Homepage Not Ranking in Google - How long do old (not current) bad SEO practices exert influence?
-
I'm trying to get to the bottom of a problem I have with the Google ranking for mauiactivities.com - it's far below what I would hope for. My research so far has uncovered the following, and any advice on where to go from here would be appreciated.
_Edit:_No problems with Bing or Yahoo - the site is #1 for primary key word 'maui activities'
1. Running a site:http://www.mauiactivities.com search in Google reveals that the homepage doesn't rank. At all. I looked through the 17 pages of results and can't spot it.
Edit: I have now, after fresh checks after submitting the homepage through Search Console, found it at #1 - still, the following applies ...
2. I've found that the domain (before it was purchased by my client in 2011) had some bad inbound links, specifically from scubamaui.com (no longer active). The links where white, on a white background. This web archive snapshot will reveal all.
3. Those bad links were 'cleaned up' (i.e. they don't show in the web archive) from 2014, and as mentioned above, the website is now 'down'.
4. Search Console doesn't have a manual penalty.
5. When I search for 'tropical divers maui' in Google I find www.mauiactivities.com is the 4th result. To me, this indicates a current relationship with the dead site (Tropical Divers Maui). No other term comes close to ranking to high for the homepage.
So, to summarise - can the old, dead Tropical Divers Maui website still be affecting the Google ranking, and what would you suggest I do next?
-
Hi David,
Thanks for your thoughts. I had just come across the multiple H1 issue and have it as a 'to do' - agree it's not great. Thanks for spotting it and making a it a point.
We do have some bad site links, yes. There has been previous SEO work done in the past and I'm trying to understand what has been disavowed before submitting a new file myself. In the mean time I've been trying to get bad links removed manually.
I also wonder how much of these bad links (that ski trip article for example) were part of a prior SEO strategy ... Much of this is a guessing game.
I'll tackle these two areas and monitor what happens.
Many thanks,
Jonathan
-
Hi Jonathon,
I wouldn't be worried about the scubamaui.com hurting your performance - there are definitely bigger factors that would be affecting the site.
Looking at your backlink profile in Ahrefs, I can see that you have a lot of dodgy blog and profile links with exact-match anchor text. Have these links been disavowed?
Examples of some bad links:
http://skitripvacation.com/blog/travel/4168-excited-about-maui-activities
http://maribethvaladez213.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/activities-and-tours-in-maui.html
http://www.betternetworker.com/members/ptevemark7There's also an issue with headings tags being used incorrectly, eg. you have 19 h1 headings on your homepage and 4 h1 headings on just about all other pages.
The first h1 heading on most of your pages is '__You are not logged in yet', which is not great.
You should only have one h1 heading per page and you should make sure it describes what the page is about.
Cheers,
David
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
-
Website ranking on Google dropping for unknown reason while rankings are improving on Bing. Please help!
one of my websites www.resumeble.com is showing a constant drop in rankings. Earlier the website was ranking for major keywords like resume writing services etc. I used Ahrefs site audit to find issues. According to Ahrefs there was a huge issue of duplicate pages, which is now resolved by proper canonical tag insertion. The site is built on Angular. Fetch report in Google shows perfect code and Sitemap is also perfect. Manual action reporting in webmaster shows no warning. Please suggest what steps should I take to fix this issue.
Technical SEO | | mayyaa40 -
How to optimize for different google seach center (google.de, google.ch) ?
We all use Deutsch language and (.com) domains for the sites. I ranked well in google.com ,but not so well in google.de , google.ch , my competitors ranked much better in google.de,google.ch. I checked most of their outbound-links, but get few information. Links from (.DE) domains or links from sites located in German help the rank for special google seach center ? (google.de, google.ch) . Or some other factors i missed? please help.
Technical SEO | | sunvary0 -
Google penalising my site? Ranking now outside top 50
Hey there, Was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/help on my current problems with my Google ranking. I used to be on page one this time last year (still am on yahoo and bing) but Google has pushed me out of the top 50. Since then I built a new site on wordpress with new content but it hasn't made any real difference. This is my site address: www.elvisimpersonator4u.co.uk I also have a separate blog here: www.thisiselvis.tv The blog did have some duplicate writing on it which I removed a few months back but it still hasn't improved my Google ranking. Would a 301 redirect fix this problem properly? I've done quite a lot of SEO on several pages on the new site to try and improve it but no luck so far. In fact I hope I haven't over optimised! No tools seem to indicate this though. I have no messages in webmaster tools so there's no obvious penalty, my web hosts keep saying I just need to buy more link builds and content writing from them but I've already done a lot of this and it's made no discernible difference. If someone could have a look and give me some advice I would be most grateful! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | devrox
Jim0 -
Could multiple languagues on one site be bad for SEO???
Our site is has content in English and in Spanish. The spanish side was translated by me, Spanish is my first language, so i know that the translations are good and its original content. We were Pandalized/Penguinnized pretty bad earlier this year. We have completely cleaned our site of anything that could be considered thin content or grey hat techniques. An associate is telling me that we need to put the spanish version of the site on its own domain, does this make sense to anyone? The spanish side of the site gets only about 5% of the visitors, bu i still don't see the logic in taking all those pages and putting them on a different domain. Would this help recover from Panda/Penguin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
Duplicat content affecting SEO Rankings
We have one main site called buypropertyanywhere, it is a database it holds all the data for all our property websites. One of our most popular sites is housesalesbulgaria, which takes the data from buypropertyanywhere in regards to bulgarian property and display it. The same with housesalesturkey it takes the data in regards to turkish property and display it. We think because buypropertyanywhere and housesalesbulgaria has the same data it has high duplicate content . We think this is affecting the SEO rankings for housesalesbulgaria. Google is looking at housesalesbulgaria as if a copy of buypropertyanywhere. So therefore should we SEO buypropertyanywhere soley and link it to housesalesbulgaria through the articles and content we put on the site. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Feily0 -
Why am I ranking for this
In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to! Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues). The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain. The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home). Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite. I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously. The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term! The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for help hehe thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Will a drop in indexed pages significantly affect Google rankings?
I am doing some research into why we were bumped from Google's first page into the 3rd, fourth and fifth pages in June of 2010. I always suspected Caffeine, but I just came across some data that indicates a drop in indexed pages from 510 in January of that year to 133 by June. I'm not sure what happened but I believe our blog pages were de-indexed somehow. What I want to know is could that significant drop in indexed pages have had an effect on our rankings at that time? We are back up to over 500 indexed pages, but have not fully recovered our first page positions.
Technical SEO | | rdreich490