Website No Longer Ranking In Google:
-
My website was on first page google couple of months ago, now nothing. Shows up in Bing page one. Some queries/pages still showing OK, but some not at all. Example "residential elevators illinois" found nowhere. http://www.accesselevator.net is the website. Have found 900 poor quality links and used disavow tool. Any further suggestions? Their Page Rank also went from a 3 to a 2. Implemented nofollow on all outgoing links. Need advice.
-
Thanks Alan, Wigas and Tommy for your in-depth responses. Really appreciate the insight!
Alan - no notifications on Webmaster Tools. Feel like I'm between a rock and hard place with the spammy links. Google does say if you upload another file it will completely override the first disavow file, so perhaps I should consider uploading a new file with only a couple of bad links, thereby negating the original file with over 800 spammy links.
Wigas - Crawled through Moz showing over 100 critical fixes including configuring attachments as no follow/no index with redirect to main site. Need to work on improving the backlinking!
Tommy - Disavow is just a mystery. Bottom line probably is if you don't have any warning notice in Webmaster Tools, don't disavow, just improve. Will revisit title-tags and image weights for sure to improve response time.
Certainly have a big mess to clean up!
Thanks again!
-
Hi Joanne,
Another possible reason is that some of the so-called poor quality backlinks are actually the reason why you were ranked on the first page. However, after Disavowing these links could have caused you to drop in ranking. For that reason, many people don't recommend using Disavow tool outright but try to remove the links manually first.
In addition to the above suggestions, maybe try the following:
- Add separators in the title tag to separate keywords
- Image Weight - you can either use Google's Tool or WebPageTest to check out the speed of your site and what needs to improve
-
Hey Joanne,
Your website could be victim of Penguin 2.1 (launched on 4th Oct, 2013) Lets analyze possible issues with your back-links
Back-links Analysis
- Money Anchors: This is the biggest issue of all. More than 50% of anchors are money: http://screencast.com/t/jC8wtH6Ijwj. This is not a desirable situation
- No Social Shares: Hardly any social shares: http://screencast.com/t/IUSEORZ69o
- Most of links From Directories and Social Book-marks: This is not an ideal situation. good to be divers. Few Guest Posts, Few Press Releases, Few Local Directories, Few Business Directories.
Starting with disavowing is good but disavow could further lower rankings and you are going to lose link juice. So, buid quality links to make amends for it.
Additionally few On Page Tweaks can help
- Title Tags are over-optimized. More than 70 characters
- Try to crawl your website through Moz and find other SEO Issues regarding Meta, Content, Semantic, Images etc
- Product Categories making things duplicate (Agree with Alan)
- Loading Speed needs some work
- Making your website responsive will be another good thing
- Hardly any internal linking. Need to improve it
I hope that will help
Regards
-
There could be many reasons the site has lost rankings.
Does Google Webmaster Tools report that the site has been manually penalized for bad links? (check both the "site messages" section and the "Search Traffic / Manual Actions" section in GWT).
What about other factors like on-site problems such as topical dilution? When I view the Residential Elevators page there's a lot of content that has nothing to do with "residential elevators", let alone that the company has experience installing residential elevators in Wisconsin or Illinois. For example all the "Recent News" sidebar content, and all the "Our Product Categories" content on the lower portion of the page severely dilutes the unique content of the page. As a result, there's likely not enough depth for the primary focus of the page.
This is made worse by the fact that that sidebar and lower portion content is duplicated across the site. The end result for just this one factor is that important pages are likely being considered "thin" overall.
Another major problem that could be contributing to the loss of rankings is site page processing speed. My test of the home page showed fourteen seconds - Google has the ideal page processing speed for an individual page at between one and three seconds. Such slow processing harms overall trust and quality.
There could be a dozen other issues impacting the site's rankings as well, such as , however those were the first few I found that all need addressing.
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
-
Temporarily redirecting a small website to a specific url of another website
Hi, I would like to redirect a small website that contains info about a specific project temporarily to a specific url about this project on my main website. Reason for this is that the small website doesn't contain accurate info anymore. We will adapt the content in the next few weeks and then remove the redirect again. Should I set up a 301 or a 302? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C1 -
Can 301 redirects that are inaccurate cause Google suppressions on rankings?
