Google penalising my site? Ranking now outside top 50
-
Hey there,
Was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/help on my current problems with my Google ranking.
I used to be on page one this time last year (still am on yahoo and bing) but Google has pushed me out of the top 50. Since then I built a new site on wordpress with new content but it hasn't made any real difference.
This is my site address: www.elvisimpersonator4u.co.uk
I also have a separate blog here: www.thisiselvis.tv
The blog did have some duplicate writing on it which I removed a few months back but it still hasn't improved my Google ranking. Would a 301 redirect fix this problem properly?
I've done quite a lot of SEO on several pages on the new site to try and improve it but no luck so far. In fact I hope I haven't over optimised! No tools seem to indicate this though.
I have no messages in webmaster tools so there's no obvious penalty, my web hosts keep saying I just need to buy more link builds and content writing from them but I've already done a lot of this and it's made no discernible difference.
If someone could have a look and give me some advice I would be most grateful!
Thanks,
Jim -
Thanks William, I will send a reconsideration request and sort out the anchor text as you've suggested, this is all very useful and I'm learning all the time.
-
If this happened so dramatically and in April it is very likely a Panda/Penguin problem. You should definitely send a reconsideration request to see if you are in penalty.
If it comes back there is no penalty, it may be that Google devalued a lot of the links that you may have.
Your internal linking has a lot of no anchor text, you should use some anchor text for your internal links and using alt="" for your images to describe what is being shown.
-
The main search term is 'elvis impersonator', but also 'elvis impersonators' and 'elvis tribute'.
I first became aware of a significant change last spring (which is when I believe a big google change occured) hence why I was worried it was a penalty of some kind. I wasn't monitoring the situation closely at the time as there didn't appear to be a problem with where I was.
It seemed to just drop from page 1 to something like page 10 if i recall correctly so definitely not a good sign! That was with the previous site design however, i was hoping for better luck with the word press site.
-
Thank you for the heads up and advice on CSS, I'm not nearly an expert in these areas so will have to look up some guides on how to change that in word press.
Do you happen to know of an easy guide that is available to explain this process?
-
Jim,
What Richard said is 100% accurate, when I view your website with CSS, Javascript, and cookies disabled the majority of the important text on your homepage is lost. Your header is an image, "Special package deals" section is an image, your endorsements are in an image, your list that starts with "don't be cruel" is an image. None of the information on these images is crawl-able, and the alt text just has your name and the sections label.
I would recommend using CSS to place live text over the images so the pertinent information is crawl-able.
-
It would be best to let us know what search term you are referring to. Also would help if you know exactly when this dropped, was it sudden or gradually?
-
Hey Richard,
Thanks for your response, the text is highlight-able as I've tried copying and pasting it into word and can do so and edit the text, should I be formatting it differently though? Is google not reading the main paragraphs regardless?
I have a couple of images this is true with text on the main page but that's not a major portion of the writing.
Cheers,
Jim -
I can't see any reason why you would have a link penalty so it must be something else.
You do have one immediately obvious issue on your site. 95% of the text is an image so it cannot be read by Google. You have to fix this!
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 is this site ranking higher?
We've put a fair bit of effort into delivering value here: https://lewescountycars.co.uk/ But a search for "Lewes taxis" or "taxis Lewes" puts this site above us: https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/ As you can you see, this is a tiny site that we outperform in most ways.... what can we do to rank above it that we haven't already done? Thanks in advance - Gerard.
Technical SEO | | Paul7301 -
Just saw a competitor jump in rank by double digits, questioning my url structure choice now.
Currently I have for our big keyword oursite.com/big-keyword/ and clicking on a material type will be oursite.com/big-keyword/material-type/ Our competition has **theirsite.com/big-keyword/ **and when you click on their material type **theirsite.com/material-type-big-keyword/ ** The also have 20 some pages, while we have around 652 as a eCommerce site as well, not sure why they jumped so high in rankings, while their backlink structure is so small still and they have a DA half of ours. I'm in the middle of a site redesign and very close to restructuring the urls the way they have it, since it really seems to have worked well. How do you feel about that?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Will Google Also Penalize Desktop Rankings If Your Site is Not Mobile Friendly?
