Ranking For Misspelling of Primary Keyword
-
I have been baffled for the past few months for ranking for the misspelling of our primary keyword BELIZE in the Google U.S. Serps.
We are nowhere to be found, but are ranking for the misspelling BELIZ (without the final "e").
We have been online since 1995 on page one everywhere. 11 months ago we did a site redesign changing over to WP as a CMS.
We changed all pages from widget-example.html to widget-example and properly 301ed all pages after deleting the old pages.
Then we accidentally de-indexed the site for a month due to a robots.txt error. This has been corrected 4 months now.
We shared this on the Google Webmaster forums and some kind folks helped with advice - nothing major in our opinion but we implemented most of the tips given.
We are doing fine everywhere with all search engines and Google itself in other areas Google.ca Google.bz Google.mx for example.
But in our primary market is the U.S. where the majority of our readers are - tourists and retirees looking for our information - we do not exist.
The joke is that searching for BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serps has us on Page One. It is a joke that is NOT funny - or maybe some human evaluator made a mistake or is playing a sick joke?
We have done a reconsideration request in case there was a manual penalty and we received the no manual penalty form letter.
I notice increasingly in Google Live Analytics people typing in our full domain name - I guess out of frustration not getting the site when inputting the primary keyword.
I find that I can write a new article and in a couple of weeks it ranks in the top couple pages. Many other pages are found via long-tail only.
I find it intriguing that yesterday I wrote a very small article, a press release actually, and today searching for the misspelling BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serp the root domain is ranked #2 and the snippet and image displayed is from this little article which is nothing really great.
I am new here. Thanks to anyone who can help.
The site:
-
Hi Mat
Being trying the GA and this is giving me a headache but looking at a tutorial on the web I am looking for Panda and/or Penguin and entered the dates given and will try to attach it here.
-
I'll ask again : When did it drop?
When ranking changes occur is important information in determining the cause. Although google updates continually big changes tend to get noticed and documented. If your ranking changes coincide with a known update (my guess is still one of the penguin updates) this will tell you what Google consider to be wrong and therefore how to fix it.
-
We have been on Page One on Google US from inception since 1995.
We notice on GWT about 2,000 backlinks from a defunct link directory. This goes up and down depending on the weather. Right now it has fallen to about 600. Here is a sample link:
http://caribbeanlinks.com/opensearch?query=Belize Cruise&hitsPerSite=4&lang=&hitsPerPage=20
We never asked to be linked there and have written several times but no response.
@NAKULGOYAL - we do well on long tail for example:
retirement in belize
living in belize
belize offshore banking
getting married in belize
belize maya
top ten things to do in belize
and many others
@mattbennet
I see your point but I do not believe we could be NOWHERE to be found for our main keyword - as stated above we have been on page one for our main keyword since 1995.
-
I looked at your backlink profile in OSE. You have the anchor text "belize" linked from a large amount of domains and with a very high amount of links. The domains linking with just the anchor text "Belize" take up nearly 23% of your link profile from linking domains. The amount of links coming to your site with the single keyword "belize" take up about 35% of your total incoming links. This is just for "Belize" and not the other various you have such as "Belize online" etc.
This is my person post-panda opinion, but I think this is likely to raise red flags with Google. It may look "over-optimized". I don't think submitting a site reconsideration requests would help - in fact, I fear it will only hurt as now Google will be reviewing all this information manually.
Second:
Your primary keyword is "belize" which is highly competitive. You may want to focus on something like "Belize Vacations" or "Belize Travel"
I just want to verify:
Have you ever ranked for the single term "belize" in the US?
Are you experiencing a decline in visits from other keywords which have historically performed well?
-
Ranking for the misspelling could be a red herring. They are by their nature far less competitive terms, so a site that can't rank for more competitive terms may do well on misspellings. Likewise for the long tail terms.
However, what you are saying does make me wonder a bit about penguin penalties. Do you know when you dropped out of the SERPs for your main term? Check back through analytics and see if you can pin it down to a week. I'd imagine it would be pretty obvious when it happened.
-
I see that you have variant anchor text links, which is good. I see an opportunity to try and give your links some internal juice. Can you get Belize and related keywords linked internally to respective pages ?
Other then that, I would continue to build content and links. I see you are ranking #2 for the misspelling, but nowhere for the correct spelling. It's not any kind of error, but the competition. You have the perfect domain. I think all you have to do is keep on building it.
The reason why your rankings could have dropped is the competition from what I have seen so far and the fact that Google has been trying to take reduce the effect of Exact Match Domains. In this case, you just need "strength" to be ranking #1.
How do you rank for other keywords/long tail etc ?
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
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
How to rank for a keyword
Hi guys, I'm looking to rank a new blog for a search term which we currently already rank #1 for. I want to create a blog which provides a better solution to a searchers query and knock our current #1 page for this new one. Is there a way to do this simply without losing the real-estate the currently ranked #1 page has already accumulated? Or is just a matter of working on this new blog to find it's own way to the top? Thanks in advance, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameseacott0 -
H1 tags and keywords for subpages, is it best practice to reuse the keywords?
