Recently revamped site structure - now not even ranking for brand name, but lots of content - what happened? (Yup, the site has been crawled a few times since) Any ideas? Did I make a classic mistake? Any advise appreciated :)
-
I've completely disappeared off Google - what happened? Even my brand name keyword does not bring up my website - I feel lost, confused and baffled on what my next steps should be. ANY advice would be welcome, since there's no going back to the way the site was set up.
-
Well I'd say that the nonindex issue Gareth pointed out, and the major markability error I discovered are your two biggest concerns initially. But yeah, once the dust settles, the other issues I point out are all a concern. Unique content that's specific to each page is quite important to long term SEO success.
-
Wow Alan - I'm surprised at how quickly you were able to find so many issues -- HUGE thank you!!!! Egad I had no idea about this stuff - especially the videos - I wrongly assumed that because the videos are stored on the backend in a single location, that having them placed in multiple areas was fine. I cannot thank you enough for pointing these errors out -- I really appreciate your expert advice!
-
Once you fix the noindex, here's some other stuff. It's a "quick hit - what stands out" kind of an audit to see if there are any really obvious red flags.
1. Odd Links
Looking at the source of your POS Nightclub and Bar page I found some odd things going on related to links. Specific examples:
A) You've got a link off to the right side of the page just under the main navigation bar (under the "News" link). This link is titled "News" and it rotates different links to different news items. One of them goes to a site called Spoke.com and the rest go to other DInerware.com pages.
Each of these links has a link "title" attribute that appears to contain the intro text of whatever it's pointed to. The problem here is it's significantly filling content at the source level that's totally irrelevant to the page. If this is happening on the entire site,there's a lot of topical dilution.
While this issue itself shouldn't be a problem big enough to be concerned with, I do believe its harming your sites quality from a topical perspective. And since this is stuff only search engines see, or is only seen when hovering over whatever individual article is viewed in the rotator, it's not good to have so much content there. Not good at all.
Also, the Spoke directory isn't exactly a high quality directory. So linking there isn't helping your site's perceived trust aspects.
2. Apparent mass repetition of video content
Am I correct in that you've got some videos posted to multiple pages of the site? Causing serious duplicate content problems? Many pages seem to have almost no unique text while having several videos. If these are then shown on more than one page, not only do you lose out from a lack of HTML text based content (a significant factor), but you get hammered by the duplication.
3. Links to PDFs
I see links to PDFs in the right column of the Product Training page, and none of them have the php code at the end of them. Yet within the page itself, PDFs have it http://www.dinerware.com/pdf/DinerwareCFGManual.pdf?phpMyAdmin=6e28a551fa44f2aa65e57201d6164da9
What's that about?
4. Markup Language Fail - The biggest problem
When I run your site through the W3C Markup Validation check, it fails and can not process. This alone means you've got a site coding problem that's most likely causing serious problems with search engines.
Go to http://validator.w3.org and enter in http://www.dinerware.com/pos-product/training/
I doubt the complete breakdown that I got when submitting that URL is temporary - and if you see it too, that's a critical issue.
-
No problem!
-
HOLY SMOKES!!! Gareth - thank you so SO SO much! I'm not a back-end web person, but will get the right folks on it asap - wonder how that mistake could have been made -- I'm grateful to you!
-
Hi Jeanie, I just had a quick look at your site and noticed you have noindex, nofollow on all of the pages I checked. You may want to adjust this as you're telling the search engines not to index these pages. Take a look at your source code and you'll spot it quite easily.
-
http://www.dinerware.com - Thanks, Alan
-
Jeanie - what's your site? Can't offer help without knowing that.
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
-
This my site i want rank in doubi any advice for me
this my site i want rank in doubi any advice for me http://alsuntranslation.com/
Technical SEO | | ATS_SEO0 -
Lots of links from a Wiki pointing at main site
Hi everyone This may seem a bit obvious but I am getting conflicting answers on this, we have a client that has a wiki that is basically an online manual of their software. They do it like this because the manual is so big and is constantly developing, there are thousands of pages with loads of links that are pointing to various sections of relevance on the main site as well, the majority of these are No Follow but I have noticed that they have a single link on the navigation that is a direct link to their main site that is a follow link, obviously this is a sitewide. Would this be seen as being detrimental to the main site, should I have this set as No Follow as well. Thanks in Advance
Technical SEO | | Andrew_Birkitt0 -
Awful ranking after site redesign
Hello everyone, I have a situation here and I’d like to have your opinion about it. I am working on a site which has been recently redesigned from scratch: in a nutshell, as soon as the new site went live their rankings dropped and, of course, so did their visitors and so on.. The guys who redesigned the site didn’t do any 301 redirect whatsoever, so now the old pages are just 404s and blocked by robots. My question is: if they 301 redirect now, do you think it would be possible they could get their rankings back? One more thing: when they launched the new site, the indexed pages basically doubled overnight; there were 700 and now there are 1400. Do you think this could affect their ranking as well? Thank you for you insights 🙂 Elio
Technical SEO | | Eyah0 -
My site has dropped in rankings what can i do to change this
My site is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/ Hi, my site has always done amazing in the rankings, for a few years i have been number one for the word gastric band hypnotherapy as well as many other keywords which includes hypno band. but in the past couple of weeks i have seen some of my keywords drop and end up on pages two and three of google instead of page one. Can anyone please give me advice on what i need to do to change this situation please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Googlebot take 5 times longer to crawl each page
Hello All From about mid September my GWMT has show that the average time to crawl a page on my site has shot up from an average of 130ms to an average of 700ms and peaks at 4000ms. I have checked my server error logs and found nothing there, I have checked with the hosting comapny and there are no issues with the server or other sites on the same server. Two weeks after this my ranking fell by about 950 places for most of my keywords etc.I am really just trying to eliminate this as a possible cause, of these ranking drops. Or was it the Pand/ EMD algo that has done it. Many Thanks Si
Technical SEO | | spes1230 -
SEO friendldy Site structure?
we are in the process or rewriting all the pages on one of our sites and will be changing some urls around. i was just wondering if dashes or underscores are better in the urls SEO wise? www.site.com/word-word-word/ or
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO
www.site.com/word_word_word/ i personally like the underscores better but some colleagues tell me that dashes are better, any tests out there on this issue?? Thanks0 -
Duplicate Content - Home Page even wth Mod Rewrite 301
Hi, It looks like Seomoz (and Screaming Frog) is showing my home page as duplicate content. http://www.mydomain.com Page Authority 61 Linking root Domain 321 http://www.mydomain.com/ Page Authority 61 Linking root Domain 321 [Screaming Frog shows duplicate as]
Technical SEO | | Force7
www.mydomain.com/
www.mydomain.com/index.html} Years ago I hired someone to write the code for a rewrite for non www to be 301 redirected to www version. I was surprised at finding out that I still have a problem. Here is the code on my htaccess page. <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule> Was this code not properly written ? One more question, we were hit hard by Panda and Penguin, would something like this be that much of a factor. Thanks in advance, Force70