My site has disapeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why?
-
my site has disappeared from the serps. Could someone take a look at it for me and see if they can find a reason why? It used to rank around 4 for the search "austin wedding venues" and it still ranks number three for this search on Bing. I haven't done any SEO work on it in a while so i don't think i did anything to make Google mad but now it doesn't even rank anywhere in the top 160 results. Here's the link:
http://austinweddingvenues.org
Thanks in advance Mozzers!
Ron
-
Actually, what you need to build is more content.
-
One more question....being as this site has very few links, would it hurt or help to add about 10 of the highest page rank directory links on the seomoz directory list before getting some natural links first?
Thanks again everyone!
-
Yes, i think it is EMD. i'll build more thanks, thanks for the input!
-
I just checked and don't see any messages that are saying i have an issue. I think this was EMD.
-
I just read up on the EMD algo change and i think that was it. i'm going to have to build more links to get it back i think....thanks everyone for the input!
-
No, i always keep my customized search set to off. i checked my ranking by typing in "austin wedding venues" in google in internet explorer. This isn't just a simple drop from competitors building links and knocking me down a few places. my site has disappeared from the serps. any clue as to why this happened? I'm stumped....
-
One more suggestion. You are not using .htaccess to either force www or force non-www. From the way you typed your link above, it seems you don't want to use www. Therefore, put this in your .htaccess file..
# Redirect www urls to non-www RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.austinweddingvenues\.org [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://austinweddingvenues.org/$1 [R=301,L]Be sure to also specify this in Google Webmaster tools. You will need to verify that you have access to both www and non-www, so do that first before adding the lines above to your .htaccess file.
-
Good advice from these people. Check Google Webmaster tools for any notifications. I'm leaning towards Deb's explanation: Exact Match Domain.
You only have 17 root domains linking to you. Try to increase that
You also only have 2 pages indexed in Google. Have you submitted your sitemap to them? Have you checked to make sure you aren't blocking the bots?
-
when did you lose the ranking .. seem like EMD is the culprit but no way to tell unless we have the exact date
-
Hi Ron,
The first thing to ask is when you were seeing your website ranking around 4th how did you do this? Did you use a ranking tool or your browser. The reason I ask is that when using a browser your search results can be personalized to you. So if you often go to your website then you may see it for a keyword search when really it isn't placed there. To be sure exactly where you rank use a non-personalized search or a ranking tool like the one on SEOMoz.
Second, it doesn't look like you are doing anything odd on-site (i.e. no black-hat seo tactics) so that's good. And, your backlinks are low so not sure if that would be the case but you need to have a look at Google Webmaster Tools to confirm.
Thirdly, a drop in rankings could be due to competition. If your competitors are actively optimizing their website and building quality links and you aren't then they can knock you off the rankings.
Hope that helps some.
Davinia
-
Shot in the dark here, but have you checked your Google Webmaster account for any messages from Google? I know some folks whose rankings went way down and didn't know why until they checked and found the dreaded "unnatural links" letter waiting for them.
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 site in 2 page
my site in 2 page how can i rank with this keywords in dubai legal translation in Dubai
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | saharali150 -
Why Google cached another site, not mine?
Hi Guys, please help me. I need your help regarding my business website i.e. https://www.kamagratablets.com/. Before 8-10 days it was ranked in top 10 from home page but I lost my position and ranking page also changed by Google. If you will check caching of this website then you will see Google cache another site - http://www.hiphoptoptower.com/ - I have checked my code and nothing found related to this website. Please check and help me on this point, how can I remove this site from caching and get my previous ranking in Google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
Whitehat site suffering from drastic & negative Keyword/Phrase Shifts out of the blue!
