Why is my site ranking so poorly compared to my competition?

[Dutko2385]

I own a car shipping business (www.carshippingcarriers.com) and I was ranking very high last year, but around the end of August our site lost a TON of rank.  Afterwards I had my SEO team at the time (no longer working with them) do a complete overhaul of the website (rewrote content, combined many pages together so no duplicate content issue, made it mobile friendly, etc..  Since then we continue to still lose rankings on Google.  Yahoo and Bing seem to keep performing decently, but Google we are getting destroyed.

I have been a member of Moz for a few months and I have been using the open site to check my competitors and their linking profile.  One in particular, www.joescarshipping.com, has been ranking extremely well and the site looks horrible, doesn't have many links, hardly a social media presence, etc..  Compared my my website which has ton of content, articles on our website, social profile is great (tons of Google+ usage), not a ton of links so a decent amount of links, etc..  Why would a company like that be ranking so high while I keep falling?

Any advice or reasoning as to what is wrong or what could be done to get better rankings?  I am just at my wits end on this matter.

[Dutko2385]

Hey Matt, do you think you could do me a HUGE favor.  You said I have these low quality backlinks.  I am unable to see them or figure out how to generate a decent report to show those out-of-country backlinks.  Could you send me a report of these or potentially tell me how you saw them and where I could?

Thank you!

[EGOL]

Lots of great and generous answers from Dirk, Josh and Matt.

I really liked this sentence by Josh....

Because they are doing something you are not, obviously

and would simply like to add the converse....

Because you are doing something they are not, obviously ;p.

and on that basis, I think that Matt offers some really good points to investigate.

[Dutko2385]

Thanks for responding Matt!  Yes, I did make huge changes quickly.  I always want to jump onto an issue ASAP because each moment that my site isn't optimized or "perfect" I am losing potential customers.  Thank you for saying "great work".   It surely try to do a good job with the little knowledge I have.  haha.

I did go in and remove quite a few instances that said car shipping and I also changed quite a few to say either: auto transport, auto shipping, car transport and vehicle transport.

Never saw the birthday card un oil you posted that link, but it surely what my website looked like.  Sometimes when you're exhausted at 2am content doesn't always flow the greatest and errors are made.

As for the errors that still need to be corrected.  I will certain jump on them ASAP and I will talk with my new "technical SEO" company about the keyword density and content.  I know they are in "phase 1" going through and editing nearly every page to get the density in the right place and have the content cleaned up.  I think they have only done about 10 pages so far.  I just hired them not too long ago.  As for the disavow links... I will have to see how to see what links you're talking about and disavow them.  I know I will have to hire a company to start a link building strategy and when I do I will surely let them know of these low quality BS links and have them disavow them for me so don't screw it up and really get my website in trouble.

Honestly, thank you very much for your responses.  I appreciate it more than you know.

[MattAntonino]

Wow, you acted really fast - I didn't take into consideration that you'd already made such big changes to the site. Great work on it then.

I would definitely rewrite some of it. It can be challenging to talk about cars for the whole page without using it over & over but the more you can limit it, I think the better it will be in the end. Too much of a good thing at the moment (plus, the birthday card is just a great reference so whenever I get the chance, have to throw it in.)

I would definitely disavow those links, clean up the content, check your other pages for the same issue and see where you're at once all these things get indexed. Then try to earn a few strong links and see where you land. From there, we can potentially help diagnose again as necessary.

[Dutko2385]

Thank you very much for the info.  I did take your advice again and put my quote box back near the top of the page.  I like it at the top because at the end of the day that is what I want my people to do.  I need the leads! haha.

I did remove the Disallow: /wp-includes/

I hope that causes a good chain reaction.

I would like to enable caching and minify, but the person who created my quote box made it where i cannot have caching and minty or it screws up my quote box.  I have coding in my box where if people type out a city or zip it will show the correct spelling of the city and state and make my customers happy.  It also makes it easier on me so i have the correct spellings of the cities that people are needing car transported to and from.  With that code I am unable to use plug-ins that will cache and minify.  I tried it and i didn't it just screwed everything up.

I honestly cannot thank you enough for your answers to my questions.  Very kind of you!

