Website not ranking for noncompetitive terms
-
Hi,
We've took over a website last July and no matter what we do we just can't get it ranking in Google, even for noncompetitive terms.
here is the website in question:
http://www.alignandsmile.co.uk
Ideally the client would like to rank for Canary Wharf but that location is competitive, the site doesn't even rank for 'Dentist New Providence Wharf E14' despite it being included in the title tag on the home page and in the content throughout the website.
Directories with Align and Smile's business information do rank however. I opened a case with google through Webmaster tools and they 'reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google.'
So I'm a bit stuck. The site ranks top for the keyphrase in Bing and Yahoo...we are really struggling with Google!
Any help would be much appreciated.
many thanks
Marcus
-
Thanks for you help with this Marcus - I'll certainly address the content and have a look at the link profile and remove any dodgy links and hopefully that will help!
Marcus
-
Hey Marcus
Marcus here!
Well, the site looks okay but it is behaving as if it has a search penalty. There is something I have been discussing with a few folks working on penalised sites and generally, if you search for a block of text from a penalised page with double quotes it returns the page, without the quotes, nowhere to be found.
"You will only pay for the private treatment you need and want" - returns the page
You will only pay for the private treatment you need and want - nowhere to be found
Now, this is hardly science but it is something that I have seen replicated across many penalised sites and it also seems specific to a given page that has an algorithmic penalty meaning that if we try the same thing on a non penalised page then it returns as a result as we would expect.
There are two big obvious algorithmic penalties broadly relating to on page and off page problems and it seems you may have a dose of both of them.
Penguin - Check your backlinks, they are very anchor text heavy and highly unlikely to be natural, editorial votes.
Panda - Your content seems to be duplicated across several other sites.
I would imagine several things have happened.
- Site was built by a company that makes dentist sites and it uses generic content across all sites
- Link building was done to improve on the poor ranks and that has just made things worse
In a nutshell you need to do the below:
- review all the content and make it unique and informative (feed it through copyscape when this is done)
- clean up the nasty link profile (look at rmoov, link detox and removeem)
- ideally generate a small amount of high quality links
This is algorithmic, so it is better than a manual penalty so you just need to ensure you get the site all fully compliant with the google guidelines.
Some recommended reading:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/seo/anchor-text-ratios-and-link-building/
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
Please who can help me rank my website www.shopdocuments.com ?
Hi , i bought my website this month , i built it myself now i want it to grow seo on google pages and stuff tried google ads but they always block my account don't know why so somebody help me please any company? individual willing to work it for me ? even if paid company no problem
Technical SEO | | planetdocs1 -
Do the terms in a website url drive search hits
I've tried to do a search on a few key words that I knew was on my landing page and I couldn't get Google to find it. So I thought maybe I needed to change my url to reflect a few the terms.
Technical SEO | | Toal0 -
How would you research on what keywords to rank?
Do you guys mind sharing your steps on what you do on your research? Semrush does not have my countries google so Sadly i have to skip that. I been using open site explore to check out on my competitors to see what they are ranking. Any more suggestions?
Technical SEO | | andrewwatson921 -
Keyword rankings for new website good in Yahoo and Bing but no movement in Google?
Hello, This past September I launched a new redesigned website for a client. His old website was a static html site that was many years old and the new website was created using WordPress. With the new design we made sure to use all the proper techniques for SEO. (h1 tages, image names, quality links, page titles, etc.) Plus, all the content is new content written for this site. I've actually launched new sites many times and after a few months usually start seeing keyword ranking improvements from the major search engines. With this particular website I'm seeing improvements in Yahoo and Bing but no movement in Google. I've used Google Webmaster Tools and made sure my sitemap is being submitted, etc. It all seems good, but I can't understand why Yahoo and Bing are working but nothing from Google. My page grades are all A's and B's and Moz isn't showing any big issues. Maybe I need to give it more time? This client is a lawyer and has many websites out there so maybe he's being penalized somewhere I don't know? As I mentioned, I've been doing SEO for about 8 years and have never had this much trouble with Google. I was wondering if you can look at the site and see if there are any glaring issues I'm missing. Website: http://www.arizonamedicalmalpractice.info/ The keyword phrases were are looking at are "Phoenix Medical Malpractice Lawyer", "Phoenix Medical Malpractice Attorney:, "Arizona Medical Malpractice Lawyer & Attorney", etc. I appreciate anyone who takes the time and does a quick look over. Thanks very much, Bill
Technical SEO | | Bill_K0 -
My website is not avaliable, will i lose ranking?
My website was not available during 12 hours and i think that i will lose ranking by that. What do you think about it? Will i lose rankings? Some URL were lost during the drop of server, what should i do? Create again? Delete on GWT? Thanks so much.
Technical SEO | | pompero990 -
Large Companies Taking Over Rankings
Recently many large companies. (lowes, bed bath and beyond, walmart, target, ace hardware, etc.), have taken over the rankings of keywords we used to rank high in. Is there any way to improve our rankings and compete with these large companies? Is this due to recent Google changes? Sample keywords are: electrolux vacuum bags, oreck vacuum bags, vacuum cleaner bag, vacuum cleaner filter
Technical SEO | | totalvac0 -
Only my website homepage is appearing in search and the other indvidual pages are not coming up?This happened after the website revamp
We have revamped our website http://www.wsinetpower.com/ after te revamp the SEO rankings went down and the inner pages are not appearing in serach. What could be the reason
Technical SEO | | Muna0 -
Sudden decline in ranking
Hi SEO People, Rankings for one of my search keywords has declined over the last two weeks from place 2-4 down to 13-15 on Google NZ. It had sat at the place 2-4 level for months. Nothing has changed on any of the sites above/below ours, and nor have any changes been made to our site. All our other, similar, keyword rankings have either stayed unchanged or improved. Does anyone have any bright ideas?
Technical SEO | | chris.elevate0