So let's say I have a parent page for shoes, and I have subpages for dress shoes, work shoes, play shoes, then inside each of those pages I have dress shoe cleaning, dress shoe repair, same for work and play shoes. Would it be ok to use h1 tags like this: Shoes > Dress Shoes > Dress Shoe Cleaning Dress Shoe Repair Work Shoes > Work Shoe Cleaning Work Shoe Repair Play Shoes > Play Shoe Cleaning Play Shoe Repair Would these be considered duplicate h1 tags since cleaning and repair are used for each subpage? In certain niche companies, it's rather difficult to use synonyms for keywords. Or is it ok to just keep things simple and use Shoes > Dress Shoes > Cleaning and so on? Especially since we have urls and breadcrumbs that are structured nicely using keywords, for this example both breadcrumbs and urls read like sitename.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Confused with rankings for keywords that are not on the actual page?
Hey Guys, So I went to search a keyword, my competitor came up, when I looked for that keyword on their page i didn't see it at all, and the page is content thin, how is it they are ranking for the keyword at all? Bit confused at how this works. So having the keyword in your content is not necessary a ranking factor? Please advise and sorry if this question is really amateur, I'm sure based on this search there is more to it then that.... could you other ranking factors as to why they rank for a keyword that is not in their content? Does the whole exact keyword have to be in the content to rank? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Why is this competitor ranking so high?
I have a competitor who consistently rans #1 or close in SERPS for keyword phrase "uncontested divorce lawyerser. in analyzing his site he doesn't seem to have anywhere near the links, domain authority or page authority that would justify this preeminence Is this a black hat situation or what? His site is www.uncontesteddivorceny.comhx thx Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0 -
Cannot find reason for drop in ranking
One of our clients is a lingerie retailer, that also sells swimwear and nightwear. They have a webshop, with landing pages such as /lingerie, /swimwear and /nightwear (only in Dutch). The nightwear page is doing ok (#5 in Google NL), but for the swimwear and lingerie pages, something strange has happened and I have no clue what it is. On May 7, the /swimwear page ranked 24 for swimwear in Google NL. In that period, the homepage was ranking at #40-50. One week later, on May 14, the homepage was ranked 24 for swimwear, and the /swimwear page was nowhere to be found. The homepage is currently ranking 17/18 for swimwear. Something similar seems to have happened for lingerie. The homepage was ranking at around 11-13 for a few weeks in April/May, the /lingerie page was ranking at 8 in May, and then after the 4th of June, both the homepage and the /lingerie page no longer seem to have any decent rank for lingerie. So, trying to find the problem: I checked the Moz On-Page Grader for all three pages/keywords. All pages get an A. Robots.txt hardly contains anything, and there's no robots meta tag to block the page. Checked Google Webmaster Tools just in case, nothing out of the ordinary. The page contains 342 URL's which is a lot, but that shouldn't be too problematic, I thought? I used the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to analyze the current top 10 for lingerie, and compared it to our client's stats. Page Authority in the top 10 is 37-68, our clients is 33. Domain Authority in the top 10 is 27-100 (wiki page), our clients is 43. MozRank for the top 10 is 6,6-8,0, our clients is 6,7. MozTrust for the top 10 is 7,0-7,1, our clients is 7,0. The basics all look fine! Now, the page could use some link building, the number of links is a little low compared to the top 10 entries. We're also in the process of redesigning the page, adding more products but also more content (text and images) to inspire visitors a little more. But being low on links doesn't seem a good explanation for such a relatively sudden change in ranking. As far as we can tell, looking back at commits by our developers, nothing changed around that time that could have this impact. Of course it's possible that we missed something, we're still looking. Also, it's strange that these sudden changes took place for swimwear and especially lingerie, but not for nightwear. I'd really appreciate any tips, hints etc. to find out what's going on here. Thanks in advance! Michel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DocdataCommerce0 -
Checking keyword rankings
I have 2 questions: 1. To check keyword rankings with firefox, i am choosing: Tools>Options>Privacy>"clear all current history" Timerange to clear: Everything Check Boxes: Browsing and download history, form and search history, cookies, cache, active logins Is there anything else I need to be doing? 2. Search results in my Niche are heavily localized. Is there any way to check rankings in another area? Ex: By default, our rankings are for Northeast NJ. Is there any way to check Baltimore, for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Google drop down - keyword gone, why?
Hi guys, i received traffic off a yearly based term, this year for '2013' i noticed it is nowhere near what the yearly term was for the year before. I believe that Google has stopped the yearly term appearing in a drop-down menu from a big volume related term, my question is how do they determine what goes in the drop down menu for related/relevant searches?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0