Website Not Ranking Organically - Not Links, Not Domain Authority...
-
This is regarding the domain: http://lesliekays.com
We got a new client about 5 months back who had a website that was hacked. It took several months, but we've cleaned up most of the spammy links and completely rebuilt their website. We have been successful with every other client that we have ever done getting our customers to rank well organically, but we just can't figure this one out. I'm willing to offer a REWARD to the single person who can figure this out for us. (Let's not get carried away, a small reward). This customer has great quality links to their site too.
We are looking for answers other than:
1. Backlinks
2. Content
3. Malware
4. Domain or Page authority
5. 404 errors
6. We have utilized Googles Webmaster tools endlessly
It is something else and we can not identify it! Let me know what you think! I will give a public shout out to the person who helps us identify this issue!
-
For anyone stumbling across this we were able to identify the issue. We had a WordPress installation that had a hidden database full of SPAM and bad links/images etc. The Database could not be located in MySQL which was interesting, so we had the client agree to allow us to delete ALL content and start from scratch. (They had previously been hacked with another vendor but owned their WordPress website). We were migrating the database because they had hundreds of blog posts. We all agreed since they weren't doing any good we would start from scratch.
Deleted entire website off of server, reinstalled WordPress and we've seen a 745% improvement in keyword rankings. We have over 20 keywords now ranking on page 1. Woot!
-
Hi Dirk,
Again, appreciated the second set of eyes on this. Unfortunately, nothing changed. In fact, it got mildly worse with all the changes! I'm at a loss. I'll keep poking around at it. If you have any revelations, please shoot them my way!
-
The 3 errors listed are for a pop-up chat feature we have running by a company called, Olark. Can this cause issues with Googlebot? This code is embedded into the footer area of the site.
-
I see errors with Googlebot:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Flesliekays.com
and Mobile Friendly test uses Googlebot.You need to go in Search Console -> Crawl -> Crawl errors just to see what results are return to Googlebot.
-
Thanks Dirk,
Worked on much of what you recommended. We'll wait a week and see what happens. This client had an old blog that we moved over, but it was a mess. She has given us permission to remove these old blogs with broken links and missing images from here site. Your time on this was very much appreciated. Let's see what happens! I am marking this as answered.
-
The reward is not important - it's solving your issue which is the thing that matters. I don't know Wordfence - but I'm getting suspicious if a tool from Google (Pagespeed Insights) renders a 503 error. This could indicate that Google bot also might encounter troubles when checking your site. The best way to check is go over your logfiles & check for the responses you serve to the Googlebot.
Removing the country blocking now seems to enable pagespeed insights to work properly. Score is not great (50/100 - mobile) so more or less confirms the test by Webpagetest.org. Try to enable caching for static resources like images and enable gzip to compress data transfer. On top of that - compress your images (some of them are really heavy - check http://www.lesliekays.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/brake-hand-position.jpg . The other elements are probably more difficult to do - but these things could already get your score around 70%.
I would try to keep the Wordfence disabled for a week or two - to see if situation improves. Without the log files it's difficult to be sure - but my gut feeling is that this is the main reason why the site isn't ranking. Working on site performance can only help with this - the suggestions above shouldn't be that difficult to implement.
Some other issues - your internal links are not optimal - you have about 600+ links going to 404 (a lot of them = images) - 7 with wrong formatted url (without .com) - 600+ url's which are redirected (in your internal linking you are mixing both www & non-www versions) - so might want to clean up a bit on these ones as well. It shouldn't be a reason for not getting indexed but it's something you should have a look at - especially if the site has some issues before.
I ran a crawl - but it seemed to go on forever - so it's possible you have some kind of eternal loop as well. I stopped at 1781 URI's crawled.
I would recommend you to invest the 99 GBP in Screaming Frog - which would really help you in identifying / solving these issues.
Dirk
-
Screaming Frog... excellent resource!
-
Hi Dirk,
I have removed the Country Blocking from Wordfence so you could take a look at it closer. Thank you for your response and time looking into this! Yes, we run Wordfence on all of our sites (over 80 of them) and haven't had any issues with Googlebot accessing them. We started blocking foreign IP addresses about 3 months ago in an effort to curb some of the hacking and brute force attacks we get.
And I'm serious about this small reward! I value your time.
Taber
-
Really? We have WordFence running on 80 of our sites and don't see any issues with the other sites, all the same type of client as well. Do you have a better suggestions besides WordFence? Perhaps I'll disable it and see if that clears the issue. And, are you saying that you are seeing a return from Googlebot error or that it CAN cause issues?
-
True - i just joining and #WTF seeing such results.
-
Sorry Peter - I was first - the reward is mine
-
Wordfence? RU serious?
This plugin can serious hit your SEO performance because their settings. For example - you return error to GoogleBot...