I am the developer for a fairly active website in the education sector that offers around 30 courses and has quite an actively published blog a few times a week and social profiles. The blog doesn't have comments enabled and the type of visitor that visits is usually looking for lessons or a course. Over the past year we have had an active input in terms of development to keep the site up to date, fast and following modern best practises. IE SSL certificates, quality content, relevant and high powered backlinks ect... Around a month ago we got hit by quite a large drop in our ranked keywords / phrases which shocked us somewhat.. we attributed it to googles algorithm change dirtying the waters as it did settle up a couple of weeks later. However this week we have been smashed again by another large change dropping almost 100 keywords some very large positions. My question is quite simple(I wish)... What gives? I don't expect to see drops this large from not doing anything negative and I'm unsure it's an algorithm change as my other clients on Moz don't seem to have suffered either so it's either isolated to this target area or it's an issue with something occurring to or on the site? QfkSttI T42oGqA
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | snowflake740 -
Rank drop ecommerce site
Hello, We're going to get an audit, but I would like to hear some ideas on what could cause our ranking drop. There's no warnings in GWT. We deleted 17 or so blogs (that had no backlinks pointing to these blogs and were simply for easy links) last summer thinking that they weren't white hat so we had to start eliminating them. At the same time, we eliminated a few sitewide paid links that were really strong. With all of this deletion, our keywords started to drop. For example, our main keyword went from first to third/fourth. With the deletions, our keywords dropped immediately a couple of spots, then with no more deletions, all of our keywords have been slowly dropping over the last seven months or so. Right now we are at the bottom of the first page for that same main keyword, and other keywords look similar. We have 70 linking root domains, of which: 15 are blogs with no backlinks that were created simply for the purpose of easy links. We didn't delete them all yet because of the immediate ranking drop when we deleted the last ones. One PR5 site has links to our home page scattered throughout it's lists of resources for people in different states in the US. It doesn't look like a standard paid link site, but it has many paid links in it's different pages. One PR4 site has our logo with another paid link logo at the bottom of one of it's pages. There are 2 other paid links from two PR4 sites that look editorial. There are other links on the sites to other websites that are paid. All links for these 2 sites look editorial. That's all the bad stuff. Other things that could be causing drop in rank - > Our bread crumbs are kind of messed up. We have a lot of subcategory pages that rel=cononical to main categories in the menu. We did this because we had categories that were exactly the same. So you'll drill down on a category page and you'll end up on a main category. To the average user, it seems perfectly fine. Our on-site SEO still has a few pages that repeat words in the titles and h1 tags several times (especially our #1 main keyword), titles similar to something like: running shoes | walking shoes | cross-training shoes where a word is repeated 2 or 3 times. Also, there are a few pages that are more keyword stuffed than we would like in the content. Just a couple of paragraphs but 2 keywords are dispersed in them three times each. The keywords in this content is not in different variations, it's exactly the keyword. We've still got a few URLs that are keywords stuffed with like 3 different keywords. We may have many 404 errors (due to some mistakes we made with the URLs in our cart) - if Google hasn't deindexed them all then we could have dozens of 404s on important category pages. But nothing is showing up in GWT. Our sitemap does not include any broken links. Google is confused about our branding it seems. I'm adding branding to the on-site SEO but right now Google often shows keywords as our branding when Google changes the way the title tag is displayed sometimes in the search engines. We don't link out to anyone. We have lots of content, almost no duplicate content, and some authoritative very comprehensive articles. Your thoughts on what to do to get our rankings back up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Can I get updated opinions on PR Web?
