Domain that ranked 4 has now disappeared from search results
-
Hi Guys,
I have a website for a realestate property, it use to rank 4 but has now suddenly disappeared from search results altogether, a search for the domain 1boydstreetalbertpark.com will bring it up (so I assume it has not been blacklisted), but if I search for '1 boyd street albert park' (it use to come up at 4) it doesn't seem to come up at all anymore.
I know the content is not original and it is the same on other sites (it is the same content the real estate agents send to everyone) but why it suddenly disappear and I would of thought having the actual search term in the domain would help it at least appear in the results.
Any Idea?
-
If you do a search for the one block of text that is on your page, in quotes, I get 16 results. (I'm assuming that the text is the mls info?) What is interesting though is that your site is not one of those results, even when I click on "see similar results".
My guess is that Google sees that the entire site is a duplication and as such has severely penalized it. Try changing the wording up so that it is original and see what that does.
I run a real estate site as well, and for our own listings I will always make a completely original page so that we stand above the crowd full of duplicate mls info. The other thing that I have found is that building one or two links to the page using the address as anchor text is often enough to skyrocket us to the number one position.
EDITED to add:
I should add that for our sites we do not do individual pages like you have done. The only benefit to this as I see it is to show your client that they have their own website. Rather, what I would do is to create a page on my website such as www.mysite.com/1boydstreetalbertpark and I can redirect 1boydstreetalbertpark.com to that page. This accomplishes a few things:
-you have the power and trust of your existing domain to back you up
-if potential buyers end up on your site but don't like that property, they may end up looking at your other listings, or your about us page
-if links get built to the page then it benefits your domain. For example, we had one client who was so excited to see the fantastic photos of her house on our site that she shared our page with thousands of facebook friends and VOILA, we had a huge influx of visits from potential clients. In this case it wasn't a link, but a facebook share, but it certainly could have been a link.
-
Lots of domains on same ip with identical biz model
http://revip.info/ipinfo/119.82.150.40
That's my bet.
-
Hey Warren,
Man, I'm really sorry to hear about the drop. I took a quick look but I'm gonna answer given what you said first.
If the content really is duplicated, that's going to be the first and loudest bell for me. The other domains that ranked are of higher authority (they have an established history, more quality links, etc.). Given the opportunity to rank a site of such high authority (which in turn offers several listing to clients, thus enhancing their browsing experience) vs. yours it's going to be tough to change their mind.
Food for thought:
The fact that the domain is so closely matched to the address could potentially look spammy. Pair that up with the duplicate content and it could appear rather nefarious to the Goog. I don't think it's that bad, but keep that in your noggin for future reference.
A long time ago the real estate industry felt a slap by Google for shotty link practices. I got a ton of real estate work back then (cleaning stuff up mostly). We often played with the idea to create mini sites for each property but simply didn't think it was the best way or working their online marketing. Large risks were among the hurdles.
Fast forward a few years and there's so much one can do to gain local exposure. That arena is really built for sites like those that are out-ranking yours (sites that have many listings, sort features, etc.). There are so many things you can do to promote individual properties on a single site that it's generally your best route.
Not knowing your business model, that's my first suggestion. Have a single site and promote the listings that way.
But if this is where you're at, then it may be as simple as getting some unique content on the site. You might read some advice to "make sure it is XX% different" but I would say scrap and write something truly unique. If it's in your budget, you can find freelance writers all over the place on the web that will get some decent content on there for you.
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
-
Value of dormant domain
My client used to own a successful domain. They sold the business, the domain was not used by the purchaser. My client bought back the business and redirects the original STRONG domain to their new domain. How can I find out current page rank, traffic, etc of the original domain? Mik
Technical SEO | | mcorso0 -
Move from 4 Domains to 1
Hey Moz Community We are running 4 domains at the moment. www.rapturecamps.com www.surfcamp.travel www.surfcampbali.com www.surfcampinportugal.com We started of our business with 1. after a view years in business we got the option to buy the other 3 domains which have ranked quite well with certain keywords. As its quite allot of work maintaining all these websites with two languages, we where thinking of actually moving number 2, 3 ,4 all to number 1. All domains receive still some good rankings as well as daily hits. So we kinda like would like to keep the SEO Juice. Therefore we where researching for some time what would be the best practice todo so. For us there are two possible options We go trough all posts/pages on the domain 2,3,4 and copy the content over to domain 1. After thats done we create 301 redirects on the domains 2,3,4 linking them back to domain 1 posts/pages. We do do so by manually adding the 301's into the htaccess file, so we are able to delete the Wordpress installations. Our we just copy the Pages/Posts from the domains 2,3,4 to the domain 1 and then kill the 2,3,4 domains afterwords, and let google index these Pages/Posts on the new domain. This way we think we would loose the whole SEO Juice from the old domains. The reason we are asking this one here, we have been reading that this method could lead to red flags at google if we redirect to much Pages/Post back to Domain 1. Hopefully someone here can help us answer that question.
Technical SEO | | 5Gates0 -
Search results indexed
Hi there, is is bad practice in seo to have search results for products indexed? For example a search result of holidays to Ibiza, with lots of deals coming up? its a search query url that would be indexed, with just an image and price per product on the page, with about 10 per page? Any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
"noindex" internal search result urls
Hi, Would applying "noindex" on any page (say internal search pages) or blocking via robots text, skew up the internal site search stats in Google Analytics? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | RaksG0 -
Can 404 results from external links hurt site ranking?
Hello, I'm helping a university transition to a brand new website. In some cases the URLs will change between the old site and new site. They will put 301 redirects in place to make sure that people who have old URLs will get redirected properly to the new URLs. However they also have a bunch of old pages that they aren't using anymore. They don't really care if people still try to get to them (because they don't think many will), but they do care about the overall search engine rankings. I know that if a site has internal 404 links, that could hurt rankings. However can external links that return a 404 hurt rankings? Ryan
Technical SEO | | GreenHatWeb0 -
Google Search Parameters
Couple quick questions. Is using the parameter pws=0 still useful for turning off personalization? Is there a way to set my location as a URL parameter as well? For instance, I want to set my location to United States, can this be done with a URL param the same way as pws=0?
Technical SEO | | nbyloff0 -
How can I use a keyword based domain to rank for my existing site?
Hi everyone, From my understanding if your keywords are in your domain name it can help you rank for the keyword. My site www.pixelchefs.com was affected from the latest Google Algorithm changes, as I used my main site as a testing ground for all my back linking. Our site was a single page with Jquery slide, late February the same time with the Google algo changes we uploaded our new site, larger site with lots of pages and info. Result of that was that home page has PR3 and all other pages PR0. Well I don't really depend on Google for any work as most of my work comes from referrals.......but While searching for names for my private page I came across the domain name www.DesignOrlando.com, The specific keyword gets 22,210 view per month according to Google analytics and also contains part of the keyword for all the keywords I am after. I want to use the domain name for my main site but i am not sure what is the best way to forward the domain so Google can start reading my site as DesignOrlando.com Any Suggestions will be very appreciated.
Technical SEO | | alex_pixelchefs0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0