Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Why is Google suddenly not Ranking my page in a second language in its appropriate target country?

Branding

621

JonsonSwartz last edited by

Hi,

One of my clients has company Facebook pages in several languages. The page in Arabic, which was targeted at Saudi Arabia, used to rank 5th place on the search for the brand name. The page has a steady growth of followers and a high engagement rate. for the past week it suddenly completely fell off ranking and instead the English page ranks #5 in the results for the brand name in Saudi Arabia. What could have caused this change and what can we do to bring the target language page back to its ranking?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
JonsonSwartz @DennisSeymour last edited by

We were linking regularily from the website to both Facebook pages (posts that contained links to the website) - each page from its respective language on the website. Otherwise, the English website has more link-building done on it than the other language.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
DennisSeymour last edited by

were you building any links/mentions/links from the website - to it? It's possible that you have done more "brand" work for the other page. Google won't show 2 facebook pages (almost never, i guess) if the niche/keyword has other relevant pages.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Google Contacting Clients in an Adwords MCC?!

I am curious if this has happened to others and if so if you were able to resolve it. Today a client forwarded an email that went to a client account and we were in no way copied on it. This is a client that spends in the 6 figures with us and I was shocked to read (Any bold or italics I have added): Hi *****, My name is Jimmy Morrow and I am an Account Strategist at Google on our Agency Team. Your account was recently selected for free dedicated support this quarter and I will be your new point of contact at Google for all things AdWords. We can go over a few housekeeping things I noticed, broader strategy, and some betas that would be a good fit. Please let me know when you have time for a 20-30 minute phone call when we can go over the accounts and make a plan for working together this quarter. Thanks and just let me know a time that works best for you! Best, Jimmy To me, they have essentially gone around us and with the "housekeeping" and "beta" comments sought to make us look either incapable and/or uninformed. We are Google Partners, etc. and we have clients in our MCC for Adwords. I have never seen an occasion where Google blatantly tried to steal the client as it appears is happening here. This is a client who heretofore had NEVER used Adwords and they have been in business since before there was a Google or an Internet. We brought them to Adwords about 6 - 8 months ago!!! They are spending 6 figures on Adwords and I am ready to pull them out and spend the money elsewhere. We sent emails from our UK and our Houston office and no response from lil ole Jimmy. Our UK team has tried calling Google and nothing and then Chatting with them and we can get nothing. This is a client who has a lot of faith in our abilities based on many things we have done for them that worked and they are the kind of client that let's us know when issues arise. So, they are not going to switch and that is not the issue. The issue is Google acted as if they wanted to embrace agencies and if that is so, why then try to back door them? I hope to hear from others who are handling PPC with Google. Thanks a ton. Robert
Branding | | RobertFisher

1
Website Name Before Search String in Google SERP

I'm curious to hear whether it's better to have your company name before the Search String, or after it?When I search for Church Management Software in Google, some results place the company before the string.
**In attached image
(Pink Squares : Company Name)
(Blue Squares : Search String) Please indicate in your response if there is any study, experiment, or evidence to back your answer. Thanks for your help! NameOrStringNameOrString cmsSerp.jpg
Branding | | ChurchCommunityBuilder

0
Changing My Home Page Focus Keyword

Hello, We recently launched a new home page design on our company website, but we still have the same focus keyword in the title, H1, and in parts of the page copy. However, this focus keyword no longer represents our entire brand. We want to change the focus keyword and have done some research on the keyword difficulty and local searches in Google, but are still uncertain on the potential effects. Let me explain our situation more in depth. Instabill provides business owners with merchant accounts and other services. Our current focus keyword is offshore merchant accounts. However, over the past three months, we have been helping businesses establish US merchant accounts (retail, mobile, and online--but retail and mobile to US only while online to merchants everywhere) and intend to continue to increase our US merchant base. We are also still able to provide offshore merchant accounts. Our fear is that when a US merchant comes to our website (http://www.instabill.com), they will see Offshore Merchant Accounts in big H1 letters and leave our site since they want a local US merchant account. However, we still want to make sure our international merchants know we can still work with them. Thus said, we would like to change our focus keyword to something more broad, but still descriptive of our brand: merchant services. To elaborate, we want our H1 heading to read Merchant Services for Retail and Online Businesses. Merchant services is more descriptive since we provide more than just merchant accounts. We also provide the payment gateway, free shopping cart modules, help registering businesses, help obtaining an SSL certificate, and a discounted PCI Certification Service through McAfee. We have more than one page on our website that ranks for the term online merchant accounts, but none that rank for merchant services. However, we are willing to put in the work to ensure we optimize our website properly and put in the effort to make the change successful. Merchant services is also a keyword we would like to optimize on our website, so making the change on the home page will only help the steps in the process. Statistics:
Offshore Merchant Accounts has a 35% difficulty level and we consistently rank for SERPs #1 and #2. This term, according to the Google Keyword Tool, only receives 70 monthly searches in the US, 50 in the UK, 10 in Canada, and 10 in Australia. These are the four countries of most importance to our website. Merchant Services has a 57% difficulty level and we do not rank for it in Google at all since we have never tried to optimize for this term in the past. Also according to the Google Keyword Tool, this term receives 14,800 monthly searches in the US, 1,600 in the UK, 590 in Canada, and 260 in Australia. Clearly, merchant services could potentially get us much more traffic than offshore merchant accounts if transitioned correctly. I suppose my bottom line question is this: Would it be a bad idea to change my primary focus keyword on my home page? What type of results should I expect to see if searching Google for my company name? Thank you for all of your help. Meghan
Senior Copywriter of Instabill
Branding | | Instabill

