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
-
Google webmaster is not crawling links and site cache still in old date
Hi guys, I have been trying to get my page indexed in Google with new title and descriptions but it is not getting indexed. I have checked in many tools but no useful. Can you please tell me what could be the issue? Even I have set up And Google webmaster is not crawling links I have built so far. Few links are indexed but others do not. Why this is happening. My url is: https://www.paydaysunny.com thanks
Technical SEO | | ksmith880 -
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 -
Can an AJAX framework (using HTML5 + pushstate) on your site impact your ranking?
Hello everybody, I am currently investigating a website which is rendered by an AJAX Framework (Angularjs) using the HTML5 +API history - Pushstate methods.
Technical SEO | | Netsociety
Recently Google announced that they are able to execute Javascript and can therefore see the content and links to discover all pages in the structure. However it seems that it doesn't run the Javascript at ALL times. (after some internal testing) So technically it is possible it arrives on a page without seeing any content and links, while another time he can arrive, run Javascript and read/discover the content and links generated by AJAX.
The fact that Google can't always interpret or read the website correctly can therefore have negative SEO impact? (not the indexation process but ranking) We are aware that is better to create a snapshot of the page but in the announcement of Google they state that the method that is currently used, should be sufficient. Does anybody have any experience with this AND what is the impact on the ranking process? Thanks!0 -
What can i do to get google to visit my site more often
Hi, i am having serious problems since i upgraded my website from joomla 1.5 to 3.0 We have dropped down the rankings from page one for the word lifestyle magazine, and we have dropped down in rankings for other very important words including gastric band hypnotherapy and i am starting to regret having the site upgraded. i am finding the google is taking its time visiting my site, i know this for two reasons, one i have checked the cache and it is showing the 2nd july and i have checked articles that we have written and they are still not showing. example if i put this article name in word for word it does not come up, Carnival Divert Ships In The Caribbean Due To bad Weather this was an article that was done yesterday. in the old days before the upgrade that would have been in google now. these problems are costing us the loss of a great deal of traffic, we are losing around 70% of our traffic since the upgrade and would be grateful if people could give me advice on how to turn things around. we add articles all the time. each day we add a number of articles, i was considering changing the front page in the middle and having a few paragraphs of the latest story to get google to visit more often. i know this would look messy but i am running out of ideas. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings
We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO. If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
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. http://www.nfsmn.com 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
Technical SEO | | reynoldsdesign0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10 -
.CA site same as .com site - are both necessary?
Dear Friend, We representa a major national brand in the auto care industry, and they have locations in both US and Canada. There is a primary content site at .com that we have duplicated at .ca. We are hosting the .ca site on a separate IP on a server in Canada - but by in large it is the same site. (there are some minor changes we made to change US English to Canadian English - though minor. When we search Google.ca we generally see strong search results for the .com site, but rarely, if ever any evidence of rankings for the .ca site. The .com site was launched several years ago about 18 months before the .ca site. Why doesn't Google.ca show the .ca site? Is this an issue of duplicate content, and Google.ca simply shows the .com version which it knew about first? Are we wasting our time, money and efforts having both? Thanks, Tim ps. this isn't about location. We use a separate site to locate local shops, and have coordinated that well with Google Places, and when looking for local auto care - we do well in both US and Canada. The sites described above are largetl content sites.
Technical SEO | | lunavista-comm0