Page not ranking despite indicators showing should easily be mid-1st page?
-
I have many years old website selling a service. The main keyword is 47% competitive, and we used to be #1 page 2, occasionally page 1 couple years back.
Domain authority is double of any of the competitors on 1st page, followed root domain links is many times that of 1st page competitors, infact against some of them almost 10 times as much, MozRank and MozTrust higher too. Infact, every metric is higher than competition. Only metric which isn't as good is Followed vs NoFollowed links metric, 95% of our links are NoFollowed, but we are still #1 in external followed links.
Yet we are stuck on 4th page, and on some localizations we are not even in Top 50.
This has happened slowly over time, not a overnight thing. Page we are trying to rank for gets grade A for optimizations, yet we have less significant pages ranking higher for that keyword. Further, newer pages tend to rank better than old ones. The whole site actually ranks quite low and we are not even getting search traffic for long tail keywords.
No problems reported on GWT, Analytics etc.Is this a google penalization or something of the sort? How can i troubleshoot this and get past this?
-
"...slowly going downwards over the year"
This sounds like possibly user metric related, which are important ranking factors no tool is able to give us. It's possible, users have showed preference to other pages ranking for that query over time. Metrics could be;
- click through rate from SERPs
- bouncing back to SERPs ("pogo-sticking")
- time on page
- repeat visits to the page
- direct visits the page
- completed actions on that page
- ...etc
Essentially, users might be telling Google they don't like the page based upon their behavior. Some suggestions;
- Watch Rand's video about how to improve Pogo Sticking
- Check out these articles on improving CTR in the SERPs (most the top ranked resources there are good)
- Set up goal tracking to get a conversion rate
- Try Justin Cutroni's scroll tracking to see how users are interacting with the content
- Try a heatmap program like http://www.crazyegg.com/
Without being able to see your page, it's tough to give custom recommendations, but I would also recommend making sure you have the best design of any site in your niche for your audience.
-
It's been slowly going downwards over the year - the page itself is more than 2 years old, only with minor modifications during this time, basic texts have remained the same.
No changes correlate to major algorithm shifts as far as i can see.
Could google penalize that hard for the content age? This is a business frontpage - so there really is not that much to update on that particular page.
Our link portfolio hasn't seen major changes in years - infact, it seems to be pretty much the same. I went through the first 300 or so as reported from GWT on random check, didn't see anything seriously spammy, many of which are high quality organic links. HOWEVER, moz tools says we have ~8600 inbound links, and GWT says total links 854,161
Something seriously wierd is going on for the keyword since #2 position is held by a site with 1 external link inbound as per moz tools, only thing they have pretty much is 99 google +1s.
Downloaded more sample links and still cannot see anything seriously spammy. There are some scrapes and people copy pasting offers or announcements, but not much. There's also some semi-spammy sites which list best offers etc.
GWT tells no manual actions.
-
Ranking factors I would look over, how fresh is your content and how fast is the site? I would also run your site through copyscape to see if there is someone scraping the site.
I would also look over your link profile if there are too many spammy exact match anchor text links. With that I like to go back and compare my GA data to major shifts in the algorithm. It helps to identify what issues need to be fixed.
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
-
My articles aren't ranking for keywords
Hello! I hope someone can help me...I've researched my keywords (long and short tail) for my articles but they are showing up as no ranking keywords. It looks like I've only got a few of my 15 articles which actually have keywords within - and I'm not sure why! Please can someone advise? https://www.el-well.com/helping-your-parents-declutter-their-home/ Thank you.
Keyword Research | | JessicaSilver1 -
Keyword Planner not showing exact match
hi guys I'm currently trying to optimize a site for 'Recruitment Agency North West' when I enter his term into keyword planner it gives me no results for the exact match, but offers me figures for 'Recruitment Agencies North West' Am I to assume that nobody has ever searched 'Recruitment Agency North West'?!!! and that I should be focusing on 'Recruitment Agencies North West' as my main key phrase? Is there another site other than keyword planner that will give me results for 'Recruitment Agency North West'? cheers M
Keyword Research | | Staunton_Rook0 -
Changed from www to non-www lost all rank. Will it return?
My web site used https://www.domain.com for the past 18 months. We finally got to #3 position for our top keyword. We changed web servers and our wordpress admin section somehow got changed to https://domain.com. As you can imaging I'm not too happy. We do have 301 redirects installed. Yesterday I noticed that our site was not ranking anymore. In fact, all our pages and our site URLs at https://www.domain.com have been de-indexed. I assume because that no longer exists. Using site: all the web pages under https://domain.com (which were identical to the old www) are now listed. All of them. However, none are showing in searches unless we search for the business name. They are not appearing under keyword searches. I would assume that the 301s (which are installed property) would make the site keep it's rank, as the pages are all identical. Will we ever get our rank back? Should we switch back to www? Or do the 301s just take time to hit? How long if that's the case?
Keyword Research | | ThereNYC0 -
If I use a similar H1 on two landing pages for my website will it impact my SEO negatively?
I've been doing quite a bit of research on keyword cannibalization and duplicate content. I have two pages with nearly the same H1. The rest of the body is different, with a few similar overlapping keywords and points. Am I right in that nealry the same keyword in H1 on two separate landing pages will damage by SEO?
Keyword Research | | joseph.defranco1 -
Do references to neighborhoods and local attractions in body copy provide any benefit to geographic rankings for the city in which those neighborhoods/attractions exist?
A few years ago, some SEOs encouraged the mentioning of local points of interest in the copy of a page to improve localized rankings for the city in question. The argument was that a page mentioning "Wrigley Field" (in a natural-seeming manner) would be more likely to be ranked for "Chicago" searches. A similar argument promoted the use of maps (assuming they have a meaningful purpose) because of the neighborhoods, streets, etc mentioned on the map. Was this ever actually a benefit, and if so is it still?
Keyword Research | | Mjesse2 -
How can my news website display on first page
Hello, I just would like to know how can my news website display on first page in Google what should i do, the time i use WordPress to run the site. i have more than 20,000 post but i don't get good number of clicks my website is www.edb-news.com thank you
Keyword Research | | MajedAtwi0 -
On-page Keyword Optimization
So I have created a page for the term "denver buick" but the next largest search term is for "buick denver." Should I create another page focusing on this keyword, or optimize one page for both? It's hard to come up with unique content since they are the basically the same term. But most importantly, if I make this new page, how do I incorporate it into the site architecture? Thanks!
Keyword Research | | kylesuss0 -
Rankings got dropped
We were ranking no 1 on couple of keywords in our countries local Google Search but from last 3-4 days we have dropped to 2-3 though we havent made any changes. Any suggestion? http://www.pakwheels.com Google: www.google.com.pk Keywords: Used Cars Cars for sale
Keyword Research | | razasaeed0