Site appears to rank very low
-
Hi,
A site we manage is ranking very low for it's main key phrases. The site is www.moremouse.com.
For example for the phrase "orlando vacation rentals" it ranks around page 12 which seems very low considering the DA, PA, links, etc. compared to many sites ranking much much higher.
Can anyone see anything obvious that is causing it to rank so low?
Thanks
Pete
-
You're in a good position with the site, because as far as I can see the business is well-liked and referenced. Definitely try and put the dampeners on those comment links and if you can, recommend re-investing budget in a more natural linkbuilding strategy that matches up to the calibre of the business. I appreciate this can be tricky though if it's a third party building those links.
I think for the next few months I'd concentrate on improving the content on-site and using digital PR (definitely not press releases, but buzzworthy articles/content that people want to share) to build brand links. Hopefully the comment spam will be outweighed by those, if not a few guys here more experienced with disavows can advise if this is necessary.
-
To be honest that is hard for me to answer as I do not know how many links were requested by the other person.
I will get the comment links stopped ASAP and take yours and Zippy-Bungles advice.
Thanks for your help.
-
I'd definitely suggest putting stoppers on the comments before you get hit by something, as that linkbuilding resource could be placed more strategically elsewhere. Even though it looks like a lot of these pages have high DA/PA value, if the links you're getting from them are comment spam, I personally wouldn't really count them as adding long-term positive value to your website.
Out of the links you have to your site, how many would you say are comments/bought vs natural? I can see some great citations like http://traveltips.usatoday.com/vacation-homes-within-4-miles-disney-world-29718.html
But there's some really dodgy looking things like: http://www.cxotoday.com/story/leadership-notes-the-art-of-listening-with-empathy/
Chances are, if the bulk of your links are comment spam then you might have issues ranking. Building more natural links and following the advice of Zippy-Bungle (which is an amazing username to type out) would help.
-
No significant drop. The rankings were poor before then.
-
I definitely wouldn't rule it out, if there's been a big spike in these then it could impact your rankings. Especially as it's quite spammy and there's a lot of over-optimised anchor text (on OSE I'm seeing more variations "orlando vacation" + rent compared to your brand name). Have you experienced any drops in traffic since May?
-
They have been created by someone else connected to the site. Do you think they will be hurting the site this much?
-
Hey,
I'm actually looking at holidaying in Orlando, so this is super handy for me!
I'm just having a look at your backlinks and it seems like there's quite a bit of comment spam, for example, this one from May 2014: http://www.buildings.com/buzz/buildings-buzz/entryid/51/a-breath-of-fresh-air-why-and-how-to-improve-indoor-air-quality.aspx There's another one here from May: http://tempedit.outotec.com/en/Careers/Job-rotation-blog/Dates/2013/3/A-regular-day-with-the-Lady/
Are these comments something your team would be creating?
-
Thanks for your reply . Some of the anchor text is exact but so is that of many competitors that rank much higher.
I have already checked Webmaster Tools and cannot see any issues at all.
-
It looks to me that
- the only use of Orlando Vacation Rentals is in the Title
- No use in body
- No H2
- No use in image ALT tags
- only 320 words - possibly too short for something this competitive...
I'm rubbish at reading html but there are probably a few more where those came from.
Why not create a new landing page - www.moremouse.com/orlando-vacation-rentals - and optimise it for this phrase. Don't include it in the navigation but make sure it is in the site map so it gets indexed.
Sure the page authority will be lower but if you track the keyword on Moz you will see how the ranking switches from one page to another as the on page works better
-
My guess is that the anchor text used in the linking domains is an exact match for the term you are trying to rank for:http://moz.com/researchtools/ose/anchors?page=3&site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.moremouse.com
I would check in Google Webmaster Tools to see if your site has been penalized.
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
-
Keywords ranking on Homepage but are not mentioned.
I was wondering why some of my keywords are ranking in my homepage but are not mentioned even once. Is it maybe because they are semantically related with the keywords targeted on the homepage? What are the reason(s) for this? Thanks for enlightening me with this one.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSOM0 -
Losing Page Rank
Hello Moz I launched a re-design of our site over the summer and we jumped in organic search for some keywords. Recently one of our landing pages is being hammered by Google last we we lost one position this week we lost 5 positions. Although, when I check the on-page grade Moz gives it an A is there a check sheet anyone has that I could go through to see if I have any common problems. Ryan
On-Page Optimization | | ryanparrish0 -
Acquired Old, Bad Content Site That Ranks Great. Redirect to Content on My Site?
