Excellent performance in BING, terrible performance in GOOGLE

[benhond]

Dear all,

We're struggling with the SEO of our platform www.taobao.nl for 6 months now. I posted some matters before on the MOZ forum and followed up the ideas that i received (tnx again But so far there really isn't much result.

Recently i found out that my platform is doing excellent in search engine Bing.com (ranking top 3/4 on my main keyword 'taobao') while my platform's homepage is still ranking dramatically in Google on the same keyword (ranking between position 180-280)

Does anybody have some insight for me what could be the reason for this or how/where i can fund it out?

Many thanks in advance!

Sander

[benhond]

Dirk,

We make use of the official Taobao API. Just as the other hunderds of 'taobao agents'.

Sander

[DirkC]

I checked your website and states nowhere that you are associated with taobao.com - so I assume you are just "hijacking" the Chinese brand name for your own benefit. On top of that - you "steal" the content from the original site and auto-translate it to Dutch.

To be very honest - I don't see a reason why Google would start promoting your site. When I search for Taobao Google I get the .com version in Chinese rather than the Dutch version (I am searching with Google.be/Dutch version)

Suppose that a German would consider it a good idea to copy Bol.com to Bol.de and copy the complete offer and auto translate it to German - I don't think Bol would be very happy with that and I have strong doubts that Google would index and promote this site. What you are doing is not that different (even if you do it with the best intentions)

Dirk

[benhond]

Tnx Josh,

I have been very careful with the disavow tool. During the months of June/July i received many adult inlinks. Of the nasty kind...  The opensiteexplorer tool indicated these links with a high spam rating.

These are the only ones i disavowed.

Any other reasons you see and can share would be appreciated!

Tnx, Sander

[benhond]

Hi!

I also noticed that and around june/july i disavowed all those spammy links. In my Webmastertools account i don't see them anymore under 'inlinks'.

Regards,

Sander

[Gabriele_Layoutweb]

Have you checked the site's backlinks in Moz Open Site Explorer? To me it seems there are some pretty spammy backlinks, could this be the reason?

You could try disavow them here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

[DmitriiK]

Well, what you're saying is not true.

Example: if I search for "tree" the first result is not tree.com, because tree is a very generic phrase and tree.com doesn't have huge brand. However, if I look for "apple" apple.com comes up number 1,  due to brand associativity.

So, taobao is pretty generic word and, apparently, your brand is not big enough to overtake it. This is proved by category pages ranking high. Therefore invest in brand awareness and exposure.

As for Google "punishing" - i don't think so, because if you had some kinda penalty, it would be for domain, not for certain query. Basically, you wouldn't be rankings anywhere for anything.

Cheers.

[benhond]

Tnx Dmitrii,

It lead me to believe that Google might be punishing my platform for something that Bing isn't seeing.

Even within Google's results i can see that my homepage is ranking very bad (http://www.taobao.nl on keyword 'taobao') while category pages are ranking fine (search on 'taobao dameskleding' for example and the top 4 results are mine).

These 2 elements led me to believe there might be some technical reason for the not-ranking of my homepage. (note that the full focus is on the ranking of my homepage on keyword 'taobao' in Google)

Tnx again!

Sander

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Bing, Yahoo and Google have completely different algorithms. It's quite easy to rank in first two, comparing to Google. Now, since the algorithms are so different, it's very hard to optimize for all engines at ones. I have many clients who rank in top 3-5 on yahoo, but nowhere in Google. The thing is that traffic share brought from non-google engines is so little, even when the rankings are great, that we pay very little attention to optimizing for those engines. Usually, if you can get good rankings on Google, good/fair rankings in other engines will follow.

So, you shouldn't really compare Bing and Google. "Forget" about Bing and start working on optimizations in Google without comparing to anything, because, most likely when Google rankings start growing, Bing rankings will go down, especially in the beginning of optimization journey. Of course, if most of your organic traffic brought from non-google engines and you don't think that it would change, even after good rankings in Google, then maybe you shouldn't be optimizing for Google (very strange feeling when I was typing it).

Hope this helps