Why does Google no longer like our site?
-
Hey guys,
I'm trying to figure out why the traffic and rankings have been plummeting on www.readprint.com. It's a collection of both public domain books and books on Amazon's store. If anyone can offer any pointers as to if it's duplicate content or ???
It used to get 300K visits/mo but has slowly been dropping over the last year.
I appreciate anyone's expertise!
-
Thanks for helping out, guys.
The homepage took the biggest hit (54% drop), but most pages took big hits from a year ago. So I'm assuming it was a site-wide drop in rankings.
When I look at the OSE metrics, it looks like readprint.com should be crushing the competition, but they're now crushing us. That's why I'm so baffled.
Perhaps the competition has more unique content, better layout, better pagespeed? I'll keep looking, but I'm hoping it's something reversible.
Thanks!
-
I had a brief look at your site and the design is very impressive indeed. I do agree with Alan that a lot of the inner pages such as author pages do lack 'unique content'.
For example, I did a Copyscape for the page: http://www.readprint.com/work-439/The-Origin-of-Species-Charles-Darwin and it found 15 same/duplicate copies on the web. I think you could introduce some sort of 'gamification' similarly to SEOMoz's Q&A forum, to get your users/members to write unique relevant content, rather than just asking them to email you.
Also I had a quick look at your website speed, and the 'first load time' is quite long. Is it on a dedicated server? Maybe you should have a look into your hosting provider. Also, you should cache the homepage, as it will improve the load time of your site.
Another question I want to ask is, the drop in traffic, I assume there were many keywords which have dropped in rankings. Were most of these rankings associated with the homepage or inner pages?
Thanks
-
Nice looking site, Colin.
And interesting information.
I really don't know what to make of the "you have stuff that I can find in other places"
A lot of people say that these days, but I think its a copout
If this was valid, then all search engines, other than google should just pack up and dig holes for a living. All book sites should close up and leave it to Amazon. All guitar makers should shut down and leave it to Gibson. Nike should be the only running shoes. All small phone companies should give up.
And Google Plus should close, because, compared to Facebook, it is weak, and a ghost town.
If your site was a perfect clone of another site, it would be a valid argument, but I doubt that is the case (I don't know your niche well enough)
You have GREAT social signals. You even have 82 G+ on the front page. That in itself is huge.
Have you thought about allowing readers to comment? you can use facebook comments. I have no idea if that helps. You really need someone here to comment who has live comments (not facebook )
Do you have internal duplicate pages?
Are you linking out to bad sites?
What does SEOMoz tell you about the site?
It looks like you have no incoming links, but that probably means SEO moz didn't know about you - or my Mozbar is broken
What do Google and Bing Webmaster Tools say?
What do your pages look like to a robot?
-
That's really helpful, Alan.
Thanks!
-
I had a quick look at your Mark Twain page, there is not much on the page that can not be found on many other web sites
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22was+born+in+Florida%2C+Missouri%2C+of+a+Virginian+family%22&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=%22was+born+in+florida%2C+missouri%2C+of+a+virginian+family%22&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk=This is what is called thin content. you need to have plenty of original content to outwiegh the duplicate
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
-
site speed
i use mid-quality pic and... but my site speed is low
On-Page Optimization | | zlbvasgabc
any suggestion?
my site is:
https://bandolini.ir/0 -
How does Google handle read more tags in Wordpress
Hi Everyone I am wondering how Google handles the read more tag in Wordpress. I pasted the link to a blog post on Google and found nothing (domain.com/post#readmore). Then I paste the version without #readmore (domain.com/post) and found that Google indexed the page but with the option to click "read more" to read it. The full blog post is not in their index, just the version asking you to read more. Is this because Google hasn't gotten to it or is Google ignoring it. I am not sure but ideally I rather have the full blog post indexed, not the read more version. I am curious to whether this will cause duplicate content issues. What are your experience with this and is it advisable to use an alternate method for read more. Maybe with a Wordpress plugin. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | gaben0 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
I've just manually edited all the page titles and meta descriptions on a site, when will this show in Google results?
I've just manually edited all of the page titles, meta descriptions and optimised the copy on a client's site. I submitted this for a new crawl on Google via Webmaster Tools but when I do a Google search the old versions are still showing. Will it still take a few weeks for the new versions to show even though Google has crawled it via Webmaster?
On-Page Optimization | | aoifep0 -
Google Places Problem
This may have been answered before but I have 2 questions. When I placed a business in Google Places, the "generic" ranking fell off the map. I now just have the 1 line Google places reference and that is all I can find. How can I get around that and get my 4 line description to show again? Do I have to delete my Places account? Before the Google Places account was built, the company was moving up the SERP ranks, now he is on pg 1 for Places but the other SERP positions have disappeared. This is true for all the keywords we are targeting. If there is not a Places reference he shows on Pg 3-5 (given the website is 4 weeks old, I think this is not bad). For the same client, he that services many of the surrounding communities. How do I get Google to recognize the various towns he services during a search? He places well for his "home" town but not at all for the other towns. if it helps any, the website is www.myairstat.com. Thanks for the help. Scott
On-Page Optimization | | scott5180 -
How to design a site map page for users (not for Google)
I would like to design a site map for my visitors so they can have a quick view on the whole content of the website. 2 questions : 1 - is this kind of site map can help in terms of SEO ? 2 - if so, what are the best practices to design it ? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | betadvisor0 -
Advice needed about site
I would like to get advice about the site http://www.wb-3d.com regarding what we should do to get it highly on Google. This seems to be a tough one as there is not enough content on the site. I would immensly appeciate any suggestion to improve the rankings. Specifically, what we should tweet and update on facebook. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050 -
Why isn't Google indexing me?
Recently got handed off a .org site for a quasi state agency here in Michigan. Turns out the developer had the site live for the past six months but left the noindex, nofollow tag on everything so the site was invisible to search engines. Obviously we wiped all of those things a couple weeks ago when we got started, added all of our sitemaps to bing/yahoo/google webmaster tools and we've already started getting indexed by yahoo and bing and showing up for branded terms...but NOTHING from Google. WMT says our pages are all indexed, but we aren't showing up for anything in search and we don't seem to be indexed at all. Granted, if this site was brand new and didn't have any links I could see us taking a little time to get found, but this site has very good .gov and .edu links, plus we've built some other solid links to it since we've launched and Google continues to ignore it. I haven't seen this before, but could Google still be ignoring us from the months of noindex, nofollowing? If so, any tips on how to get back in teh Google's good graces here?
On-Page Optimization | | NetvantageMarketing0