Subfolder ranks worse than the rest of the site
-
We have the strangest problem. The blog for our website ranks very poorly:
www.lifeionizers.com/blog = average position in SERPs = 200. The site itself has an average position in SERPs of 12. The blog has a few terms it ranks #1 for such as branded terms and:
is mineral water alkaline = 1.3
kangen water vs alkaline water = 2.6
kangen water pyramid = 1.2
ph of redbull = 1.1 (Used by Google as answer in knowledge graph)
But the blog ranks terribly for most search terms. This blog has about 440 pages of in-depth, well-written authoritative content. Readers are well engaged, the blog has a bounce rate of ~3.5% with average time on page of over 6 minutes. The problem can't be the quality of the content.
Does Google levy penalties against specific subdirectories? Or is this a configuration problem? Bad links have been disavowed.
-
Awesome! Thanks for the update.
-
UPDATE: Organic traffic to the blog has doubled in the last few days. It started going up about 4 days after I unblocked the categories from being crawled. I'm not certain that it's all Google organic traffic, but it sure looks encouraging since the blog hasn't responded to any SEO fixes for nearly two years!
-
I would definitely check out the list on Clarity: https://clarity.fm/browse/technology/wordpress - and for developers it's often best to look in your own network - so I'd ask friends / colleagues for referrals, or you can search your LinkedIn connections as well.
-
Got to work on those blocked scripts. It turns out they are all outside resources:
- Hubspot
- Zopim Live Chat
According to Google, if outside resources are blocked, you have to contact the vendor about unblocking them. I contacted both Hubspot and Zopim, they will get back to us in about 2 days. Thankfully, we didn't have any of our scripts/CSS blocked.
I'm also working on that redirect. It turns out that if I shut it down, and redirect to the 200 OK page, that the blog will then render search result pages that will be indexed. That will give us a massive duplication problem. Its because of this that we did the redirect in the first place.
We're considering getting a Wordpress pro to come in and fix it right. Any suggestions?
-
Great! So glad it's helped so far, please keep us updated
-
You were right about the Fetch and Render. I found tons of scripts and images that were blocked. We're unblocking them all. I'm still working on your other suggestions, we do have a lot of old content. My plan is to leave all the evergreen content, and purge everything else
-
I've unblocked the categories in Wordpress. Let's keep our fingers crossed!
-
Hi - I wouldn't focus too much on that - I would take the suggestions made in my first answer and start with those! You really don't want to block crawling of categories!
-
My mistake, we deleted a page with a similar URL. That page was published on Dec 9th. Three days is not an uncommon lag for Google to index a new blog post. WMT shows that we are only indexed to the 7th of December. Google appears to re-index our site once per week:
Lastest index 12/7
Previous index 11/30
Previous index 11/23
Is this unusual? And thanks for your help! This has been a very frustrating problem!
-
Do you reactivate it? It's still live:
http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss
-
We recently deleted that page. It was ranked at ~1000 in SERPs, so that indicated to us that Google had a major problem with it. Since we couldn't figure it out, we got rid of the page.
-
I just want to add for record, one thing that was really interesting. That is this page: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss
Was cached in Google but not indexed - which is odd. And to me a sign that Google is not crawling and processing the blog correctly. I've attached screenshots since they may very well index the page shortly.
Cache - http://screencast.com/t/cZcGbIHb
Site: search not indexed - http://screencast.com/t/IJQbyMhd
-
Hi - this was an interesting one! But I think I have found some of the issues.
- I'd really let Google crawl the categories. They are currently blocked from crawling in robots.txt - http://www.lifeionizers.com/robots.txt - this is an issue because I suspected part of the problem may be due to crawl efficiency. One reason I say this, is because Google has yet to index a blog post from about 2-3 days ago.
- This is a small thing, but link to the 200 OK version of the blog from your main menu. Right now, it links to /blog but then redirects to /blog/ with the trailing slash. Any little bit friction you can reduce the better.