[DirkC]

Hi,

We all had to start somewhere. There is a lot of useful content on Moz (check the beginners guide for starters) & there is off course the q&a. For the budget you mentioned you should be able to get some decent SEO company helping you out.

On the robots.txt - it is in the root of your website: www.carshippingcarriers.com/robots.txtYour javascript is located in  the /wp-includes/ folder - however in the 2nd line of your robots file you put

Disallow: /wp-includes/

I would take-out this line.

New design looks clean & content is better to read and is closer to the top. You moved your form to the bottom. Personally I would keep it on the top (there is sufficient place on the main image)

Page speed hasn't really improved mainly because of the images: the image http://www.carshippingcarriers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IMG_0528.jpg is high-res & much too big. Same for http://www.carshippingcarriers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_0538.jpg & your main image. Resize & use a tool like https://compressor.io/ (free) to compress them even further.

Check also Pagespeed insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.carshippingcarriers.com%2F&tab=desktop - score is not too bad - but you could enable caching for static resources & minify your css/js/html files (the tool does this for you - you can download the optimised js/css at the bottom of the page.

From usability perspective - the links on the green background are blue rendering difficult to read.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[Dutko2385]

Dirk, I took some things of what you said and I immediately made changes.  I removed the pictures that the other SEO team put on my homepage.  I also changed the theme because the website looked extremely dull with the pictures and I did understand where you were coming from with the photo in the background and the content over it... it was sometimes hard to read.  Maybe you could check to see if it still it hard to load the homepage again.

I will absolutely start writing the blog about more car shipping stuff.  It is just hard because I don't want to write duplicate content.  There is only so much I can write about in my industry.  I figured because part of my industry is dealing with cars and such that writing about new cars and stuff would be ok.

I didn't see that many links when I went to Open Source on Moz and was searching for the backlink profile.  I have been doing that to many of my competitors to see where they have backlinks and steal their ideas.  Then obviously I need to hire a link building company who is going to give me the right backlinks and disavow the crappy ones I have.

The last objective you touched on was the robots.txt.  How would someone unblock javascript with my robots.txt?  I never knew it was like that, again my old SEO company did all of that stuff and I even paid for a totally revamped quote box and I think that is the reason for it being blocked.  Is there a way to unblock java?  If so, how the heck can you through Wordpress?  I tried looking for about an hour last night.  I have the Yoast Premium plug-in and I went under tools and found a file editor link that says "This tool allows you to quickly change important files for your SEO, like your robots.txt....." so I looks in there and all it had was:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /staging/

I didn't touch anything because I don't want to make matters worse.  I didn't see anything about javascript.

I am such a noob it isn't even funny.  I know some things, but many others and beyond my scope.  I was paying a company between $3,000 and $6,000 a month and basically all that he was doing was writing articles.  He harped on me to post on social media (which I am now) and to generate him new content.  He didn't even do any external linking like he was suppose to (also never told me to go get links when he wasn't able to), didn't notice that javascript is blocked with my robots.txt, and obviously didn't do much else.

[Dutko2385]

Matt, I took some of Dirk's words to heart so all last night I took out the pictures that were on my homepage, but them the website looked very dull.  I then added content, but then my website looks even more dull because it didn't have pictures.  So, I decided to change my theme.  That is why it looks like my website is not indexed properly.  I will go through and check the amount of times the keyword and get rid of some.  I wasn't even trying to be spammy.  I literally wrote this content yesterday night and went to sleep.  I will change it for sure.  Question though, instead of have "car shipping" so many times could I edit some of the '"car shipping" words to "auto transport", "car transport", "auto shipping", and vehicle transport" instead of getting rid of the word "car shipping" for some of these?

As for the links: I didn't know I had garbage backlinks from foreign countries.  Not sure how that even happened.  I surely know I didn't do that.  I have not done any back linking from anything besides reliable directories (yahoo local, yelp, vimeo, and etc..  Then you mentioned the auctions websites for selling cars.  Not sure how those occurred either.  It looked like they took a picture of mine and then tried giving me credit.  It is stuff like this as to why I am looking for a link building strategy/company to do all of this for me.

