Possible google sandbox issue? Organically ranking page 1 for our number 1 keyword, but page 5 sometimes 6 on google?
-
What are some things I can look into to figure out why google is ranking us on page 5 sometimes page 6, with some slight rank boosts to rank 36 from 48 but then falls right back.
While Yahoo and Bing rank us page 1 consistently, without these big drops back.
I use google search ( webmaster tools ) daily, fix 404s and make sure to fetch new content I create.
Our site is within the Sandbox issue time frame, google 1st indexed the site about a year and a half ago, the site has been through various SEO service checks, and has had those issues fixed ( some bigcommerce won't allow, such as full sitewide ssl and a few other small factors ) but all the big stuff was handled or will be 100% handled after this redesign is complete. But just still seems we're stuck in the google hole again.
We do use adwords, but no clear signs as to why we'd suffer such hardships with google ranking, only thing we don't have optimized in terms of on page optimization from moz is keyword in url, of which will be changing within the next month or two, as we're rolling our a new redesign with SEO 100% at the forefront, nice url paths, with keywords in their url, much more responsive site that uses less resources.
But before we release this redesign, I'd like to find out what toe we stubbed of google's to give us such a ranking blackeye...
We don't have that many backlinks, and I know these are a huge factor, however, building quality backlinks it's harder than walking on water at time and on the same level as spinning hay into gold.
Any ideas community...
-
Hi there.
Well, Google, Bing and Yahoo are using completely different ranking algorithms, so, it's not surprise that your rankings differ. I don't think you really can optimize for all search engines. You just optimize for Google and hope that you rank on others as well. So, to answer your question - I don't think the problem is with Google. It's most likely with your website. Make sure that your website is well optimized (tech and non-tech side), you have good backlink profile, your content is outstanding and your social media presence is huge. Also check for possible algortihm's spam hits like penguin etc.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Link juice from links that are not on the page?
Hello, Thank you in advance for your help! I was doing research for backlinking opportunities by looking at competitor backlinks using Open Site Explorer and I ran into a puzzle. When I do an Open Site Explorer search for http://whatsdavedoing.com/ I find that link equity is being passed to the site from a number of pages on the http://www.travelsupermarket.com/ blog with the anchor text "What's Dave Doing" When I go to these pages and do a source code search I cannot find this anchor text. When I do a google search with the following: site:travelsupermarket.com "What's Dave Doing" I find that there are tons of items that come back with a list of blogs in their description: "Dec 5, 2013 - ... foXnoMad · Inside The Travel Lab · itravelnet · The Mad Traveler Blog · The Mad Traveler Online · Uncornered Market · What's Dave Doing?" Where is this coming from? What is going on here? Is this a linking tactic that sites use to pass link juice to contributors without linking to them directly? Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!
Competitive Research | | overlandundersea0 -
Rankings & Linking Root Domains
How are the Linking Root Domains under Keyword Rankings being found? We've noticed for many of our key terms that big brands like Amazon, eBay, Home Depot, etc. only list 1 linking root domain, while much smaller competitors in our industry have hundreds. Clearly big brands are going to get more links than a company most people haven't heard of and the idea that these companies only have 1 linking root domain to a specific subcategory on their site is not believable. What's going on here?
Competitive Research | | Kingof50 -
What are the pros and cons of putting all content under directory named after target keyword?
The question sounds complicated but is actually quite simple. We want to rank high for the keyword "publicity". Here are some facts: Google Keyword Research: Competition 0.02 & Global monthly searches: 22,200 SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool: highly competitive We are producing plenty of editorial content every day on our online magazine which right now resides under http://mag.publiseek.com and we are thinking of renaming the magazine: "Publicity" and moving it to http://publiseek.com/publicity That way every new article will be under the publicity subdirectory. Of course we would redirect all the existing articles under the old structure to the new one using 301's. And we're hoping that with time we get the top position for the keyword publicity. I am interested to hear from the experts out there what are the pros and cons of this approach?
Competitive Research | | davhad0 -
Majestic gives me a 24 situation and 24 trust flow. Seomoz just a total number of 7\. How come the difference? My ranking is still bad, so is Majestic crawling faster then google?
Hi, my total domain value number on SEOmoz is 7. In Majestic it is 24 situation and 24 trust flow. My ranking is still bad (page2) and my competitors have a lower trust/ situation flow in Majestic. But in Seomoz the're better. Is the conclusion that Majestic is more up to date then Google itself and that Seomoz is more inline with the google crawling? Because Majestic doesnt reflect my ranking. (ps I started with the domain for a month, and I only have some history in registration)
Competitive Research | | remkoallertz0 -
Local/Geo-Targeted SEO Keywords
Hey everyone, I work for a local jeweler who only has one store and wants to rank for geo-targeted and local results. We want to rank for "jewelry Minneapolis", "Minnesota engagement rings" and terms like that, since we're not an e-tailer we don't need to rank nationally... just in the MSP metro. I've been trying to find a service that has accurate search volume information for local search. I want to see how many searches are being conducted for various terms so I know where to focus our time and effort to rank for these terms. Does such a service exist? Or something that is more geared toward a strictly local strategy such as ours? Thanks in advance for all of your assistance! Jayme
Competitive Research | | jpretz0 -
How to do this type of listing on Google organic search results?
The typical listing looks like this (as im sure you know):
Competitive Research | | CompleteOffice
However, one of my competitors has a listing that looks like the following:
(http://i.imgur.com/Io1oX.png - link to image if its too small for you to see)
How do they do this?
Am i right in thinking this is a lot better for SEO because effectively it takes up 3-4 positions on search results?
YIHQA.png Io1oX.png Io1oX.png
0 -
Keyword difficulty tool - bit confused here!!
Hi, Got a question about the keyword difficulty tool, I'm new to seomoz so might be a silly question but here goes. Q: It takes the top 10 results from Google under a certain search query, the results displayed gives a rough breakdown of what power the page on the search results has along with the root domain. It looks like it rewards the best out of the bunch for each section with a tick, so 1 tick per column for the best performer. Now I would have thought if one of the websites in the top 10 had all 4 ticks it would rank at the top of the list but this is not the case. What else would come into play to make others which have no ticks rank higher then one which has all. Sorry if this sounds really confusing.
Competitive Research | | activitysuper0 -
1 domain dominating unbranded search terms?
Anyone have any insight or comments? We’ve been negatively impacted by the last Google algorithm update - not by a penalization of our site but because another site is now grabbing the top 3-4 search results for long tail physician name searches thereby pushing us lower in the rankings. Being that we’ve never seen this happen with unbranded search terms, we’re not sure how to address it. To see an example, click http://www.google.com/search?q=dr.+elizabeth+eads. You’ll notice that the top 4 results are all from 1 site - HealthGrades - with 2-3 of the 4 pages being canned, pre-written templates without any unique content (see malpractice & sanction pages). It seems that they are doing this by paginating their information into separate pages, thus appearing in multiple search results, instead of putting all the information on 1 page, as we do and Google’s best practices suggest. Any advice or comments would really be appreciated.
Competitive Research | | irvingw0