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
-
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Its now been 12 days since since google notified me that my manul link penality was revoke.. how long before I'm reindexed?
Hi, Its been 12 days since google revoked the manual link penalty they had one me, I'm still ranking 335 for my domain keyword, there has been no movement yet.. Googlebot spiders my site daily, and I have also tried resubmitting the page from within GWT, Fetch Web Page.. How long do you think it should be before I see some movement...? or should I file another reconsideration request just incase they forgot to remove the penalty and just thought they did.. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Robdob20130 -
Google having trouble accessing my site
Hi google is having problem accessing my site. each day it is bringing up access denied errors and when i have checked what this means i have the following Access denied errors In general, Google discovers content by following links from one page to another. To crawl a page, Googlebot must be able to access it. If you’re seeing unexpected Access Denied errors, it may be for the following reasons: Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.) Your robots.txt file is blocking Google from accessing your whole site or individual URLs or directories. Test that your robots.txt is working as expected. The Test robots.txt tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot will interpret the contents of your robots.txt file. The Google user-agent is Googlebot. (How to verify that a user-agent really is Googlebot.) The Fetch as Google tool helps you understand exactly how your site appears to Googlebot. This can be very useful when troubleshooting problems with your site's content or discoverability in search results. Your server requires users to authenticate using a proxy, or your hosting provider may be blocking Google from accessing your site. Now i have contacted my hosting company who said there is not a problem but said to read the following page http://www.tmdhosting.com/kb/technical-questions/other/robots-txt-file-to-improve-the-way-search-bots-crawl/ i have read it and as far as i can see i have my file set up right which is listed below. they said if i still have problems then i need to contact google. can anyone please give me advice on what to do. the errors are responce code 403 User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/0 -
No manual spam actions found - still my site does not rank
I noticed it on the 1st of October 2012 - that all my rankings disappeared - i filed a reconsideration request w google and i got this - No manual spam actions found. I have no idea why my site would have been subject to an algo change which made my rankings completely go away - i have not used spam, not used any kind of linkbuilding. Can you guys look at my site and see if you have any ideas: http://tinyurl.com/9a5k38u Thank you, Cary
Technical SEO | | CMTM0 -
I think google thinks i have two sites when i only have one
Hi, i am a bit puzzled, i have just used http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=in2town.co.uk to check my anchor text and forgot to put in the www. and the information came up totally different from when i put the www. in it shows a few links for the in2town.co.uk but then when i put in www.in2town.co.uk it gives me different information, is this a problem and if so how do i solve this | | | | | | | | |
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
| | | | | | | | |0 -
Google is indexing proxy (mirror) site.
We moved the site to a new hosting. Previously the site used Godaddy Windows Hosting with white domain masking. After moving the site we just mirrored the site. We have to use mirrored domain for PPC campaigns because it mirrored site contains true BRAND name and there is better conversion with that domain plus all trade marked keywords are approved for mirrored domain. Robots.txt User-agent: * Host: www.hermitagejewelers.com Disallow: /Bin Disallow: /css www.hermitagejewelers.com is the main domain. Mirror site is www.ermitagejewelers.com (Without the "H" at the beginning) Most of the keywords are now picked up by mirror site. I have not noticed any major changes in ranking except that it ranks for mirror site. We updated the sitemap. Website is designed very poorly (not by us). Also, we submitted the change address request for ermitagejewelers to hermitagejewelers in webmasters. Please let me know any advice to fix that problem. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | MaxRuso1 -
Any good ideas on how to quickly rank a new site for a new product laucnh?
Hi, I'm thinking of examples like the wii u - when it was announced all wii u sites were new. what ways could one get an edge quickly when competing against other sites without a great deal of authority on this 'new' keyword? obvious ones are social bookmarking, what else could easily be used to quickly (<24hrs) at least help a bit in non competitive kws?
Technical SEO | | dmn020