- Because you have a lot of things in that robots.txt file - I would definitely perform some fetch and render tests in webmaster tools. Here's the thing, Google has said if you block CSS or JS from being crawled it will harm your sites ranking - so definitely do fetch and render and make sure that's not the case.
- The order of "Recent Articles" in the main content area in the blog homepage: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/ - don't seem to be "recent" at all. At least they are not in chronological order. This is confusing for me (and others users probably) so likely very confusing for Google. Most would expect the /blog/ homepage to list the most recent posts by published date. Especially since it is labled "recent". If these are supposed to be maybe "popular" I would label it as such.
- Lastly, with this much old content I would do a thorough content audit (directions here or here) of your blog. You should prune old, poor, outdated, low-traffic content just like you'd prune a plant - this will certainly help user metrics signals and keep your indexed:trafficked ratio healthy!
Those are just some of the immediate things I saw. I'd start there.
-
I think that it could just be that the key terms are extremely competitive. I would advise actually having someone take a look at the site in depth. Anything someone says without actually seeing the site is just speculation and maybes. I'm sorry I can't be more help!
-
I have been treating them as separate entities. I've focused on testing the blog, and fixed everything I could find - it had no effect. I've voraciously pursued scrapers with takedown orders etc, it had no effect.
I'm reaching out now, because I'm out of ideas, done everything I could, and nothing has worked. We are considering abandoning SEO entirely because there seems to be nothing we can do to get our rank to improve. I'm hoping someone in here can help me figure out what the problem is before we abandon ship
-
All on the subdomain? Google treats your subdomain as a separate site from your domain. If the penalty was on the subdomain level, that is where you need to focus your efforts. You have to treat them as separate entities.
-
We've seen a lot of Keywords improve significantly (+200 positions improvement in SERPs) but then a week or so later, they simply drop back down to where they were. We've seen other terms improve, and stay improved. We've also picked up about 500 keyword phrases since Penguin 3.0. The site as a whole has improved it's position in SERPs by about 20 positions since Penguin
So the answer is a definite we don't know.
-
Did you have a Penguin penalty by chance? You said you disavowed bad links, but if you were penalized was the penalty removed? I think the terms that you are targeting are extremely competitive and you need to do some more off site op to get them ranking well. Run a competitive SERP and see what page on looks like.
-
Yes, this blog targets specific terms related to alkaline water, water ionizer, ionized water, kangen water. We used to be competitive for all those terms, until Google nuked us. We fixed everything we could find, SEO-wise, but have seen zero improvement for those search terms.
I'd expect that if you improve the copy on a page, and promote it in social, that it should do better than position 200 (Google supplemental index). But SEO optimization on-site has had no effect on how this blog ranks. It improved from 220 to 200 after Penguin ran recently, but that's it
-
Without seeing the site I am not sure what else it could be. Are the blogs targeting specific key terms? If so, did you analyze them to see what metrics you need in order to compete with the people on page 1?
-
Yes, we've built good links for the site, and the blog has acquired good organic links all on it's own. We share regularly on social media and the blog has videos from YouTube on it.
This is the strangest thing. The blog has been built and maintained using white hat techniques, with every effort to provide value to the user, and play by the rules. Yet Google still treats it like we're pushing payday loans or something.
I've been fighting this for a year and a half, with no improvement. As a company, we are at our wits and and may just shut the blog down if this persists
-
The bad links have been disavowed but have any good links been built? Refresh some of those links with good, high quality, relative links. Share some of the pages on social media and add a couple of videos if you can, from Youtube. All of those things should help you.
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
-
Why have I lost my #1 ranking?
