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Hi Matt,

Thanks for your reply. I think the fact that we gained a lot of backlinks and then lost them was due to our very highly quoted and linked story in December (the Skype story, used as an example in our first post). Many websites put links to us on their front pages. Inevitably, these only stay until pushed down and off the page by newer stories.

We have not create fake links anywhere. According to Google Analytics, visitors have entered our site through links on 904 websites since Dec 1. The top ones are Reddit, YCombinator, Twitter, habrahabr.ru, Facebook, TheNextWeb and Wikipedia. All very legitimate links, as far as I can understand.

What do you think we should do? Why does https prevent using a link profile tool?

Yes. But shouldn't Google be good at determining that? For one, they all or almost all link back to our original story - not the other way around. Secondly, our story is always published before theirs and Google should detect that.

If this is the case, it doesn't explain why we have no ranking at all on the title of our front page.

Thanks Devanur. Very interesting idea. However, we do want to keep our whole website as HTTPS - to make it more difficult to track what our users do on it, and also to encourage other websites to move the HTTPS as well. The more the better. For example, all of GitHub is already HTTPS-only. If HTTPS is indeed the reason it's quite a scandal that Google can't deal with it properly.

Hi,

We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case.

1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story.

2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us.

Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search.

Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.

According to https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 :

Update the HTML of each URL in the set by adding a set of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link elements. Include a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link for every URL in the set, like this:

So your recommendation seems to contradict what Google instructs.

Other ideas?

If I google "greatfire" I find the Chinese version of our website (zh.greatfire.org) before the English version (en.greatfire.org). This is not on the Chinese-language version of Google. Why is this? Our site even has a language indicator () and also hints of where the English version is ().

The same thing happens if I google "freeweibo". I find https://freeweibo.com but not https://freeweibo.com/en/, even though we indicate that's the English version ().

Any ideas?

Hi Moosa. Thanks very much for your reply and great suggestions. If I add canonical tags on each URL page referencing the category page where it belongs, should I also add noindex tags on it? Should then actually all URL pages have noindex tags and only allow category pages to be indexed?

Thanks for suggestions. I have some follow-up questions. Would really like to know what you think about the following:

1. The "page rank will get shared to all of the pages that you have across your site". In general, does this mean that if I add noindex tags to all but a few pages, they will be ranked much higher? Currently thousands of pages are indexed. Is it correct to say that if only say 20 pages were indexed that would greatly improve their ranking?
2. The zh and en versions of the website have different templates and most of the text content is also translated (with the main exception of old blog posts). We could add noindex on all of the zh website or all except the main pages. Would you recommend that?

Our website lets users test whether any given URL or keyword is censored in China. For each URL and keyword that a user looks up, a page is created, such as https://en.greatfire.org/facebook.com and https://zh.greatfire.org/keyword/freenet. From a search engines perspective, all these pages look very similar. For this reason we have implemented a noindex function based on certain rules. Basically, only highly ranked websites are allowed to be indexed - all other URLs are tagged as noindex (for example https://en.greatfire.org/www.imdb.com). However, we are not sure that this is a good strategy and so are asking - what should a website with a lot of similar content do?

1. Don't noindex anything - let Google decide what's worth indexing and not.
2. Noindex most content, but allow some popular pages to be indexed. This is our current approach. If you recommend this one, we would like to know what we can do to improve it.
3. Noindex all the similar content. In our case, only let overview pages, blog posts etc with unique content to be indexed.

Another factor in our case is that our website is multilingual. All pages are available (and equally indexed) in Chinese and English. Should that affect our strategy?References:https://zh.greatfire.orghttps://en.greatfire.orghttps://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agreatfire.org

We run https://greatfire.org, a non-profit website which lets you test if a website or keyword is blocked or otherwise censored in China. There are a number of websites that nominally offer this service, and many of them rank better than us in Google. However, we believe this is unfortunate since their testing methods are inaccurate and/or not transparent. More about that further down*.

We started GreatFire in February, 2011 as a reaction to ever more pervasive online censorship in China (where we are based). Due to the controversy of the project and the political situation here, we've had to remain anonymous. Still, we've been able to reach out to other websites and to users. We currently have around 3000 visits per month out of which about 1000 are from organic search.

However, SEO has been a headache for us from the start. There are many challenges in running this project and our team is small (and not making any money from this). Those users that do find us on relevant keywords seem to be happy since they spend a long time on the website. Examples:

websites blocked in china: 6 minutes+
great firewall of china test: 8 minutes+

So, here are some SEO questions related to GreatFire.org. If you can give us advice it would be greatly appreciated and you would truly help us in our mission to bring transparency and spread awareness of online censorship in China:

1. Each URL tested in our database has its own page. Our database contains 25000 URLs (and growing). We have previously been advised that one SEO problem is that we appear to have a lot of duplicate data, since the individual URL pages are very similar. Because of this, we've added automatic tags to most pages. We then exclude certain pages from this rule that are considered high-priority, such as domains ranked highly by Alexa and keywords that are blocked. Is this a good approach? Do you think the duplicate content factor is still holding us back? Can we improve?
2. Some of our pages have meta descriptions, but most don't. Should we add them on URL pages? They would be set to a certain pattern which again might make them look very similar and could cause the duplicate content warning to go off. Suggestions?
3. Many of the users that find us in Google search for keywords that aren't relevant to what we offer, such as "https.facebook.com" and lots of variations of that. Obviously, they leave the website quickly. This means that the average time that people coming from Google are spending on our website is quite low (2 minutes) and the bounce rate quite high (68%). Can we or should we do something to discourage being found on non-relevant keywords?
4. Are there any other technical problems you can see that are holding our SEO back?

Thank you very much!

*Competitors ranking higher searching for "test great firewall china":

1. http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org. They are only a frontend website for this service: http://www.viewdns.info/chinesefirewall. ViewDNS only checks for DNS records which is one of three major methods to block websites. So many websites and keywords that are not DNS poisoned, but are blocked by IP or by keyword, will be specified as available, when in fact they are blocked. Our system uses actual test locations inside China to try to download the URL to be tested and checks for different types of censorship.

2. http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html. This is a better service in that they seem to do actual testing from inside China. However, they only display partial results, they do not explain test results and they do not offer historic data on whether the URL was blocked in the past. We do all of that.