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Thank you both! Now when is the damn Penguin update coming?!?! hahaha I wish we could have an answer.

Marie, you are awesome. All your insight has really helped me to understand better what we can do and what requires waiting. I'll take some actions ASAP.

Just a quick question about something I've already mentioned - can the fact that I created specific pages with optimized content for each keyword affect the homepage's possibilities to rank due to keyword cannibalization?

Look at this page, for instance, this is the one I created for "refacciones bmw":

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/refacciones-bmw

Am I shooting myself in the foot with this? Consider our competitor has NO optimized content whatsoever, not in their homepage nor nowhere else.

Thank you!

The image shows only organic traffic. Not sure what you mean about not finding my competitor. I can see it in Google results first page for the target keywords. Thank you Sean.

Duh, sorry the image shows ONLY organic traffic.

Hello guys. Thanks for your answers, I really appreciate them.

I have definitely thought Pengiun has the culprit of this, but when looking at analytics (see attached image) there hasn't been a huge traffic drop that would make it obvious there was an algorithmic penalty, also there hasn't been manual penalties against the site.

I am guessing my client's keywords didn't bring much traffic anyway before the theoretical penalty, so that's probably why there is not a decrease in traffic? Can this be a keyword-specific penalty?

My client's site is www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx

Competitor's site is www.saferefacciones.com

Sample keyword: "refacciones bmw" (my client wants to rank for variations on these keyword, just changing the brand name".

Thank you so much!

pWSOjhO

This will be a bit long, so please bare with me.

I have a client in the auto parts industry who wants to rank their homepage for 13 different keywords. We are ranked first page for all keywords in Yahoo! Mexico and Bing Mexico, but not ranking first page at all in Google Mexico.

My client's competitor, however, is clearly outranking my client in Google. When comparing both pages, my client's, while not 100% optimized, looks better optimized than their competitor's. Looking at all metrics using Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs, etc... my client's site looks MUCH better on all fronts.

I know ranking a single homepage for more than 10 keywords is a difficult task. Our competitor is however, ranking for them, so it's not impossible. The keywords are not even that competitive according to Moz's analysis. I decided to create an optimized page for each keyword to try to rank these pages, but still my client wants the homepage to rank (again, if the competitor is ranking, then it's possible to do this) and I am afraid these pages I created could result in keyword cannibalization ultimately affecting the homepage's possibility to rank.

My client had a previous SEO agency working for them and basically all they did was create fake blogs and have lots of keyword rich links directed to the site's homepage. I got the complete link profile from several tools and submitted a disavow requests for as many fishy links I could find, but that hasn't shown any results so far. Note: when looking at the competitor link profile, they have basically just a few links and no external links of real value whatsoever.

My client is obviously very frustrated, and so am I. In my SEO experience, it shouldn't be such a difficult task to accomplish, however nothing seems to work even though everything seems to point that my client should rank higher. So now I'm running out of ideas regarding what to do with this site.

Any insight you could provide would be SO helpful to me and my client. If needed I can provide my client's homepage URL and also their competitors homepage for you to review. i can also give you any extra information you need.

Thanks a lot!

Links in footers and sidebards should be NOFOLLOW'ed, so in theory, yes, links on actual content should count much more.

Wow thanks for this answer Miriam. This definitely helps me understand much better how this works as I was getting very confused why I was ranking better in "global" searches, now this makes more sense.

Thank you Gary. What you've mentioned makes sense to me.

So, pretty much getting to google.com is almost impossible now, as Google will redirect users to their local Google sites based on their IP addresses. Therefore, it makes more sense to rank in local versions of Google, at least for this site, which is not intended to be global.

I'm thinking more links from .mx sites could be a possible solution.

Thanks a lot!

Hello Moz community,

I have a question: what is the difference between a local version of Google vs. the default Google in regards to search results?

I have a Mexican site that I'm trying to rank in www.google.com.mx, but my rankings are actually better if I check my keywords on www.google.com

The domain is a .mx site, so wouldn't it make more sense that this page would rank higher on google.com.mx instead of the default Google site, which in theory would mean a "broader" scope? Also, what determines whether a user gets automatically directed to a local Google version vs. staying on the default one?

Thanks for your valuable input!

If your site is well optimized and the keyword isn't too hard to rank for, then give it time. It's been a month, try not to be impatient. Instead of obsessively checking your ranking, focus on getting good links to your site. It's been my experience that it takes 3 months or so before you start climbing positions.

Best of luck!

I would definitely 301 re-direct to the new page, this way you'll make sure any links that were coming to page "A" are counted for your new page "B". After all, 301 is such a quick thing to do, it's worth it to be sure.

Hello Moz community. I'm looking here for some input from the experts on what could be wrong with a site I'm working on. The site is in Spanish, but I'm sure you'll get the idea.

We want to rank the site first page on Google Mexico (www.google.com.mx) for the keyword "refacciones Audi" and some other brands (refacciones = replacement parts would probably be a good translation, just FYI). Now, our page hasn't been completely optimized, so in my mind it's OK not to be on first page yet.

However, our main competitor is ranking first page for all the keywords we want to rank for, but when you check their site, you'll find there is hardly any content, no keywords are being used in their content, all pages have the exact same title and meta description, their catalog is in a completely different domain. In short, no SEO whatsoever. Looking at Moz data, our site has a DA of 26, while our competitor's has a 10. They have no external backlinks at all, while we have a few hundred.

This leaves me scratching my head: how can a completely non-optimized site outrank us?

I decided to check our backlink profile, and a previous SEO agency seems to have built MANY fake blogs with lots of backlinks with rich anchor text. Quite a big percentage of our backlinks are of this kind, so this is the only thing I can think can be affecting our ranking. Will disavowing be our solution?

If you'd like to check, our site is: www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx

Our competitors' is: www.saferefacciones.com

ANY help will be extremely appreciated as I feel a bit lost.

Thanks!