Low on Google ranking despite error-free!?
-
Hi all,
I'm following up on a recent post i've made about our indexing and especially ranking problems in Google: http://moz.com/community/q/seo-impact-classifieds-website
Thanks to all good comments we managed to get rid of most of our crawl errors and as a result our high priority /duplicated content decreased from +22k to 270. In short, we created canonical urls, run an xml sitemap, used url parameters in GWT, created h1 and meta description for each ad posted by users etc.
I then used google fetch a few times (3 weeks ago and last week) both for desktop and mobile version for re-approval. Nothing really improves in google rankings (all our core keywords are ranked +50)since months now: yet yahoo and bing organic traffic went up and is 3x higher than google's.
In the meanwhile we're running paid campagins on facebook and adwords since months already to keep traffic consistent, yet this is eating up our budget, even though our ctr and conversion rates are good. I realize we might have to create more content on-site and through social media, but right now our social media traffic is already around 50% and we are using more of twitter and google+ as well since recently.
Our organic traffic is only 14%; with google only a third of that. In the end, I believe this breakdown should look more something like organic 50%-70%, (paid)social,referral and direct traffic. 50%-30%...
I can't believe we are hit by a penalty although this looks like it is the case. Especially while yahoo and bing traffic goes up and google does not. Should I wait for a signal once our site is "approved" again through GWT fetch? Or am i missing something that i need to check as well to improve these rankings?
Thanks for your help!
Ivor
ps: ask me for additional stats or info in a pm if needed!
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for your valuable input. We will work on it and revert whenever I have additional questions.
Bedankt :-)!
Ivor
-
To be honest, I don't think that it's the duplicate pages which are the biggest problem, but at this point rather the on-page. Most of your potential users will search for "<> for sale in <<location>" so you should try to make sure that these kind of pages exist, with on-page elements. It will also help to make your site more flat - currently 46% of your pages are >=5 clicks from the home page. </location>
A part from that, personal ads sites tend to get a lot of traffic from long tail keywords, so the more ads you have, the more potential you have to attract traffic. Unfortunately, if you don't have a lot of traffic, you won't get a lot of ads, so it's a bit of a vicious circle you're in. When I crawled your site, I found about 450 HTML pages (unique), which remains quite small.
Not sure how the competition is in Spain, but normally it's a quite competitive market you're in, with a lot of players which are well established since quite a few years. So even if you do everything right, they will still beat you because they have a better link profile & reputation. It could be a better to focus on one specific niche (cars, motorcycles, boats,... ) and be really great on that niche, and expand to other niches once the first one gains momentum.
Social factors have some importance, but remember that these links are no follow, and that Google is not indexing all of Facebook.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi DC1611,
Thanks for your answers. It is true that we need to optimize further these pages, although I don't understand why few of these duplicates relative to our overall site would cause such problems? Just wandering when and how we will be recognized for improved ranking, as keyword optimization is not the only factor? Social factors f.ex. should also be of equal importance at least? Given the amount of combinations that arise out of our queries on-site, it is a huge challenge to optimize for them...Nevertheless we are working on updating our major landing pages that have missing descriptions...
Btw useful tool you mentioned, Screaming Frog, does give a thorough overview and a bit more useful than pulling out csv reports constantly from other crawling solutions.
-
I noticed you're Belgian, you could also check what other sites are doing like Markplaats, 2ehands,.... in terms of site structure and on-page optimisation. Crawling them with a tool like Screaming Frog will certainly give you some inspiration. I don't know the Spanish sites for personal ads, but check them as well. If you use Semrush you can check for which keywords they rank, how their landing pages look like and how they are optimised.
-
Hi,
You still have some duplicates - for each page the https & http version exists - I would choose the https version & redirect the non-https version to this one.
There are a lot of pages which have no H1or an H1 that doesn't really add value. Title idem - not always covering the content:
Example: http://www.mercadonline.es/anuncios-sevilla -
Title: Resultados de la búsqueda - MercadOnline.es
H1: missingApart from this - I guess your target audience is looking for quite specific info (like BMW for sale Sevilla) - as far as I can see you don't really have optimised pages for these queries. A potential landing page for this query would be: http://www.mercadonline.es/ads/motos-motocicletas/12162 - but Title, H1, Metadescription are not adapted
Title: Motos, motocicletas - 12162 - MercadOnline.es
Meta description: En Mercadonline.es encontrará diariamente una amplia gama de motos y motocicletas - 12162
H1: Vehículos=> try to adapt these to make it more specific to the corresponding search query.