In an interesting study by DeganSEO titled 'Negative Impact of 301 Redirects - A Case Study' a drop of rankings was observed when popular blog posts were redirected to product pages. One hypothesis is that the suppression is due to topical difference between the redirected pages (blog posts) and the target page. The topical difference issue is an interesting one when you consider it in the context of website migrations. We always recommend that 301 redirects are done at a page level and that if an equivalent page doesn't exist to just 301 anyway but to the most logical page. If you think about it Google are likely to frown on this because a) it's not a good experience for the user - 404 would be more accurate for them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QubaSEO
b) it's lazy - if you have good content that has gained authority/trust then create the same content on the new site don't trytp pass that to an entirely different page. Thoughts? Experiences?0 -
Keyword Rankings: One keyword dropped, dragging other rankings down. Possible or not?
Hey moz fans, So these week I noticed significant drop in rankings... But what caught my attention is that one specific keyword dropped 18 positions, and all the other just 1-3. Print screen: http://prntscr.com/7fb4g4 Do you think it's possible that the drop of that page, that went 18 positions down, brought the whole domain down? Or is it another cause?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kokolo0 -
Keywords Ranking Varies When Search changes Location/City (Not Google Places)
We have a client that are ranking well on most Australian cities for competitive keywords except Google Sydney. If you toggled the cities on the search field when you search for a keyword, their places are almost exactly the same except for Sydney on which they can't be found at all in the Top 100 results. The keywords are not city specific, they are general commonly searched keywords about health. This is not a Google Places issue. The search result shows the right landing pages of the site for their respective keywords. Any ideas or experience on this kind of situation. Much appreciated Louie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | louieramos0 -
Not ranking in Google - why???
This will be a bit long, so please bare with me. I have a client in the auto parts industry who wants to rank their homepage for 13 different keywords. We are ranked first page for all keywords in Yahoo! Mexico and Bing Mexico, but not ranking first page at all in Google Mexico. My client's competitor, however, is clearly outranking my client in Google. When comparing both pages, my client's, while not 100% optimized, looks better optimized than their competitor's. Looking at all metrics using Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs, etc... my client's site looks MUCH better on all fronts. I know ranking a single homepage for more than 10 keywords is a difficult task. Our competitor is however, ranking for them, so it's not impossible. The keywords are not even that competitive according to Moz's analysis. I decided to create an optimized page for each keyword to try to rank these pages, but still my client wants the homepage to rank (again, if the competitor is ranking, then it's possible to do this) and I am afraid these pages I created could result in keyword cannibalization ultimately affecting the homepage's possibility to rank. My client had a previous SEO agency working for them and basically all they did was create fake blogs and have lots of keyword rich links directed to the site's homepage. I got the complete link profile from several tools and submitted a disavow requests for as many fishy links I could find, but that hasn't shown any results so far. Note: when looking at the competitor link profile, they have basically just a few links and no external links of real value whatsoever. My client is obviously very frustrated, and so am I. In my SEO experience, it shouldn't be such a difficult task to accomplish, however nothing seems to work even though everything seems to point that my client should rank higher. So now I'm running out of ideas regarding what to do with this site. Any insight you could provide would be SO helpful to me and my client. If needed I can provide my client's homepage URL and also their competitors homepage for you to review. i can also give you any extra information you need. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EduardoRuiz0 -
We have two different websites with the same products and information, will that hurt our rankings?
We have two different domains, one for the UK and the other for the US, they have the exact same products, categories and information. (the information is almost the same in 400 products) We know that Google could recognize that as duplicate content, but will that actually hurt our rankings in both sites? Is it better if we create two completely different versions of the content on those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Why is google ranking me higher for pages that aren't optimised for keywords those that are?
I am finding that our homepage and other pages are being ranked higher against keywords that we have optimised other pages for. e.g Keyword: Luxury Towels Google Ranks our homepage http://www.towelsrus.co.uk at 20 for this and the page I am trying to rank for it is nowhere to be seen http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/sport-spa/luxury-towels/catlist_fnct498.htm Why is this and is this why our position for certain keywords fluctuates? How do I remedy this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Redirecting my new Website URL to my old Website URL
Hi! OK, I am semi - new to SEO Moz but have been self-teaching for 3 years. However I am stuck.. I have been operating my e-commerce site from www.shopadornonline.com for the past 3 years. I just purchased www.shopadorn.com Right now Shopadorn.com re-directs to www.shopadornonline.com because all my products and links go to shopadornonline.com/productblahblahblah I guess I am stuck. Not sure what to tell my web designer to do? Do I give up on having shopadorn.com OR do I start re-directing customers and doing 301 re-directs? I think from what i have read that it is bad to have traffic going to both shopadorn and shopadornonline as they compete for rankings? Where should I start?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shopadorn0