Need help in diagnosing what I may be doing wrong
-
I have a site that has been having problems ranking. Initially, spam rate was at 18%. I have since changed the URL and forwarded to the original so now the spam rate is under 5%. Phone calls started picking back up very slowly but then by August 2024 things came to a screeching halt. Phone has been dead and very little business has been written. I did notice on the robots.txt file it had this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /no-bing-crawl/
Disallow: wp-adminand now I have since changed it to this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.phpSitemap: https://urlishere.com/sitemap_index.xml
My question is what else do I need to do to get this site to start ranking again? We are blogging once a month, writing press releases once a month, updating the social media a few times a week. I feel like maybe there is something on the backend that needs to be done to get this site back to ranking. I am using SEO by Yoast and I have filled in the title and meta description fields for all pages. There is a spot in Yoast where I can validate the site with Google, Bing, etc. I'm trying to figure out how to do that. I do see in the site's Google Webmaster Tools there are several pages not indexing. Any ideas on what else I can do to get this site to start ranking again? Thank you.
-
Hi, have you changed the web design or lost any good links recently?
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
-
To hyphenate or not to hyphenate?
Quick question: does Google differentiate between terms that correctly include a hyphen (such as "royalty-free") and those that are incorrect ("royalty free")? I ask because the correct term "royalty-free"(with a hyphen) receives far less monthly traffic for the same term without the hyphen (according to Moz): Term | Estimated traffic
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
"royalty free music" | 11.5-30.3K
"royalty-free music" | 501-850 If Moz views the terms separately then I'd guess that Google does too, in which case the best thing to do for SEO (and increased site traffic) would be to wrongly use "royalty free" without the hyphen. Is that correct?0 -
Should I "no-index" two exact pages on Google results?
Hello everyone, I recently started a new wordpress website and created a static homepage. I noticed that on Google search results, there are two different URLs landing on same content page. I've attached an image to explain what I saw. Should I "no-index" the page url? Google url.JPG In this picture, the first result is the homepage and I try to rank for that page. The last result is landing on same content with different URL. So, should I no-index last result as shown in image?
Technical SEO | | amanda59640 -
Clever Way To Increase Organic Search Traffic To News/Magazine Websites
Hi fellow Mozzers... I've been asked to increase organic search (SEO) traffic to a news/magazine style website. All the website consists of is regular news articles within a specific niche. It is also already listed on Google News. I know we can improve any on-page tactics, such as optimising the article webpages, internal linking, improving the navigation and adding breadcrumbs etc. But what about off-page? They want us to work on backlinks to the site, which we can do for the homepage to improve the domain authority. But there's no point on increasing backlinks to the individual news articles, as they have a very short life span, and are not evergreen. Perhaps it's a good idea to increase backlinks to the category pages? But there are no real keyword opportunites on these pages. Can anyone recommend a clever SEO strategy to increase SEO traffic to a news style website? The site can be found at https://tinyurl.com/2p9arrwz Best wishes. Many thanks for any replies in advance 🙂 Lee.
SEO Tactics | | Webpresence0 -
When to re-write and redirect a blog url?
What are best practices for rewriting (and then redirecting) blog URLs? I refresh old blog posts on our blog every month and many of them have URLs that are too long or could be improved. However, many of them also already get decent organic traffic and I don't want to lose traffic due to a URL redirect. Are there any best practices or "rules" I can follow when deciding whether to re-write and redirect blog URLs?
Content Development | | Emily.R.Monrovia
Thanks!0 -
Unsolved Are my local pages watering down my website?
We operate in multiple cities, and for a number of years, have (mostly successfully) targeted each city with its own landing page. But lately Im seeing these pages drop in rankings, If I ignored SEO tactics, and designed the site based on what I think would be most useful/helpful to people viewing the website, I would not have any location landing pages. I would have one strong page (eg, probably the home page), that says "and we operate in the following locations..." and then list them off. The thing is, I dont really think these location specific landing pages have ever offered any real value to someone searching, other than just making it clear that we operate in their area (which doesn't need a landing page to make that clear). They're basically variations of each other, key word adjusted for the location - done for the purpose of ranking locally. I mean, that sounds like spam. But all the research says that I need landing pages for each location. My question: What would happen if I built one new page, and listed all the locations clearly on that page, and then 301 redirect the existing location landing pages to the new, single page. Would I fall of the cliff?
SEO Tactics | | blitzna1010 -
Can you help me understand leveraging semantic markup
Hi, i am trying to understand about leveraging semantic markup but even though i have read the page on the link, i am still not sure of what it means and how i can use it in my site www.in2town.co.uk which has been built using joomla If anyone can help me understand then that would be amazing and help me understand how it would benefit my site.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is it Helpful to Add a Dynamic Blog Feed to Your Homepage?
Do you think it helps SEO significantly to add a feed on your homepage that shows a snippet of your latest blog posts? If yes, have you seen any results from doing this?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Help! Need advice for a new HTTPS URL!
Hi. We have just launched a new website that is fully secure with the HTTPS url. You can still access the home page with an ordinary HTTP address. That is what we want to change. Should we forward the HTTP url to the HTTPS? Redirect? It is the same URL for both. http://www.parrotmoon.com Thank you for all ideas! Jay
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0