Hello! Ever since switching to a new website back in late 2014, my rankings have suffered. My webpage https://www.shwoodshop.com was always the #1 google position for the keywords "wood sunglasses" and "wooden sunglasses". For a while my site bounced back a forth between the #1 and #2 spots, but in the last 4 months I have been stuck with a #3 rank for both keywords. I hired an SEO company to help fix the problem but after a year of work, there was still no positive change. I have had multiple experts take a look at my site, but to no avail. All signs seem to point to a stronger, healthier site than my competition. My domain authority and page authority are much greater than the competition with the #1 and #2 rankings. I have used the On-Page grader and other tools to try and help, and even though I am getting an "A" grade, I'm still not improving my rankings. I ran a link metric comparison for my website versus the competition and attached it to this post. The main area I seem to be lacking is the Internal Equity-Passing Links. The top competitor has a ridiculous amount, which I think may be due to their use of breadcrumbs. Is this enough to make the difference? My other thought is that I could be suffering from duplicate page content. My website is setup to be "localized" via Subdirectories With gTLDs (.com/us, .com/eu, .com/au, .com/international). The on-page content is the exact same, but the prices for the products changes depending on your location. Moz shows a ton of duplicate pages due to this. Could I be getting penalized for this? I am an SEO novice and trying to learn as much as possible while investigation this issue. Any suggestions or ideas would be greatly appreciated! -Taylor wUiyU
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shwoodeyewear0 -
Is it possible to rank in google mexico when you don't have a local site?
Hello, someone is asking me why we don't rank in google mexico search engine. I mentioned we don't have a google mexico site, but have a USA site, so we may rank, but not as well as if we had the mexico site. IS there anyway to improve rankings or tips? THanks! Laura Robinson
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson321 -
Not ranking in Google - why???
This will be a bit long, so please bare with me. I have a client in the auto parts industry who wants to rank their homepage for 13 different keywords. We are ranked first page for all keywords in Yahoo! Mexico and Bing Mexico, but not ranking first page at all in Google Mexico. My client's competitor, however, is clearly outranking my client in Google. When comparing both pages, my client's, while not 100% optimized, looks better optimized than their competitor's. Looking at all metrics using Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs, etc... my client's site looks MUCH better on all fronts. I know ranking a single homepage for more than 10 keywords is a difficult task. Our competitor is however, ranking for them, so it's not impossible. The keywords are not even that competitive according to Moz's analysis. I decided to create an optimized page for each keyword to try to rank these pages, but still my client wants the homepage to rank (again, if the competitor is ranking, then it's possible to do this) and I am afraid these pages I created could result in keyword cannibalization ultimately affecting the homepage's possibility to rank. My client had a previous SEO agency working for them and basically all they did was create fake blogs and have lots of keyword rich links directed to the site's homepage. I got the complete link profile from several tools and submitted a disavow requests for as many fishy links I could find, but that hasn't shown any results so far. Note: when looking at the competitor link profile, they have basically just a few links and no external links of real value whatsoever. My client is obviously very frustrated, and so am I. In my SEO experience, it shouldn't be such a difficult task to accomplish, however nothing seems to work even though everything seems to point that my client should rank higher. So now I'm running out of ideas regarding what to do with this site. Any insight you could provide would be SO helpful to me and my client. If needed I can provide my client's homepage URL and also their competitors homepage for you to review. i can also give you any extra information you need. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EduardoRuiz0 -
Ranking stuck
Hello, I have a client with whom we are doing all the "right" things. We have a blog we add relevant content to once a week, we post on facebook, google+, twitter. We have stumbleupon and tumblr links. We have nice high pr links from local non-profits whom we sponsor for charity events. We are in the local citation sites and have 5 real reviews (working on more) But we are stuck anywhere from page 4 to page 2 for most of our keywords, which are all insurance related in the Gainesville area. I would love to hear some fresh ideas! http://dukeinsuranceagency.com , thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webzenz0 -
How to change a site without loosing ranking .
How to change a site without loosing ranking .I have a WP site for my own company .locally i have good ranking for few keywords .but I decided to change site theme and improve site contents further .but still i am not sure how to change these thing and doing without loosing ranking .expert advices welcome .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
One platform, multiple niche sites: Worth $60/mo so each site has different class C?
Howdy all, The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase. In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.) The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process. The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qurve0 -
Site speed - query
When you say site speed, does it mean speed of loading of each of the pages of the website or speed of home page loading. What do site speed tools measure ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610