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
-
My Website disappeared from Google Search Results overnight
Hello there, I'm the owner of the Website https://cours-toujours.com/, dedicated to reviewing running shoes. My Website is pretty young and I'm currently focused on building new reviews (so I keep adding new articles, week after week, I did not really focus on the rest of the website for now).Until a few days ago, I saw growing traffic on my Website, everything seemed good and I kept adding new reviews to my website.And then suddently traffic dropped and went to 0 in 2 days (I went from 550 impressions/day to 49 impressions/day in 2 days :/)When I look in the Google Search Console, I don't see any issue: my sitemaps are submitted and the correct number of URLs are reported I don't have any Manual Action or Security Issue I don't have any Removal Request Everything seems fine... But I can barely find my website in Google Search Results.When I do a site search (site:cours-toujours.com), I find only 2 pages of results, mostly non-important pages (categories, etc.).I asked in Google Community Forums, and i got this reply about my pages being too similar to one another (https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/44880689?hl=en). But I'm not really happy with this answer, as all my pages have ~1000 words of unique content (even if of course they have the same structure as they are all dedicatd to reviewing a running shoe...)Any idea where this might come from/how I can fix the issue?
Technical SEO | | SimonCoursToujours0 -
Company name ranking
Hi all, I hope somebody can share their thoughts on the below. A web designer launched my client's new website and I have been tasked with the SEO. I was approached with an immediate problem, www.clientswebsite.co.uk was ranking 9th for their company name after being indexed by Google. The search results above www.clientswebsite.co.uk were related to my client but not all, for example a direct competitor was also ranking. I have been working on the SEO for 2-3 weeks and I just managed to get to 3rd position for the company name, and then www.clientswebsite.co.uk disappeared from page 1! And now instead, an irelevant sub page is now ranking for the company name on page 2 (a contact page). I have checked and the home page is still indexed (did a site: check). The only problem software picks up is a redirect chain (http://homepage -> http://www.homepage -> https://homepage) the web developers said it wouldn't impact rankings (when I asked them to edit the htaccess file to fix it) I've listed below the SEO tasks I completed whilst attempting to rank the company name: I set up analytics and webmaster tools, in which I set up preferred domain (www) Added a sitemap Edited meta data making sure company name was included I contacted the websites above www.clientswebsite.co.uk that were relevant and asked them to place a link linking to their new website, I was successful with a couple of these. I placed www.clientswebsite.co.uk on all of their social media profiles I reformatted headers on their home page, making sure the H1 included my client's company name I found 2 extra versions of my client's home page (not exact copies, but very similar content) that had been published, so I decided to 301 redirect these to the correct home page Activated SSL and forced to HTTPS I would really appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts here, whether it be explanations or possible solutions Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Choice of domain
Hi. I want to build a new site that is optimised for a training product that we have. We have an existing domain which I'm considering pointing at this new site. This domain is one of the new .training TLDs. Let's call this domain foo.training where my main keyword to optimise for will be "foo training". I've also looked and can see that foo-training.com is available. I read up on best practices for domains here : https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain My question is will the .training domain be seen as "spammy" in any way? Am I better to just go ahead and register the .com?
Technical SEO | | rmcatalyst0 -
Inurl: search shows results without keyword in URL
Hi there, While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this. The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created. Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
Changing URL - Ranking Disappeared?
Hi All, I named a page URL /plectrums/ within the back end framework. But then decided to change it to /personalised-plectrums/ I resubmitted a GWT sitemap and 301 redirected plectrums -> personalised-plectrums My ranking for personalised plectrums has disappeared and has not come back does anyone know why this is? Or is there something I have missed? Lewis
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Umlaut in domain
Hi, My client wants to expand it's business to Germany and logically we need a domain name to match. We've found a great one and regsiterd several variants to it. However I just found out that in Germany it is possible (while here it's not) to register a domain with an umlaut. My question is: will google assign more value to: schädlinge.de than schadlinge.de when users search for schädlinge? If yes, how large will the difference be? (I will use an umlaut in the title etc) Kind regards,
Technical SEO | | media-surfer
Jason.0 -
Domain Aliases
Hi there, I've got two sites mysite.com and mysite.org .org is indexed by google, .com doesnt seem to be. .com is used for some material that is sent out, and accounts for about 20% of incoming visotors. (80% end up on .org) Is there any positive or negative effect from this? Would I benefit from 301'ing the .com to .org?
Technical SEO | | dencreative0 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10