My Domain Authority is high but don't rank in serps
-
So i'm a beginner/intermediate SEO and uptil about 3 weeks ago i enjoyed Top 3 rankings for all my keywords(VIrtual Assistant,Virtual Assistants, Virtual Personal Assistant,Virtual Personal Assistants and so on) for my site www.247VirtualAssistant.com. All of a sudden i dropped in rankings and can't figure out why. I ran a link analysis and nothing looks like it changed, in fact i still command much higher domain authority than my competition, but i'm stuck on the bottom of the 2nd page. I can't tell if i'm being penalized, if the other sites all of sudden just outperformed me or something else is happening here. I've also noticed a lot of "dancing" in my serps, I've been in 2nd last position on the 2nd page, then 1st of the third page, then last on the 2nd page and so on. Can someone please help me make sense of this?? Thanks!
Thomas, a very confused an desperate website owner
-
I'm not 100% sure of the latest follow vs nofollow ratio guidelines, but running your homepage URL through OSE suggests that maybe too many of your top links are nofollow (18 out of your top 50) - most seem to be fairly spammy blog type comments. Perhaps try and target less spammy links?
Just trying to be helpful, please don't take it the wrong way.
Brad
-
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense and it's something I've wanted to combat for a little while. I beleive i can fix the copscape problem by just rewritng all my content but duplicate content on my site itself("Would you like to know more about Virtual Assistants? Fill out the form below for a FREE consultation!") comes from my contact form which is on most of my pages. Do i need to have a unique version on each page?
Thank you! This site and this community rocks!
-
Hi Shajan,
I've only taken a quick look at your homepage but it looks as though you might well be over optimising. The phrase "virtual assistant appears" 38 times on the page which is too much considering the amount of text on the page. It doesn't read very naturally. There was a great post on SEOmoz a couple of weeks back which you might want to take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730
Hope that helps,
Brendan.
-
Sounds like you could have been caught up in the latest panda update or you have some other quality related issues. As a quick check I ran your homepage through copyscape.com and it came back with 10 or more matches and I tried googling a chunk of your text which came back with more than 100 other matching sites:
Google this in the double quotes to see what I mean:
"Would you like to know more about Virtual Assistants? Fill out the form below for a FREE consultation!"
You have uniqueness issues for starters so looks like you have been filtered my friend. I would give this a read for starters:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
Then make an honest appraisal of your site and your content. A batch crawl with copyscape would be a good idea and then just remove or rewrite the weak or duplicate stuff and you will make your way back into the rankings if everything else is straight.
Hope it helps
Marcus
-
I don't think you're being penalized, you wouldn't just drop one page down. I suggest you take a good look at all the recent changes you've made on and off site. This could be the case of some of your links being lost or devalued.
Higher DA does not guarantee better ranking, it does help your pages to rank better but you still have to optimise them for your keywords.
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
-
Forwarding a .org domain to a .com domain: any negative impact to consider?
Hello! I have a question I've been unable to find a clear answer to. My client's primary domain is a .com with a satisfactorily high DA. My client owns the .org version of its domain (which has a very low DA, I suppose due to inactivity) but has never forwarded it on. For branding/visibility/traffic reasons, I'd like to recommend they set up the .org domain to forward to the .com domain, but I wanted to ask a few questions first: 1. Does forwarding low-value DA domains to high-value DA domains have any negative authority/SEO impact? 2. If the .org domain was to be forwarded, am I correct that an SSL cert is not necessary for it if the .com domain has an SSL cert? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms1 -
Migrating Customers Off Domain, DO NOT Want to Pass Ranking Signals
Hey everyone! Thanks in advance for any help on this. I work for a SaaS company that has all of our customer apps and assets on our company domain. This has resulted in a lot of backlinks pointing to our domain, and a lot of pages indexed as well. I'm working with product to migrate all customers onto a separate domain, but a concern is that we need to still move the customer content to the new domains somehow without passing any of this backlink info. Am I correct in my assumption that if we 301 all of the apps and assets, all of that backlink info stays the same? What would be the best way to do this? Could we 302 everything and then wait like, 30 days and delete the 302? Would that still fix the problem, or does all of that backlink data "stick" after the 302 is deleted? Any additional thoughts would be extremely helpful!!
Technical SEO | | rachelmeyer0 -
Why isn't my homepage number #1 when searching my brand name?
Hi! So we recently (a month ago) lunched a new website, we have great content that updates everyday, we're active on social platforms, and we did all that's possible, at the moment, when it comes to on site optimization (a web developer will join our team this month and help us fix all the rest). When I search for our brand name all our social profiles come up first, after them we have a few inner pages from our different news sections, but our homepage is somewhere in the 2nd search page... What may be the reason for that? Is it just a matter of time or is there a problem with our homepage I'm unable to find? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Orly-PP0 -
John Mueller says don't use Schema as its not working yet but I get markup conflicts using Google Mark-up
I watched recently John Mueller's Google Webmaster Hangout [DEC 5th]. In hit he mentions to a member not to use Schema.org as it's not working quite yet but to use Google's own mark-up tool 'Structured Data Markup Helper'. Fine this I have done and one of the tags I've used is 'AUTHOR'. However if you use Google's Structured Data Testing Tool in GWMT you get an error saying the following Error: Page contains property "author" which is not part of the schema. Yet this is the tag generated by their own tool. Has anyone experienced this before? and if so what action did you take to rectify it and make it work. As it stands I'm considering just removing this tag altogether. Thanks David cqbsdbunpicv8s76dlddd1e8u4g
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
When rankings dip what's the best diagnostic procedure?
Bonjourno from 10 degrees C lighly raining Wetherby UK 🙂 Every so often SEO feels like a game of snakes & ladders. One minute your rankings go up and then then within the click of a mouse they drop back down. Like a Greek play you begin to feel our mortal lives as SEO pundits is controlled by the Google Gods. A case in point is illustrated here in this graph:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/lincoln-drop_zpseeb04690.jpg Now if i want to explain why the rapid dip has occured for target term "Lincoln Solicitors" here's is what i'd do: 1. Go to webmaster tools and check for crawl errors 2. See if a Google algo change has changed the rules of engagment 3. Check another site administrator hasnt tinkered with the original layout But i wonder what process do other SEO practitioners follow to explain to a disgruntled client - "Why have my rankings that i pay you to look after nose dived?" Any insights welcome:-)0 -
Site drop in SERPS after domain down for three plus weeks
Have had a clients site that has been staple in the SERPS for the last four years that we have worked on it. However they had hosting issues a couple of months back which they didn't sort for two to three weeks. Since there the main keyword has bounced around between 24th and 44th in the google results. The drop ties in with the hosting issue but the client does seem to believe that this is the source of the issue. Can someone point me towards some online articles that would explain this for them. Some of the keywords have not suffered as badly but the one key term is still in the mid 20's. I am sure it is suffering a minus 20 for the keyword as it was normally 4th or 5th in the results. We don't host the site and the client had know idea were it was hosted. What is so annoying is that it is us who pointed out the site was down. Thanks in advance everyone 🙂
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
What Parts Of Domain Registration Change Affect Rank
Could changing one's physical address for a domain or going from public to private registration have a negative affect on rank? Other factors? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 945011