Matt, thank you for taking the time to send me all of this.

[MattAntonino]

I wouldn't normally spend this much time on a Q&A answer but, well, in this case I felt the urge. You'll see why.

**I thought: because Panda, first of all. **

Do a search on your homepage for "car" and then just cycle down through the page. The phrase "car shipping" appears 37 times on the homepage and it's way excessive.

Choosing Car Shipping Carriers Is A Smart Idea
There are many reasons to choose Car Shipping Carriers when you need to have a car shipped. Car Shipping Carriers is one the nations highest rated car shipping company in the United States. Our 5-Star Reviews and 100% rating shows that we take care of our customers from the initial quote until the vehicle is delivered. We have affordable car shipping rates, premium car shipping services and excellent customer service.

This is the SEO birthday card. And here I thought they stopped making those.

Other pages like your enclosed car carriers page are just as bad. 40 instances of "car" in 376 words. I know SEOs generally talk about "no such thing as keyword density" but in this case, there is such thing as way too many uses of the same word.

Nearly every page title on your website has the words "car shipping carriers" in it - which page do you want Google to rank for "car shipping" because you've told them that's what every page is about. "Beast Supercar | New Supercars | Car Shipping Carriers."

Then I thought: because Penguin, too.

Your backlink profile does have a few issues. You have a bunch of links from sites that are all the same but different URLs: georgiacarauction.com, minnesotacarauction.com, michigancarauction.com - all sorts of these. On the same IP, same template, etc. It looks like a dodgy way of gaining a bunch of backlinks and honestly my first reaction was to check to see if you owned those sites because it looks like a mini link network. So do the news links: wkrg.com, wsls.com, wspa.com, nbc4i.com - all link back to you.

Then I found Russian & Chinese backlinks to you. Vietnamese .edu.vn links, a bunch more .info than i think is realistic. And at least one from 40 different countries. Seems a lot. So I checked the Chinese links:

http://www.ljzj.gov.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=176721

http://gxzxw.gov.cn/bbs/home.php?mod=space&uid=33658

.gov.cn - but spam. And the Russian ones? I'm pretty sure they aren't legit backlinks either.

http://www.forum.kmtis.ru/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=66542

But I'm wrong. It's not the low quality content. And it's not the super-low quality backlinks.

I ran a cache:yoursite.com check ... your content isn't even indexed properly.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.carshippingcarriers.com/&gws_rd=cr&ei=lx0WVpLpF4W2uASpxb-wDw

Google sees and has indexed a completely different version of your homepage. Granted, it's still spammed for the word "car" and still looks like the SEO birthday card but it's not the same content as what you have online live. Your internal page seem to be working but your homepage content isn't seen by Google.

[DirkC]

4. You block javascript with your robots.txt - you shouldn't do that (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html)

[DirkC]

Hi,

Did a quick check - some remarks.

1. Homepage - very heavy to load (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151007_D6_180W/ ) - important text at the bottom and difficult to read due to the background image - part of the text/links is hidden behind images which isn't exactly what Google likes.

2 A lot of content is on your site is about new cars - not sure if this is the best strategy to follow. You will never be best in class for this. The links inside this part to your "main" content look a bit artificial. I would rather build content around shipping cars (what is the most expensive car you ever shipped, the strangest car, remarkable stories...etc) - provide content about the shipping process (the different steps, illustrate how you take care of the cars during shipment,...etc which is much more related to your core business. Check what the main concerns of your customers are and build content around this. Use tools like Semrush to checkout the keywords that are generating the traffic for your competitors and build content around them as well.

3. Your competitor's site might be ugly and quite light in content  - it charges much faster and has all the content that counts visible upfront. He has about 1200 follow links to his site - you have about 100 - so you might want to work on some linkbuilding (you will find plenty of resources on this topic here on Moz). His links seem to be quite (over) optimised - so it's possible he's buying them.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[Dutko2385]

Dirk, thanks!  I was a bonehead and didn't post my URL.  I just edited my question to add my URL.  It is www.carshippingcarriers.com

[DirkC]

For questions like this it's always useful to publish the url - without the url you can only get very generic advice.

Dirk