Hope this helps;
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Ranking Above sub-domains
So I work for a company that has a very successful affiliate that operates under a third level domain name such as "region.company.com". Their SEO practices are very good and they rank highly in keyword searches. However "company.com" does not even though it is not a subdomain. Even after optimizing the company.com's pages etc, the regional sub domain ranks much higher for keywords and the main company fails to rank at all. Is Google discounting the main company's page? Is it a matter of trust or time? or is it something else? How can I get Google to prioritize the main company website rather than a lower level domain affiliate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resolute0 -
Does including your site in Google News (and Google) Alerts helps with SEO?
Based on the following article http://homebusiness.about.com/od/yourbusinesswebsite/a/google-alerts.htm in order to check if you are included you need to run site:domain.com and click the news search tab. If you are not there then... I ran the test on MOZ and got no results which surprised me. Next step according to :https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en#ts=3179198 is to submit your site for inclusion. Should I? Will it help? P.S.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This is a followup question to the following: http://moz.com/community/q/what-makes-a-site-appear-in-google-alerts-and-does-it-mean-anything0 -
Google is showing 404 error. What should I do?
Dear Experts, Though few of my website pages are accessible, Google is showing 404 error. What should I do? Even moz reports gives me the same. Problems:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Somanathan
1. Few of my Pages are not yet catched in Google. (Earlier all of them were catched by Google)
2. Tried to fetch the those pages, but Google says, page not found.
3. Included them in sitemap, the result is the same. Please advice: Note: I have recently changed my hosting server.0 -
Video SEO for Google
I was wondering what the prime factors were to make something rank for a video on Google. Does anyone have any suggestions? I think that length may be important, but I don't know what the ideal run time is. Hypothetically for local SEO, would I be better off doing a tag like "Mercedes Buffalo NY" or do individual tags of "Mercedes" and "Buffalo" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Google Places Listing Active In Two Seperate Google Places Accounts?
Hi is there any issues with having a google places listing in two seperate google places accounts. For example we have a client who cannot access their old google places account (ex-employee had their login details which they can't get) and want us to take control over the listing. If we click the "is this your listing" manage this page button - and claim the listing, will this transfer the listing to our control? Or will it create a duplicate? Are there any problems having the listing in different separate accounts. Is it a situation in which the last person who manages the listing takes control? And the listing automatically deactivates from the old account? Do all the images remain aswell? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney
Tom0 -
Why is google ranking me higher for pages that aren't optimised for keywords those that are?
I am finding that our homepage and other pages are being ranked higher against keywords that we have optimised other pages for. e.g Keyword: Luxury Towels Google Ranks our homepage http://www.towelsrus.co.uk at 20 for this and the page I am trying to rank for it is nowhere to be seen http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/sport-spa/luxury-towels/catlist_fnct498.htm Why is this and is this why our position for certain keywords fluctuates? How do I remedy this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Wordpress error
On our Google Webmaster Tools I'm getting a Severe Health Warning regarding our Robot.txt file reading: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises
Crawl-delay: 20 User-agent: 008
Disallow: / I'm wondering how I can fix this and stop it happening again. The site was hacked about 4 months ago but I thought we'd managed to clear things up. Colin0 -
Is My site seeing a Google Dance ? - Rankings all over the place
My eCommerce website is seeing some rankings flucuate daily from say rank 20 to rank 130 whilst some other keywords ago up and down by as much as 40 places. I have been putting up alot of new unique content and can see in GWT that google has been crawling my site more but given that I was affected by the google panda updates which saw a 40% drop in traffic I'm only just to recover some of it., i have also been trying to get rid of any poor links and our linking building is only concentrating on high quality posts and links. I am wondering if this is the post panda update - "google dance" or is google having issues trying to work where to rank my site and possibly punish me? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0