0
Effects of a long-term holding page/503 http code whilst site is being rebranded?

We have a client who is adamant that during the rebranding of their company and website, a holding page is put in place from August 5<sup>th</sup> till go-live date on August 21<sup>st</sup>. They don’t look like budging on the matter, therefore we are looking to set up a 503 HTTP code on the holding page to tell Google the site is down for maintenance and redirect all pages back to the holding page. The general consensus is that implementing this for such a long period of time will see Google de-index all pages and the site will lose masses of traffic as a result for a substantial time afterwards. It would be great to get some insight on best practice for this situation, how Google will determine the situation and the consequences of such actions. If you have any case studies of similar situations or have firm knowledge of how this scenario would affect the site, I would be delighted to hear from you!
Branding | | AndrewAkesson

0
Add Google + button link to google page and not link

Hello SEOOOOOOOOO moz people ! I was wondering if you know how can I add Google + button to my page I tried to set it up in google page http://awesomescreenshot.com/08d1a9hmef https://plus.google.com/b/109790526955470383191/109790526955470383191/posts But i would like to link the button to my google + fan page https://plus.google.com/b/109790526955470383191/109790526955470383191/about and not the url of the page. As our website is indeed 12 websites if you go to http://www.ibremarketing.com you don't have the same +1 than http://www.ibremarketing.com/me or http://www.ibremarketing.com/ma Any idea of how to do it ? It would be amazing 😛
Branding | | AymanH

0
Google Places Zoom level question

One of my clients (a dealership) has 2 google places listings. One for their actual dealership and one for their parts and service dept (they are separate buildings 5-10 mins away from each other). When you search for their name "Westchester Toyota" both in web and maps the only result is for the parts and service building. Both listings are active and verified (and both are in good standings). The weirder part is that if you take that same search in maps "Westchester Toyota" zoom out a few levels and search again Boom both listings appear... Not only that but the main stores listing is places as listing A. I'm wondering if anyone has ever had this issue and has a solution? I believe on the initial search Google is deeming the parts and service listing as the dominant listing (which is why it zooms in so far) but then Google throws me for a loop making the real listing the "A" when you zoom out. Note: The main listing is closer to Westchester, NY. Any insight is appreciated!
Branding | | Haystak

0
Page 1 Rankings, but not increase in traffic, contact form requests or calls

I am very frustrated. I have achieved page one rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo for highly relevant keywords and phrases. The keywords I am ranking on page one for are the same ones competitors are targeting and working well for them. I am interested in any feedback as to what could possibly be the cause for not receiving much traffic? I mean I am getting page 1, everyone I talk to says the sites are beautiful....Very confused. Now in the various keyword tools the do show that the various keywords receive anywhere from 25-250 searches per month, but those tools i find highly innacurate when performing a local campaign...oh yeah, these are all local campaigns i am talking about. Do I need to pursue paid marketing, PPC, or something. I always thought organic rankings were the way to go. Also, unfortunatly i am not able to divulge the URLs or concern due to client confidentiality issues. Thank you very much in advance for any insight:) I will send the URL's privately to anyone that is willing to take a look at things
Branding | | WebbyNabler

0
Unique Content around GEO targets

Is there a way to produce SEO, google friendly Unique Content to ad to long tail pages, that will provide user value? Emample: 1800medigap.com we want to rank for keywords that are geo specific: Medicare Supplemant Insurance Balitmore Maryland Denver Colorado Medigap Insurance ......
Branding | | jdcline

0