Site not in Google top 50 for key terms
-
Dear Moz Community,
Our site - http://www.sportsdirectnews.com publishes a high volume of daily sport stories and aims to follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, yet our pages don't appear anywhere in Google's SERP's.
We've looked in details at the issue and think it could be something to do with:
a) Unusual links
or
b) High page loading time
or
c) Too many on-page links
If you could have a look at the site - http://www.sportsdirectnews.com - and give your professional opinion as to why our website is not appearing in SERP's, we would be most appreciative.
SDN
-
Hey Justin, it is a pretty long and specific process. However there is close to 50 different blogs and articles published on MOZ alone for it. I'd start here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amoz.com%2Fblog%2F+%2B+unnatural+link+removal
Hope this helps!
- Kyle
-
How do we manually clear up our link profile Kyle? Thanks.
-
Thanks for posting your response Jesse. Yes, we noticed a message from Google in Webmaster Tools relating to "unnatural inbound links", to which we have submitted a reconsideration request to Google. With regards to links, we get a large number of daily links from a wide variety of websites (mainly news and sport sites), up to 300 'inbound links' as a traffic source a day, depending on on the news stories web publish. What can be done to disavow links when Google doesn't tell us which links are 'unnatural or spammy'? We analysed our inbound links and nothing stands out as particularly spammy.
-
Thanks for taking the time to view our indexing issue Kyle. Just a few questions about your post: Are you saying that the adverts are a problem because they slow loading time, or because they are adverts and not indexable text content? Do you think removing some of the adverts that slow loading time and also adding more text would, when combined, have a dramatic increase in Google indexing our web content?
-
Great point on the unnatural anchor text, that would definitely have a greater effect in regards to top 50 rank. After clearing up your link profile the content portion will get you the rest of the way.
-
Few things going on here.
I agree with kyle that the user experience is poor due to those ads and that will absolutely hurt things. Slow load times are a huge problem as well.
Beyond that, your link profile needs some work. It's quite skewed. There are 22,000 links coming from 25 domains. That's a huge disparity that really shouldn't happen. Also, as far as anchor text goes I notice a huge number of links pointing at sports news and <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="športové novinky" data-id="39055838023">športové novinky (which I'm assuming is sports news)</a> <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="športové novinky" data-id="39055838023"></a>
This could be a potentially bad thing.. even though they're only coming from a couple domains. But you really want to make sure your anchor text is branded and not forced with keywords at all times. A few here and there is good, nay great, but all of them being targeted keywords is begging for a Penguin penalty.
Have you received any unnatural link warnings in GWT? Definitely check if you haven't..
And then check out all of your on-page reports here at Moz. There are a ton of onsite things that I'm sure could be done to this site and the Pro Tools here will help you discover what the big ones are for you.
Most of all.. you just need to build some high-quality content and become an authority on all thinks sports news all the while gaining relevant backlinks organically.
-
You can take this analysis with a grain of salt since it only entailed around 5 minutes of my time but i think it has to do with the percent of unique content to ads on your page. I clicked through around a few articles in the formula one section and all of them had close to 6-7 paid advertisements (mostly above the fold) and only a few sentences of copy.
Then taking it to the next level the page load time was relatively slow but it seemed almost all to do with the advertisements slowing the load time (using fiddler to inspect). My advice, either limit down the amount of advertising you are running on actual article pages OR write more and higher quality content.
Best of luck!
- Kyle
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
-
Using Google to find a discontinued product.
Hi Guys. I mostly use this forum for business questions, but now it's a personal one! I'm trying to find a supplier that might still have discontinued product. It's the Behritone C5A speaker monitor. All my searches bring up a plethora of pages that appear to sell the product... but they have no stock. (Wouldn't removing these pages make for a better internet?) No 2nd hand ones on eBay 😞 Do you have any suggestion about how I can get more relevant results... i.e find supplier that might still have stock? Any tips or trick I may be able to use to help me with this? Many thanks in advance to an awesome community 🙂 Isaac.
