Low on Google ranking despite error-free!?

[ivordg]

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!

[ivordg]

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for your valuable input. We will work on it and revert whenever I have additional questions.

Bedankt :-)!

Ivor

[DirkC]

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

[ivordg]

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.

[DirkC]

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.

[DirkC]

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: missing

Apart 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