Viral page not ranking onGoogle
-
A user generated talk thread on our social networking site went viral yesterday and generated around 36000 extra visits.
But, when we Google the key phrase in this thread our site is not even in the Top 50. Instead the pages are dominated by other (lesser) websites referring to the content and linking to the thread
The page is indexed
The on page SEO grade for the key phrase and variant according to SEOMoz is A
Our home page has a PR of 7 and an SEO Domain Authority of 76
We are the original source of this content
Other talk threads on different subjects in a similar category are ranking on page 1 of Google.
What's happening?
-
Mind shooting over the Query and URL in question? I'd love to take a peek directly.
-
Thanks Kris. The thing is our discussion threads are indexed daily and other new talk topics were already ranking 1 on Google for the title of the thread. We were the original source and we have good site authority and PageRank...
Since the topic went viral, the sites linking to us were not necessarily friendly sites or sites even known to us. The issue is not that we need to rank for that wacky topic (which was user generated don't forget) but that despite being the original source we failed to rank at all, nowhere, while all the sites talking about us were on page one and beyond. Kind of puzzling.
-
If it just went viral yesterday you might want to give it a few days to see ranking changes. Also remember that google still primarily relies heavily on links. Traffic != links. The other pages you mentioned may be more heavily direct-linked to than your page. My recommendation would be to hit up those people discussing your content and make sure they are placing a do follow link back to your content, preferably with an anchor text that either directly or partially matches the subject you are hoping to rank for.
-
Hi Cecily - what's the URL and I can look at your on site SEO
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
-
What would cause a major drop in ranking for (images) on both desk top and mobile? Web rankings are holding OK?
Sometime between Nov 8th and Nov 11th are rankings on Google for images dropped substantially. Our web rankings are holding OK. any idea!
Technical SEO | | OCFurniture0 -
Local Landing Pages struggling with rankings although I've done most things needed. Any idea?
Hi Mozzers, I am wondering if someone could advise if there's anything obvious here as to why my local landing pages suck ranking wise even though I have done all of the following. http://goo.gl/Lr4HXa I am trying to rank for Garden tool hire Bristol on my landing page. Main category page is garden tool hire Consitant NAP - Citations. Local branch address on Page , in title tag, H1 tag and the address is in on page content which is unique. Schema.org has been set up with address in this aswell etc. Pagination set up and view all page has concanical tag pointing to page 1 Speed not an issue as this is a fast site. Currently all the product links on the page are H3 tags but I've seen this on lots of other sites. All my NAP Citations point to the parent branch pages although I don't have any individual deep links pointing to this page. Unique Content I currently don't have internal links to relevant articles on my blog page as I have those on my main category landing page as you can see here - http://goo.gl/sO9A9U but I can add these as well to all my location specific landing pages if you think it would help. Any thoughts greatly appreciated Pete
Technical SEO | | PeteC120 -
Switchboard Tags - Multiple desktop pages pointing to one mobile page
I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users. Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page. However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page. I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether. Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?
Technical SEO | | JBlank0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Why am I ranking for this
In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to! Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues). The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain. The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home). Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite. I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously. The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term! The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for help hehe thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Wrong page ranking even after fixes. Why?
Howdy, I've read a number of posts on this issue and followed all the advice I could find. My issue is this: several of our targeted keywords have the wrong page ranking which results in a loss of conversion and high bounce rate. I use the site:mydomain.com operator to see how the pages are ranking which I find really useful. One of our targeted keywords is 'wedding stationery' and the page which should rank is shop.confetti.co.uk/branch/wedding-stationery however this page ranks 3rd on our domain. I've done the following: Optimised the correct page De-optimised the ranking pages Added links from the incorrectly ranking page to the page I want to rank using keyword anchor text Added internal links to the page I want to rank from high Page Authority pages using keyword anchor text Here is a link to the SERP which shows the ranking for our domain for the 'wedding stationery' search term. I made the changes a couple of weeks ago. Any advice or explanations as to what is causing this would be greatly received. Thanks in advance, Brendan.
Technical SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
Home page penalty?
What does it mean when your home page has a penalty? I have a site that has good rankings for many pages, but my home page seems to be penalized by Google. I tried searching for my home page URL in Google, www.xxxxxx.com and my page doesn't show up, but sub pages do show up? What would cause this penalty and how do you correct this issue.
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
No. of links on a page
Is it true that If there is a huge number of links from the source page then each link will provide very little value in terms of passing link juice ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050