Algorithm Updates | | isaac6631 -
Is it me or Google?
Hi All, I'm new here so take it easy on me.. OK, basically i have had a SEO company for about 3 years, they did a wonderful job, for the last 12 months or so i have been in top 1-3 positions for pretty much every keyword i wanted... On Jan 17th, that all changed, suddenly google doesnt like something about my site... for the sake of this questions lets focus purely on the keyword "CCTV", i use to be 1st or 2nd, it varied... Since Jan 17th i am all over the place, today alone, i was 9th this morning, then 13th, then 22nd... I am working on a lot of things my SEO company told me to do, with regards my site, obviously this is going to take time... but my big concern is that google doesnt seem to know where to rank me lol, i mean, at least if they settled on a place i.e 22nd, then i have a stable base to work from... Has anyone seen this kind of thing before, and can i expect at somepoint google decides to simply remove me? Any advice welcome. regards James
Algorithm Updates | | isntworkdull0 -
How vital is it for a site to have a mobile site for mobile SEO?
With the exponential growth in mobile device sales and usage and an expected 980% growth in advertising next year for/on mobile devices, we at http://www.mobilewebsitegurus.com decided that it was time to help companies create great looking mobile websites that are user friendly and SEO friendly at affordable rates with tons of features built in from the start. However, when selling our design, how important is it to have a GOOD mobile site compared to a big one to rank on mobile devices? We head that Google was thinking of only showing mobile sites on mobile devices. NOT TRUE. Then we read/heard that the rankings were MUCH BETTER if you had a mobile site, but after a lot of research we found that too NOT to be true. On most sites there were NO difference. So what is the TRUTH about this and is it maybe just that it will happen, just has not happened yet - the different rankings for mobile and regular sites on mobile devices that is? ANY insight in this would be great not only for us but for the entire SEO community 🙂 Thanks. ALSO, add "Mobile SEO" to the boxes below of "Topics" since mobile SEO will grow in importance.
Algorithm Updates | | yvonneq0 -
Mobi sites and sitemaps
Hi all, How does should one treat mobi sites which have a separate set of files to the main site - with regards to the sitemap? Doe we tell Google about them?
Algorithm Updates | | gazza7770 -
Google above the fold update
Hi everyone, Ever since the Jan 19th Google 'above the fold update' I have noticed some strange ranking changes in some of my sites. 1. rankings increased dramatically (not in top 50 to page 2) on Jan 19th for about 5 days then dropped out completely from the top 50. 2. our rankings then did the same thing again around Feb 2nd for about 5 -6 days then has bottomed out ever since. We do not have any ads on the site but our pages are dominated by images for most of the 'above the fold' section then followed by the content down the page. Any insight into this would be much appreciated. Cheers, Andrew
Algorithm Updates | | jay.raman0 -
Do Google donations to Wikimedia show any bias in search results?
Over the weekend we learned Google co-founder Sergey Brin donated $500,000 to Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia.com. Last year I believe Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia. I now ask, is this suspicious in anyway, seeing that Wikipedia ranks so well in Google for so many terms? There are several blog posts about it online here and there throughout the years, but what does everyone think?
Algorithm Updates | | DanDeceuster0 -
Domain Authority and Google keywords
Hi there, We have a domain authority of 33, one of our competitors has an authority of 10, yet they appear to list higher on many keyword searches in google. Is there a reason for this? Our site is 5 months old, and their site is over 3 yrs old. Thanks for your feedback 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | PHDAustralia680 -
Google place page Images
Is there any real difference in uploading an images directly to your google places page or linking an image from another site? I have heard that you get better results if you upload a photo to photo bucket then to insider pages then post that link to your google places page. To me it just seems a bit odd to do things this way. I get that it's suppose to give you more back links however I don't think it would necessarily be relevant or useful for the user. Any thoughts??
Algorithm Updates | | christinarule0