Not ranking on Google
-
Hi all, I am optimising a site which is a hotel directory for a small island in the Mediterranean - Malta. The site is www.maltahotelsonline.com.
I did a keyword research and optimised the page. However I am now at link building stage. Since we do not have many links the site is still not ranking very well for the desired keywords (ranking fine on Bing and Yahoo yet not on Google). As a result there isn't much traffic on the site.
1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google?
2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
-
I would suggest you to change:
content='Book your hotel in Malta with Malta hotels online - Competitive prices for hotels in Malta, budget hotels, Malta excursions, transfers and more.' name='description' />
To:
Cuz this is the first time that I see an content to be declared before name.
I dont say that this would help something in your rankings, but better fix it.
-
Thank you for your suggestions Bryan! I will look into the links you shared.
-
Hi Daniela,
**1. Is there any particular issue that you can spot on this site that is not allowing it to rank well on Google? **
Run the seoMOZ report card to make sure your on page data is crawl able without too much error.
Also you have a PMD (Partial Match Domain), these URLs where recently punished if they had low quality links or unnatural link profiles.
2. Any suggestions on link-building please?
I would focus on a clean link profile (anchoring 50%-75% of you links as your Brand name or URL )
There are many ways to earn links. SEOmoz is full of articles to help one rank, however what works in one niche might not work in another.
You can find the best bloggers in your niche (it could be a "malta travel blog") and have them share an article for you.. Maybe give them a free stay if they blog about you.... (This is one example of #RCS)
Hope this Helps.
-
Hi Andrea,
Thanks for your feedback.
I'm definitely with you that it takes time to rank and that it is not easy for people to find us.
We created new sections in the site where we can update content on regular basis - e.g. the About Malta and the News & Events section. I am trying to get a special offer too to make it more attractive for the consumer and instill some word of mouth.
We've done a small PPC campaign on google yet keywords were expensive for the identified keywords in the market we want to reach.
Thank you for pointing out the keyword stuffing issue - I will revise the content again.
With regards to the EMD update- we are adding original content, thus hoping that Google won't see our site as low-quality.
-
Well, if this work you are doing is relatively recent, it can take time to get rankings. Especially if you have limited inbound links - it's not easy for people to find you. So what else are you doing besides SEO to get the word out about your site - blogs? Inbound marketing? What are you doing to drive traffic?
It seems like you may be keyword stuffing "Malta" and "Malta hotels" to the point where it seems spammy - this is a bad thing. It doesn't read naturally for the user. Your main page and why Malta pages also have similar page titles - you may want to tweak that; your main page title tag is really stuffed. And, keep this in mind: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/your-guide-to-googles-emd-algorithm-update/49915/
Just a few initial thoughts.
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
-
Will 301 affect my present Google ranking
Hello , I am in a fix right now. I have a website which is ranking well for many keywords in search engines.I am redirecting all my pages and blogs to new website with new domain name for better user experience and will be adding more content to new website. If i redirect all pages and posts from present website to new website will it affect my present rankings. What can be the possible effects that my present website will have. I need to fix this as soon as possible. I want to redirect so please tell me what best should be done as well. Thanks
Technical SEO | | wallacep0 -
Homepage is deindexed in Google
Happened sometime on the 12th or 13th of Feb (is there a way to tell exactly besides referring to GA?).
Technical SEO | | Shinosky
I've been on the Google Webmasters Tools forums trying to nail this down - https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/OgpmNCc3IFA/mmtgUilyXUUJ I can only think that Google is viewing this as duplicate content from an internal page for example: http://mudlifeled.com/shop Very frustrating because we were moving up on the first page for some good brand key words and traffic was climbing. Now I've got my hands up and am at a loss to what I can do.0 -
Google dance tools - do they still give an indication of rankings to come?
I can't remember the tool I used in the past but it searched a number of data centres which gave a pretty good indication of what your new rankings would be once full updated, is this still the case today? If so, can anyone recommend any tools?
Technical SEO | | designguy760 -
# in url affecting rank
Hi I am building links to a page www.companyname.com/category.index.php There is also another similar url www.companyname.com/category.index.php#. This page is linked to from the non # page. This is a new client and I'm not entirely sure why that link is there. Am I correct in thinking that these two urls are different in the eyes of the search engines? If so, would some of the link juice to www.companyname.com/category.index.php be transferred to www.companyname.com/category.index.php# and affect the ranking of the non # page? I hope this makes sense! Thanks
Technical SEO | | sicseo0 -
Google Page speed
I get the following advice from Google page speed: Suggestions for this page The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 request(s) and 77.1KiB. http://www.irishnews.com/ http://www.irishnews.com/index.aspx I'm not sure how to fix this the default page is http://www.irishnews.com/index.aspx, anybody know what need to be done please advise. thanks
Technical SEO | | Liammcmullen0 -
Google.com
Hi We are managing a .com site for a client working on getting the site ranking. The site is hosted in the US. The content is rich, deep and unique. The site is in a competitive market but had begun ranking top 50 for a selection of keywords and we could see many more in the top 100. The site is now going backwards and only has a few keywords ranking top 50 and all the others have disappeared from the rankings all together. Any thought as to what could cause this. The site is managed from the Uk but as mentioned is hosted in the US. No penguin issues as all content unique, rich, relevant and fresh. SEO is also managed from the UK. Thoughts
Technical SEO | | SEOwins0 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0 -
Page rank and ranking down
Hi I blog at Technostarry. Some 3 months back during page rank update, my page rank went down from 3 to 2. I don't know the reason behind this. And now, my traffic and ranking is also down. I am not involved in any bad SEO practices, I don't copy paste and I write original content. I am too confused as why and what has happened with my site. If someone could analyze my blog and look at my weak points then that would be great. I would like to get any suggestions to get back my ranking and also page rank back. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | technotech0