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UPDATE: Organic traffic to the blog has doubled in the last few days. It started going up about 4 days after I unblocked the categories from being crawled. I'm not certain that it's all Google organic traffic, but it sure looks encouraging since the blog hasn't responded to any SEO fixes for nearly two years!

Got to work on those blocked scripts. It turns out they are all outside resources:

• Hubspot
• Zopim Live Chat

According to Google, if outside resources are blocked, you have to contact the vendor about unblocking them. I contacted both Hubspot and Zopim, they will get back to us in about 2 days. Thankfully, we didn't have any of our scripts/CSS blocked.

I'm also working on that redirect. It turns out that if I shut it down, and redirect to the 200 OK page, that the blog will then render search result pages that will be indexed. That will give us a massive duplication problem. Its because of this that we did the redirect in the first place.

We're considering getting a Wordpress pro to come in and fix it right. Any suggestions?

You were right about the Fetch and Render. I found tons of scripts and images that were blocked. We're unblocking them all. I'm still working on your other suggestions, we do have a lot of old content. My plan is to leave all the evergreen content, and purge everything else

I've unblocked the categories in Wordpress. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

My mistake, we deleted a page with a similar URL. That page was published on Dec 9th. Three days is not an uncommon lag for Google to index a new blog post. WMT shows that we are only indexed to the 7th of December. Google appears to re-index our site once per week:

Lastest index 12/7

Previous index 11/30

Previous index 11/23

Is this unusual? And thanks for your help! This has been a very frustrating problem!

We recently deleted that page. It was ranked at ~1000 in SERPs, so that indicated to us that Google had a major problem with it. Since we couldn't figure it out, we got rid of the page.

I have been treating them as separate entities. I've focused on testing the blog, and fixed everything I could find - it had no effect. I've voraciously pursued scrapers with takedown orders etc, it had no effect.

I'm reaching out now, because I'm out of ideas, done everything I could, and nothing has worked. We are considering abandoning SEO entirely because there seems to be nothing we can do to get our rank to improve. I'm hoping someone in here can help me figure out what the problem is before we abandon ship

We've seen a lot of Keywords improve significantly (+200 positions improvement in SERPs) but then a week or so later, they simply drop back down to where they were. We've seen other terms improve, and stay improved. We've also picked up about 500 keyword phrases since Penguin 3.0. The site as a whole has improved it's position in SERPs by about 20 positions since Penguin

So the answer is a definite we don't know.

Yes, this blog targets specific terms related to alkaline water, water ionizer, ionized water, kangen water. We used to be competitive for all those terms, until Google nuked us. We fixed everything we could find, SEO-wise, but have seen zero improvement for those search terms.

I'd expect that if you improve the copy on a page, and promote it in social, that it should do better than position 200 (Google supplemental index). But SEO optimization on-site has had no effect on how this blog ranks. It improved from 220 to 200 after Penguin ran recently, but that's it

Yes, we've built good links for the site, and the blog has acquired good organic links all on it's own. We share regularly on social media and the blog has videos from YouTube on it.

This is the strangest thing. The blog has been built and maintained using white hat techniques, with every effort to provide value to the user, and play by the rules. Yet Google still treats it like we're pushing payday loans or something.

I've been fighting this for a year and a half, with no improvement. As a company, we are at our wits and and may just shut the blog down if this persists

We have the strangest problem. The blog for our website ranks very poorly:

www.lifeionizers.com/blog = average position in SERPs = 200. The site itself has an average position in SERPs of 12. The blog has a few terms it ranks #1 for such as branded terms and:

is mineral water alkaline = 1.3

kangen water vs alkaline water = 2.6

kangen water pyramid = 1.2

ph of redbull = 1.1 (Used by Google as answer in knowledge graph)

But the blog ranks terribly for most search terms. This blog has about 440 pages of in-depth, well-written authoritative content. Readers are well engaged, the blog has a bounce rate of ~3.5% with average time on page of over 6 minutes. The problem can't be the quality of the content.

Does Google levy penalties against specific subdirectories? Or is this a configuration problem? Bad links have been disavowed.

We have a partial victory! The Moz Bar works on the blog, but it appears we have a problem with a noscript script on other pages of the site, such as the homepage. The Moz On Page grader works for blog pages now as well. Before this fix, it was showing all F's, no matter how well optimized the page was.

Thanks!

I removed the Javascript comments but it didn't fix the problem. The Moz Bar now shows the same line of code without the comment code:

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsB...

When I run my site in the Moz Tool bar, all of the page elements are read correctly except for HTML text.

Sample page: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/alkaline-water/electrolyzed-reduced-water

Instead of the text on that page, the tool shows Javascript code:

/*

With a very high character count for text (14,247).