Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Site not ranking in Google but comes up #1 in Yahoo and Bing
-
Hi everyone,
I've been working on SEO for this site for about 2 years and for some reason the site has just tanked in google. However it shows up #1 in yahoo and bing for the same search.
Phrase: "commercial foundation repair mn"
If anyone can shed some light on the issue I would really appreciate it. They do have a sister-site: american-waterworks.com that may be causing issues as they link a lot of content to amww but not the other way around.
Thanks
Eric
-
Hi Eric,
more info on the over optimization penalty here.
-
_Few issues - _
Titles are too keywords focused
Meta descriptions are same site wideHowever, as Ryan has clarified, ranking in Google is a different ballgame altogether. And one more thing, I cannot find your website listed in Google Local. Get your website listed in Google Local as it might help your website rank high in some local terms.
-
Simply put don't make your pages for SEO, make them for your users/visitors, do your main SEO offsite.
Time and time again though, we've experienced the google high - bing/yahoo low or the google low - yahoo/bing high.
It would seem each search engine reviews the others and do not want to display the same results, after all, what would be the point?
So figure out which one you want to target and go for it with whatever methods that get you up there. I think it'd be quite hard to get #1 for all search engines, unless of course your a site like wiki.
Good luck!
-
Thanks for the replies,
I haven't been involved in the SEO community as much lately, can you elaborate or point me to a resource about the "over optimization penalty"?
Thanks
Eric
-
Eric, try focusing on one location at a time in your title tag . At present you are trying to target 3 states ( MN, IA, WI) on the home page title tag. Build backlinks for the MN key phrase from quality sites. Be very careful with the over optimization penalty while you work with the on page factors.
-
Bing and Google are two independent companies. They often evaluate site rankings very differently for various reasons. A few items I noticed:
-
your sister site, american-waterworks.com already ranks on the first page of Google results for the given phrase.
-
the nfsmn.com links prominently to the american-waterworks site from the home page
-
Google frowns on a single company / site owner trying to rank multiple sites for the same term
There are many possibilities. Further analysis is needed to determine the root issue in your particular case. There are clearly other sites attempting to rank for the same term. The nfsmn site has hardly any links, it links out to multiple other sites from its home page and the content quality and site architecture aren't that good. I would not expect the site to rank #1 in Google for anything other then a perfect match for a non-competitive keyword.
I also noticed the american-waterworks site does not rank on the first page of Bing, yet it does in Google. Each search engine may recognize these sites are related and choose the site they feel is best suited for the term to rank.
-
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
-
Why Google de-rank a website.
Hi, I was inspecting a website which is covering the topic of best wheelbarrow of 2021, it is a new website and and starts ranking on google. But, after few days it got de-rank automatically and Moz is also not showing any result to that. I was wandering why this just happened and what should I do if I made my website and will not face this kind of situation?
Technical SEO | | Moeen22330 -
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS - How long does it take Google to re-index the site?
hello Moz We know that this year, Moz changed its domain to moz.com from www.seomoz.org
Technical SEO | | joony
however, when you type "site:seomoz.org" you still can find old urls indexed on Google (on page 7 and above) We also changed our site from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
And Google is indexing both sites even though we did proper 301 redirection via htaccess. How long would it take Google to refresh the index? We just don't worry about it? Say we redirected our entire site. What is going to happen to those websites that copied and pasted our content? We have already DMCAed their webpages, but making our site https would mean that their website is now more original than our site? Thus, Google assumes that we have copied their site? (Google is very slow on responding to our DMCA complaint) Thank you in advance for your reply.0 -
How Long To Recover Rankings After Multi-Day Site Outage?
Hi, A site we look after for a client was down for almost 3 days at the start of this month (11th - 14th of May, to be exact). This was caused by my client's failure to verify their domain name in accordance with the new ICANN procedures. The details are unimportant, but it took a long while for them to get their domain name registration contact details validated, hence the outage. Very soon after this down time we noticed that the site has slipped back in the Google rankings for most of the target keywords, sometimes quite considerably. I guess this is Google penalizing this client for their failure to keep their site live. (And they really can't have too many complaints about this, in my opinion). The good news is that the rankings show signs of improving again slightly. However, they have not recovered all the way to where they were before the outage, two weeks ago. My question is this ... do you expect that the site will naturally re-gain the previous excellent rankings without us doing anything? If so, how long do you estimate this could take? On the other hand, if Google typically penalizes this kind of error by 'permanently', is there is anything we can do to help signal to Google that the site deserves to get back up to where is used to be? I am keen to get your thoughts, and especially to hear from anyone who has faced a similar problem in the past. Thanks
Technical SEO | | smaavie0 -
Hreflang Tag great for Google, what about Bing or others?
I've read that the Hreflang Tag is all the rave for International solutions on a per page basis. I haven't read much about what International agencies are using for non-Google search engines such as Bing. Is the common language meta tags the only solution? would love to see an article that addresses this
Technical SEO | | MikeSEOTruven0 -
Mobile site ranking instead of/as well as desktop site in desktop SERPS
I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive. It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile. Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product. My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content? Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Google rankings dropped dramatically after 24 hrs of hosting suspension
Hi, One of my websites ( http://www.traveldestinationsearch.com/ ) dropped most of its Google rankings after 24 hours of hosting suspension (from April 26 until April 27, 2012). The hosting company suspended my website after exceeding the bandwidth limit: there was no unusual activity on my website, it just exceeded its bandwidth limit by 20-30MB for the previous month. Anyway, the website is back online since April 27 but the problem is that, following these 24 hrs of no service, I see a dramatic decrease of my website's Google rankings for its main keywords. Even today, April 29, I can't find my website anywhere in the first 100 results for most of its targeted keywords. Before the suspension, the website ranked #1 for its main keyword and somewhere in the first 2-3 pages of Google search results for other two main keywords. My question is: is it the hosting suspension the reason for the Google ranking drop, and (assuming this is a temporary problem) when do you think I should expect my website to regain the rankings it had before the hosting suspension? Thanks for your support. Regards, Adrian
Technical SEO | | AdrianBanu0 -
Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?
I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools. However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.
Technical SEO | | askotzko0