Hello. my company acquired another website. This website is very old, the content within is decent at best, but still manages to rank very well for valuable phrases. Currently, we're leaving the entire site active on its own for its brand, but i'd like to at least redirect some of the content back to our main website. I can't justify spending the time to create improved content on that site and not our main site though. What would be the best practice here? 1. Cross-domain canonical - and build the new content on our main website? 2. 301 Redirect Old Article to New Location containing better article 3. Leave the content where it is - you won't be able to transfer the ranking across domain. Thanks for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Blenny0 -
Pre-launch site or not
We are going to set up a new site in four months. Historically we always set up a simple Wordpress "Pre-launch-site" with relevant texts to start ranking in the SERP. Anyone with experience of doing/not doing this and what is had led to? A site with relevant texts also should have incoming links, which needs more work.
On-Page Optimization | | fredrikahlen0 -
New jobboard: Can redirecting folder (site.com/jobboard) to subdomain (jobboard.site.com) hurt SEO?
Hi there, I'm planning to implement a jobboard on my website which needs to be installed on a subdomain (jobboard.site.com) but I'd really like to use site.com/jobboard for promoting this jobboard (jobboard collects external industry jobs). Are there any possible disadvantages when I set up a 301 redirect from jobboard.site.com to site.com/jobboard? Also: What if I want to move this jobboard to a unique domain one day (e.g. jobboard-industry-xy.com), Would that be tricky (as I'd basically have to redirect the folder-to-subdomain redirect to an external domain and therefore get a folder-to-subdomain-to-external-domain redirect...)? Cheers, Thomas
On-Page Optimization | | stl990 -
Keyword in URL: Ranking Factor?
I've got a site about a specific topic, which we'll call "themes" for the sake of this discussion. I personally like to keep the url structure short and clean (for usability purposes, but mainly because I'm a perfectionist and a minimalist). I feel that adding "themes" to the url structure is a bit redundant. However, nearly every keyword phrase that my site should rank for includes the word "themes." So I'm wondering how much I'm handicapping myself by not including the keyword "themes" in the url? The domain name itself sort of includes the keyword . . . although it's in Italian (I chose the domain for it's brand-ability, not for the keyword). A quick example: My Url Structure: www.themo.com/topic/abc My Competitor's Url Structure: www.sitesample.com/themes/topic/abc For many of the keywords, the competitors with the keyword in the url rank highest. But, I'm not sure how much emphasis to place on this, because from my understanding Google doesn't pay as much attention to url keywords anymore . . . and those sites might just be ranking high because they've been around for so long (which also happens to be the reason why they coincidentally also include the keyword in the url, because they started the site when that was a high ranking factor). Thoughts? Should I just trash my perfectionism and add the keyword to the url structure? (By the way, the site is only a couple months old and doesn't have any significant backlinks to inner pages yet, so changing the url structure wouldn't be a big deal if I decided to do that).
On-Page Optimization | | JABacchetta0 -
Impact of mobile pages on current rankings
Morning all - I've been getting a bit of traffic recently for mobile phrases, so am thinking of putting a mobile optimised page on my site which users will be automatically directed to when they visit my site. My question is though, how will this affect the rankings of those current pages which are trying to target mobile users. For example, let's say I've got a page at www.betting.com/iphone which is ranking really well for those users looking to place a few bets on their iPhone. Once I stick my mobile optimised page up anyone clicking through to this URL will be re-directed to a generic mobile landing page at a different URL. Is this likely to effect my rankings of the original www.betting.com/iphone page at all given the fact that all visitors are being immediately re-directed elsewhere? Thanks very much for your help
On-Page Optimization | | theshortstack0 -
If i only want to rank for one specific keyword and use it in all my page titles, will it negatively affect my rankings?
If i want to rank highest for one specific keyword (virtualization management, for example) and use that keyword in all the titles on my website, will that negatively affect my search rankings? SEOmoz is telling me that i should use unique titles for my different pages to ensure that they describe each page uniquely and don't compete with each other for keyword relevance.
On-Page Optimization | | foonista0