My domain does not come in the search results, what do I do?
-
Hi,
I have a website called www.bollykings.com
It had a pretty solid rank on google for a number of keywords but 4-5 months back, it was badly affected by the Panda update. Now it comes nowhere. I have started updating and posting new articles on it since the last two months.
When I search for "bollykings" on Google.com, website does not come only in the first 40 results. What could this mean?
-
Hi Prateek
Wow, that's strange that someone should build those links without being hired! I understand if you don't want to change domain and I think that would be a rash move too. I would try and contact the webmasters of the worst links (i.e. from adult sites and the forums that have most spam comments) and ask them if they can remove them. that's going to be a lot of work, but it seems like the only way to get rid of those bad links if you haven't built them.
getting better quality links could definitely attenuate the effect of the bad links. but you will run the risk of getting more bad links, yet again! plus, it might become even more obvious to search engines that you are building links manually. so you've got to be really careful here and not build too many at a time and only go for really excellent quality links.
-
Hi Prateek - that's cool about the unique images! - good idea.
I think if you can fix the ads and sort out your design issues, you'll be in a much better place going forward.
Fixing your link profile is going to be a massive challenge. I'll be brutally honest, it's one of the worst ones i've seen in a long time. What you should do is contact the webmasters of all the questionable sites linking to you, asking them kindly to remove the links. If there's any specific pages that a lot of bad sites are linking to - then you should remove them, leaving a 404 error and then transfer the old content on a new URL. Once you have removed as many of the bad links as you can, I would make a list of them and then send this to Google along with a re-inclusion request. If you've also smartened up your design and removed your ads - they should hopefully let you back in....but no promises i'm afraid.
All the best,
Phil
-
wow Phil, that's a really nice and accurate analysis you did of my website...
A. Yes, all the blog content is unique - it's been written by me.
B. It's difficult to get unique images but a lot of the images are totally unique - I made them myself in photoshop by merging other photos. I guess you are right, I should remove the three ads I have on my website..
C. How do I clean up my link profile? I didn't even create it. Is it possible to remove them from websites that you don't own - I highly doubt that. Should I focus on building good links and content instead?
Thanks a lot for helping me out man!
-
Thanks for your help Phillip.
I know I have lot of bad links but the funny part is I don't even know how I got them. I've never really hired anyone to build links for my website. Is it possible a competitor spammed my website with bad links?
Is it possible to get these links removed? If so, how do I do that?
If not, do you think that building more links from better websites can nullify the effect of these bad links? An SEO agency I consulted told me it was best to move to another domain but I don't want to do that - this website is my baby. I don't want to ditch it..
-
Hi Prateek,
It's tricky to say definitively why you've lost all your ranking without spending some time with your analytics, but i've had a quick look through your site and link profile and i have a few thoughts - which it would probably be worth looking into further.
- Your site doesn't have enough unique content on it, which may be causing a panda slap. - while i assume all of the blog articles are unique and written by you (they are on other sites on the web, but i think these sites have duplciated your creations) the ads, the sparse design and the non-unique images don't indicate to Google that you're a valuable authoritative resource. - i would seek to redesign the site and look lessening the prevalence of the few ads you have,
- You have an extremely dodgy looking link profile - some of your referring sites seem incomplete and spammy, you have tons of nofollow links from unrelated sources and lot of links from extremely questionable adult sites. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you are getting a penalty for these links or Google have deindexed the sites providing you these links - lessening your domain authority. I would recommend that you seek to clean up your link profile as best you can - especially the adult links.
- Your site is a quite slow to load. - to fix this, I would initially look at browser caching and the size of your images
Thanks,
Phil
-
not ranking for you brand name always hints to penalization. you have built some fishy backlinks and i see many of them on sites that are:
-
topically unrelated
-
in foreign languages
-
on forums (where often there are other spam comments, e.g. with the anchor text "viagra")
i would start by removing the forum spam, that's definitely a major reason to penalise your site.
-
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
-
Changed domains, saw significant drop in domain authority
Hello, A little over a month ago we switched our domain from A to B. The original was .com and the new one is at a .tech for good measure. We have meticulously done 301 redirects page by page but there has been a massive drop in traffic and I checked here to see that we've gone from a 30 domain authority to a 9. The company is a few months over 1 year old, but we're really looking at traffic accumulated in just about 8 months for the old domain. Is there any way to recover some of the old juice in this one other than the re-directs? Our number of backlinks have also severely dropped despite re-directs.
Technical SEO | | SteveSaf0 -
Does the domain extension effect domain authority and ranking
We have produces a website on a .company domain extension. We have produced a good sized website with unique content. However the DA remains at 1. There are no high priority issues in the page crawl. We suspect that the domain extension may be causing a lower DA. Is this a ranking factor?
Technical SEO | | easydomains0 -
Domain Authority
Hello everyone, My question is: is there any manual way to increase domain authority, rather than link building to domain (homepage) ? Thanks Eugenio
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Removing a URL from Search Results
I recently renamed a small photography company, and so I transferred the content to the new website, put a 301-redirect on the old website URL, and turned off hosting for that website. But when I search for certain terms that the old URL used to rank highly for (branded terms) the old URL still shows up. The old URL is "www.willmarlowphotography.com" and when you type in "Will Marlow" it often appears in 8th and 9th place on a SERP. So, I have two questions: First, since the URL no longer has a hosting account associated with it, shouldn't it just disappear from SERPs? Second, is there anything else I should have done to make the transition smoother to the new URL? Thanks for any insights you can share.
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Domain authority and rankings?
I have a site that sits in #1 position for its keywords right now. But it only got there about 1mth ago. The site is only about 6mths old with lots of link building. I check the domain authority and its only 37/100 with the #2, #3 sites having domain authority of 57 and 82 respectively. This site has like 800+ backlinks. While the #2 and #3 sites have 20,000+ backlinks. Does it mean that my site will LIKELY drop in rankings very soon? I know there is no certainty but wld you say that it is highly probable my site will drop?
Technical SEO | | jl2550 -
Keyword domains
Hi everyone. Two questions regarding keyword domains (e.g. "widgets.com") If we have to choose a domain with an extra word, does it make a difference to have the added word before or after? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "widgets-now.com" Does it make a difference if the extra word is a generic vs a 'real' word? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "japanese-widgets.com" Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Technical SEO | | hectorpn0 -
Seomoz api for domains working, for domains+directory not?
We're working on a tool using the seomoz api ... for domains we're always getting the right values, but for longer URLs we're having troubles ... Example: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-reasons-why-qa-sites-can-boost-your-seo-in-2011-despite-googles-farmer-update-12160 won't work http://www.seomoz.org/blog works Any idea what we might be doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | gmellak0 -
Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for Filter Search result pages--Why?
Hi, We're getting 'Yellow' Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for URLS that are in effect product search filter result pages (see link below) on our Magento ecommerce shop. Our Robot txt file to my mind is correctly set up i.e. we would not want Google to index these pages. So why does SeoMoz flag this type of page as a warning? Is there any implication for our ranking? Is there anything we need to do about this? Thanks. Here is an example url that SEOMOZ thinks that the search engines can't see. http://www.site.com/audio-books/audio-books-in-english?audiobook_genre=132 Below are the current entries for the robot.txt file. User-agent: Googlebot
Technical SEO | | languedoc
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /.js$
Disallow: /.css$
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /utm
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /customer/
Sitemap:0