Apologies if this question has already been answered. I was unable to find it. For desktop organic rankings: Will Google take into consideration mobile-readiness as a ranking factor? Thanks in advance for any reply, Kind regards,
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
Eric Darby1 -
Authority site drastic ranking drop after google https switch. Please Help!
Hi Mozers. Since Google switched to the https version, our company website (http://we.register.it) indexing switched to the https version (https://www.register.it). After that the ranking on Google dropped for almost every keyword. The site is very old and got a great authority and PR 7. It ranked for same keywords for very long time On each page from years there is the correct meta rel canonical. No spam, and WMT is ok. Could you please help? The internal links are all in http, and in https. If you are https are in https (they are all relatives) No changes have been made and the subdomain is in that way from 8 years: the main url has always been http://we.register.it Google started this indexing switch around the 15 October
Technical SEO | | luca_cash0 -
What changes do i need to make to my site to get into google news
Hi, when we had the old design, we were in google news but then when we upgraded our site, we had a major problem which forced us to have to redesign our site. Since then we have not been included in google news and we would like to get back in. We only want to be in google news for the following page http://www.in2town.co.uk/Latest-News-Headlines But for some reason, no matter what we do we keep getting knocked back. I would love to know what we should be doing to get into google news and see what the problems are. We have moved to a bigger dedicated server to increase speed so i know it is not that. Any help would be great Also is there an alternative to google news that i can get our site into to generate traffic and to get our news stories straight out to people Hi, Thank you for your note. We appreciate your interest in sharing your content with us. However, when we reviewed your site, we found that we cannot include it in Google News at this time. We have certain guidelines in place regarding the quality of sites which are included in Google News. Please feel free to review these guidelines at the following link: http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40787 We know it can be frustrating to not have more information about this but we appreciate your efforts and understanding. We will log your site for future consideration. Please keep in mind that we will be unlikely to review your site for at least 60 days following this email. Thanks for your understanding and your continued interest in Google News. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
The Google News Team0 -
Google Showing Multiple Listings For Same Site?
I've been optimizing a small static HTML site and have been working to increase the keyword rankings, yet have always ranked #1 for the company name. But, I've now noticed the company name is taking more than just the first position - the site is now appearing in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd position (each position referencing a different page of the site). Great.. who doesn't want to dominate a page of Google! ..But it looks kind of untidy and not usually how links from the same site are displayed. Is this normal? I'm used to seeing results from the same site grouped under the primary result, but not like this. any info appreciated 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregDixson0 -
Partial Site Move -- Tell Google Entire Site Moved?
OK this one's a little confusing, please try to follow along. We recently went through a rebranding where we brought a new domain online for one of our brands (we'll call this domain 'B' -- it's also not the site linked to in my profile, not to confuse things). This brand accounted for 90% of the pages and 90% of the e-comm on the existing domain (we'll call the existing domain 'A') . 'A' was also redesigned and it's URL structure has changed. We have 301s in place on A that redirect to B for those 90% of pages and we also have internal 301s on A for the remaining 10% of pages whose URL has changed as a result of the A redesign What I'm wondering is if I should tell Google through webmaster tools that 'A' is now 'B' through the 'Change of Address' form. If I do this, will the existing products that remain on A suffer? I suppose I could just 301 the 10% of URLs on B back to A but I'm wondering if Google would see that as a loop since I just got done telling it that A is now B. I realize there probably isn't a perfect answer here but I'm looking for the "least worst" solution. I also realize that it's not optimal that we moved 90% of the pages from A to B, but it's the situation we're in.
Technical SEO | | badgerdigital0 -
Google has not indexed my site in over 4 weeks, what's the problem?
We recently put in permanent redirects to our new url, but Google seems to not want to index the new url. There was no problems with the old url and the new url is brand new so should have no 'black marks' against it. We have done everything we can think off in terms of submitting site maps, telling google our url has changed in webmaster tools, mentioning the new url on social sites etc...but still nothing. It has been over 4 weeks now since we set up the redirects to the url, any ideas why Google seems to be choosing not to index it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cewe0