-
Bonus: You indicate that you don't have problems with 404's - but your site isn't exactly clean concerning the internal links. Can't crawl using Screaming Frog given the 503 I get - but manually checking few pages it seems you have mal formatted links:
Classic Car Insurance (the .com is missing) - it's not a 404 but DNS lookup error
I would do a full scan with Screaming Frog to check what other technical issues you have on the site.
-
Just added the screen copy from the Pagespeed Insights result for sake of completeness.
-
Difficult to check - given the very strict firewall rules you apply (I get a 503 out of Belgium : Reason: Access from your area has been temporarily limited for security reasons)
I assume you are sure that your firewall is allowing Googlebot to access your site? (the sentence "For example, if you were blocked because it was detected that you are a fake Google crawler, then disable the rule that blocks fake google crawlers" scares me a bit)
When I use Pagespeed Insights I get the message that they are seeing a 503 as well (and this is Google after all). You might want to check your logfiles to see that Googlebot is indeed able to crawl your pages (with all the IP addresses it is using)
Other than the config of your firewall - you might want to check loadtimes - according Webpagetest you page takes 25sec to load so there is probably some room for improvement. (I know from other cases where very slow sites were the main reason for indexing issues)
Let me know how to get the reward
(if one of these reasons is causing the indexing issues)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
-
Posting same content to different high authority websites
Let's say 1 article piece is highly relevant to multiple states and we pitch this article across the different domains in those states. Each article piece will be tweaked to localize the content. I understand that Google devalues links coming from low quality, websites that are spun up, but what about links that are basically the same content (but localized), across different high authority domains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny1230 -
GWT - Links to website - Are they accurate
Hi I am looking at GWT more and more and I starting not to believe the information within it. For example we had a link on XYZ.com say 6 months ago. This link as been removed no reference to our website, however it still showing on GWT inbound links. I have noticed quite a few sites which have no relevance to our site. Is anyone else finding the information wrong in WMT
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Will multiple domains for the same local business hurt its rankings?
If I have a mold removal client who has domain1.com, which is several years old, and he creates a new domain2.com with the same info (reworded), but changes over the citations to domain2 will it 1. lower domain1.com's rankings? 2. make ranking either site harder since there are now 2 sites for the same thing? 3. reduce the ability for either site to gain a higher domain authority since links can now go to either
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Are links to our website through our affiliate program hurting our rankings?
We have an affiliate program for an educational related course product and I am becoming worried that links to us on our affiliate's websites are hurting our site rankings. I have read that google is usually pretty good about picking up on affiliate links and not giving the follow links credit, but not sure if that is just for the big affiliate networks or if they can spot less obvious affiliate programs. With this in mind, would you ask all affiliates to use the nofollow tag on all links coming in, or would you make sure that the links are more branded in nature? There are a mix of text links along with banners and other display components. There would be editing that would need to be done to the core files of our affiliate/member software (aMember Pro) to make all links nofollow and we want to see if there are other recommendations before doing so. We are trying to fight out way out of what we believe is an over-optimized anchor text penalty and are evaluating all areas that we can make improvements. Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | youngb550 -
100% links within the website - could it rank?
Hi, If I create blog posts inside my website and link it back to my website, Would it still rank? I understand that its better to get links from the established domain. But I just wonder what kind of impact would my site have if the blog posts within my site link back to itself for ranking. Please let me know. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zsyed0 -
Disabling a website - What to do with "link juice"?
Hi I built a website for a client a long time ago now and for a number of reasons I have decided to shut down the website. None payment being one of the reasons! My question to all you SEO guru's out there is, what should I do with 301 redirects. The site is an e-commerce based website and my personal website is simply advertising my services and portfolio. If I 301 redirect all the traffic from the customer website, will there be any issue with Google (or any search engine) seeing that my website is receiving traffic for search phrases such as "Coffee Mugs"? I.e. abolutely no relevance at all to my website content! My worry is my site could be penalised for a flurry of thousands of redirected links. Also, if I redirect everything to my site and the customer decides to pay the bill in due course, I will then remove the redirects - I guess this will have a massive impact on the rankings of the site? Thanks for reading and any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yousayjump0 -
Impact of SSL - switching from http: to https: on organic rankings?
Hello, just paranoid, but thought i'd ask. We are installing an SSL certificate on a site ranking very well organically in all the engines. This will change our site from http:// to https://. Is there an risk to our rankings in doing so? What might I need to consider? Changing my htaccess redirects to https: instead of http;? Any ripple effects from switching to a secure site? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen
Greg0 -
Will an active forum on our domain help with rankings by fresh content?
We have a very large ecommerce store with little fresh content being added, accept through a web blog on the sub domain. We are thinking of moving over our blog that is on another domain entirely and has a lot of active users. But first I want to make sure it will actually help the domains rankjings, and second i'm concerned about the duplicate content on the old forum if we move it to the main domain. Should we just copy over all the content, 301 the old forum URL's to the new ones? Thanks much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0