Not Ranking - Any Tips?

[Ullamalm]

Hi guys,

I have a client site that I've recently come onboard with that was published late last year, not really optimized for anything, and in a moderately, but not very, competitive, search space.

Early April we optimized the home page and a couple of other pages and have since built about 5-6 (high quality, partial match) links to it, and a press release was done mid last month. The only other thing we did was change the site from non-www to www and set this as the preferred domain in Search Console.

Over 6 weeks since that all began, and we're still not on the radar at all for any of our main keywords - nowhere. The only thing we are really ranking for is our brand name, but this is the wrong (press release, not home!) page, and it's bouncing a lot. All of the pages seem to be indexed, and we are ranking for one other (inconsequential) keyword, but 99 is the highest it has reached.

An SEO friend told me to build some citations, but this is not a local business, nor are we trying to rank locally.

Can anyone please suggest why it might be taking so long, and what else I could try? I imagine more links will help, but results from our outreach are hard to predict, so if there were another safe link type that could help me figure out whether this domain is in trouble or not ASAP, that would be ideal.

Thanks very much in advance for any help you can provide.

Ulla

[KevnJr]

Sounds like you've found the issue, or at least the main one. I would wait on the dev site to be removed before starting over with a new domain.

KJr

[Ullamalm]

I appreciate your responses so far. My response is almost a uniform yes to all questions. In terms of URL redirection, we simply changed it from non-www to www via htaccess, and in the Wordpress settings - I believe that's all that's required, right?

My developer, however, just reminded me of something, which I now think is causing the issue. BEFORE we published a new version of the site, he accidentally published the development version by not setting up robots.txt correctly, causing a duplicate of the site to get indexed (it still is...)

The reason I didn't sound the alarm bells is that most of the content was subsequently changed on the new version, so I didn't think we'd face any duplicate content issues - however, Google must now associate our domain with another it has indexed of which it WAS a complete copy...

This is obviously pretty bad and I'm 90% confident is causing the issue. My developer corrected the robots issue at the time and is currently requesting the removal of the sites via Search Console, per what this article advises: http://www.thoughtshift.co.uk/what-to-do-if-a-test-or-dev-site-is-indexed-on-google/

...but I have no idea what to do next. Should I abandon ship and tell the client we need to switch domains? Or wait until the dev site is fully removed and see if we start to rank, hoping this was just some sort of algorithmic penalty?

[ChrisAshton]

Deacyde and Mike have offered some great advice and it's very hard to add to that without being able to look at the site.

If you're comfortable sharing your URL I'd be happy to take a closer look for you, though I certainly understand if you're not.

[MikeRoberts]

Its only been a month and its a moderately competitive landscape. So its possible it will take some time for all the changes to fully filter through and start ranking you better. Have you done a crawl request on the site, are your pages all indexed, is everything redirected properly that needs to be redirected, is your robots.txt set up properly, and have you seen any growth in important metrics in analytics since the changes were made that might signal to you the changes are starting to work?

[Deacyde]

Hello there,

I'm sure this can be extremely frustrating, especially after all the work you done for it.

Couple things to check off the list:

• Do you have a www and non www version of your site in webmaster tools, even if you decided on the website default being the non www, it's good to have all variations of your web property so you can monitor them.
• Please don't hit me but, are all www urls being redirected, so your older backlinks with the www are leading to your non www pages?
• Are there other on-page SEO issues that could be preventing the site's indexing / crawling as it should be?
• Does the site have any penalties, manual or algorithmic?
• Have you used a keyword rank checker to see where they are ranking? If using only moz's keyword rank checker, they only check up to rank 50, ahref.com only checks to 100 but other tools can go further, serpfox was one I played with, knowing the rank despite how bad it is, can help determine whats going on.
• Also doublecheck that either htaccess or robots.txt are not blocking pages

While this is in no way a complete checklist for figuring your issue out, it's a shot in the dark, since I don't even know what your website is and keywords are. I am sure others can help weigh in as well with other issues to look at, but this should be at the very least a place to start.