I saw Moz has discussed PR web in earlier posts, but they are mostly months to years old. I'm wondering if PR Web is a good service? A lot of my competitors use it, but it seems just like a paid link to me. If for whatever reason, PR Web is an approved loophole, does anyone have any suggestions on which plan to purchase? Thanks, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Looking for a Way to Standardize Content for Thousands of Pages w/o Getting Duplicate Content Penalties
Hi All, I'll premise this by saying that we like to engage in as much white hat SEO as possible. I'm certainly not asking for any shady advice, but we have a lot of local pages to optimize :). So, we are an IT and management training course provider. We have 34 locations across the US and each of our 34 locations offers the same courses. Each of our locations has its own page on our website. However, in order to really hone the local SEO game by course topic area and city, we are creating dynamic custom pages that list our course offerings/dates for each individual topic and city. Right now, our pages are dynamic and being crawled and ranking well within Google. We conducted a very small scale test on this in our Washington Dc and New York areas with our SharePoint course offerings and it was a great success. We are ranking well on "sharepoint training in new york/dc" etc for two custom pages. So, with 34 locations across the states and 21 course topic areas, that's well over 700 pages of content to maintain - A LOT more than just the two we tested. Our engineers have offered to create a standard title tag, meta description, h1, h2, etc, but with some varying components. This is from our engineer specifically: "Regarding pages with the specific topic areas, do you have a specific format for the Meta Description and the Custom Paragraph? Since these are dynamic pages, it would work better and be a lot easier to maintain if we could standardize a format that all the pages would use for the Meta and Paragraph. For example, if we made the Paragraph: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area.” As a note, other content such as directions and course dates will always vary from city to city so content won't be the same everywhere, just slightly the same. It works better this way because HTFU is actually a single page, and we are just passing the venue code to the page to dynamically build the page based on that venue code. So they aren’t technically individual pages, although they seem like that on the web. If we don’t standardize the text, then someone will have to maintain custom text for all active venue codes for all cities for all topics. So you could be talking about over a thousand records to maintain depending on what you want customized. Another option is to have several standardized paragraphs, such as: “Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area. Followed by other content specific to the location
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CSawatzky
“Find your [Topic Area] training course in [City, State] with ease.” Followed by other content specific to the location Then we could randomize what is displayed. The key is to have a standardized format so additional work doesn’t have to be done to maintain custom formats/text for individual pages. So, mozzers, my question to you all is, can we standardize with slight variations specific to that location and topic area w/o getting getting dinged for spam or duplicate content. Often times I ask myself "if Matt Cutts was standing here, would he approve?" For this, I am leaning towards "yes," but I always need a gut check. Sorry for the long message. Hopefully someone can help. Thank you! Pedram1 -
SERPs recovery? When can I believe it?
Here's a happy story: Some of you folks with sharp memories may remember my questions and worry over the last 3+ months regarding our fall into the abyss on Google after great positions for over a decade (we've always been fine in Bing and Yahoo). And our company name URL was still #1 so no site-wide penalty. Well......I've been working hard on fixing this in a smart way with all the ingredients I've been learning about. Thank you to SEOMozers for all the help!! There's still plenty to do, especially in the link earning department, but I've come really far from where I was in the Fall. Anyway. I am here right now to report what may be true to life fantastic news. I was starting to suspect an improvement last week, but it proved to be wrong. Then, I saw another sign yesterday but couldn't trust it. Today, my latest SEOMoz report is showing me the following for the several keywords we lost position down to "not in the top 50" for. keyword 1: up 44 points to #6keyword 2: no change still at #4
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gfiedel
keyword 3: up 46 points to # 4
keyword 4: up 43 points to #7
keyword 5: up 46 points to #4
keyword 6: up 2 points to #2 What I'm wondering is if this is real. ;o). I'm pinching myself. I realize that it could be one of those sliding readjustment things and we'll drop back down, but we are not a new site. It seems that even if that is the case, it still must illustrate something good. Some kind of elimination of possibilities for why the drop occurred in the first place. I did a few things in this past week that may have put it over the tipping point. One of which was signing up for adwords a week ago. I'm happy to give details if anyone is interested. A few specific questions: 1. What might this be showing me?
2. We have about a 45% number of anchor text footer links in client sites (we're a web dev co) one or two of which are numbering in the hundreds have keywords in them and are continuing to generate more links due to ecomm and large databases. I was gearing up to remove them or get them moved out of the footer so there's only one, but now I'm afraid to touch anything. Most of the footer links are just our company name or "site design". Any suggestions? 3. any other bits of advice for this situation are appreciated. I don't want to blow it now! Thanks!0 -
Do backlinks with good anchor text from bad sites help?
Hi, In the Netherlands, the SEO competition for terms like loans is very competitive. I see a website in this industry that seems to be doing very well based on links with good anchor text from sites that seem quite worthless to me, such as: http://www.online-colleges-helper.com/ and http://www.alohapath.com/ My question is: is it worth pursuing this type of links? I assume these must be paid links, or am I wrong? I'd really rather not go down this route but I don't want to be outranked by someone who is using these types of links... Many thanks in advance for any type of insight! Annemieke
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnnemiekevH0