPs that people could be using to arrive on your site so it really does make no sense. All the location info seems to be fine as well so it's unlikely you're ranking somewhere offshore, though I'm sure you've look at that in GA as well since you've already been incredibly thorough.

The hostname filtering means it can't be the UA code inadvertently used on another site or domain either. I suppose one other grasping-at-straws test you can do is to set up a fresh UA code and apply that in case there's something strange happening - what may cause that I have no idea but stranger things have happened!

[White_Shark_Media]

Hey Chris appreciate the feedback but yes I checked analytics to make sure it's not referral spam. We have hostname filters, session duration filters, and a filter with a mega list of about 100 common referral spam culprits.

To answer your follow up I also had already checked the content keywords but didn't find anything out of the ordinary.

I also checked the keyword list from GWMT and GA and the terms driving our Google organic traffic are tiki huts, tiki hut bar, tiki huts for sale, backyard tiki huts and several other variations of those same terms. However when I search for those terms the site is nowhere to be found (gave up on page 10). Those terms are generating anything from 40 to 150 visits per month which doesn't add up if those terms are ranking past page 10.

I manage to get in contact with a Google rep and after 2 days of "investigation" they replied saying the cannot explain the discrepancy in our rankings vs GA reported traffic and they can't confirm wether or not the problem is on our end or theirs. I'm grasping at straws at this point.

[ChrisAshton]

On top of the filtering I mentioned above, it might also pay to have a look at the Content Keywords in Search Console (Google Index > Content Keywords). This will show you the significance of various words across your site.

Though rare, you may find some odd words showing up amongst some of the most significant there - try searching for various combinations of those and see if you rank for them. Particularly if you're seeing a high bounce rate from organic traffic, you may be accidentally ranking for irrelevant terms so that traffic hits your site, goes "what is this?" and they pogo back to the SERPs.

You may also find checking the Search Analytics in Search Console (Search Traffic > Search Analytics) and see what terms it shows you getting impressions and clicks for. It's highly likely this will be no more helpful for you than Analytics but since it looks like you've covered all the usual stuff, we're kind of in a position of looking for hints rather than answers!

Apologies if any of this information is too obvious or you've already checked.

[ChrisAshton]

Perhaps a silly question, but have you checked the analytics data to make sure it's not referral spam causing the majority of this? These spammers are hurting organic data these days too and particularly on a site with low organic traffic, referral spam can drastically alter what your data shows you.

The easiest way to see legitimate organic data in Analytics is to open the property and navigate to Audience > Technology > Network. From there, just under the graph you'll see a blue text link for "Hostname". Click your domain name from that list and it will show you visits going only to your host name (domain) which filters out some types of referrers.

Once you've done that, either change _"_All Settings" at the top to Organic, or add another segment next to it. While not foolproof, this filtered organic data is at least accurate enough to work with.

You can set up a filtered view so it's permanently filtered this way, though though doing it properly requires creating a fresh view within the existing property, meaning you'll have no historic data to look at without going back to the unfiltered one - great for the future but useless for immediate troubleshooting.

[White_Shark_Media]

Yes agreed we're working on their backlink profile but they're not having traffic problems that's where I'm lost and can't explain whats happening. They are getting hundreds of visits from google organic search to several pages currently, however, the keywords are 98% not provided so i don't see what was searched. If it was all landing on the homepage i would associate it to branded search traffic but the service pages are getting 100+ visits monthly from google search even though i cannot find the site on any serps for any keyword other than "Native American Palm Huts". It's as if I can't see the rankings but other people can? If that makes sense.

thanks,

[DmitriiK]

Interesting. I just checked again and it does show all links. I could have sworn that yesterday it was only index page.

Now, what about backlink profile? ahrefs tells me you got only 9 backlinks and OSE says only 3. This would make a lot of difference in Google. Everybody knows that all search engine algorithms are different, and from experience, you can rank on yahoo just by content, for google you need backlinks as well.

[White_Shark_Media]

Hey Chris,

It's not a coincidence they have all been indexed since before I asked the question. Everything I can think to check I have and as far as I know everything is set up correctly. The part that has me confused more than anything is the fact the site is getting hundreds of visits (40%+ of the traffic) from Google organic search. That traffic isn't just landing on the homepage either it's distributed across the home and product pages. So somehow those pages are ranking and generating traffic, they have to be ranked fairly high for it to account for such a big chunk of total traffic, yet no matter how I search (besides "" searches) I don't see the site anywhere. Thanks for the help

[White_Shark_Media]

Nope that's the weird part as far as I can see there are no issues with the site besides the fact that I can't see any results when I search for the site. However like I mentioned there is real (not bot) organic traffic from Google to several pages on the site. So somehow the site must be ranking for others? Thanks!

[White_Shark_Media]

You must have either made or mistake or not used the correct URL because all 12 pages are indexed (see the link I included in the question). There's no problems or errors with crawling either, robots is set correctly, not using any nofollow noindex tags, no error messages in Google Webmaster Tools and the correct number if crawled and indexed pages showing in both the site: search and in the actual GWMT console. I appreciate you taking the time though.

[ChrisAshton]

I'm not sure if you've already resolve the issue or it's coincidence but I can see all of your pages indexed now, at least in a site: search.

Looking at your sitemap and robots I can't really identify any obvious issues there either. The fact that your home page has some degree of rankings suggests to me that you may just need to improve your site strength. Having just 2 referring domains probably isn't helping this

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, even though you say it's indexed, it's actually not full truth. As you say, you can see only index page. And I have checked by googling "nativeamericanpalmhut.com" and "site:nativeamericanpalmhut.com". No secondary pages found. There is a problem with crawling your website.

Make sure that your robots.txt is properly built, meta robots are used correctly (if used at all) and internal links are not nofollow.

Hope this helps.