Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks. So you're saying Google never haves a problem with this other than in more competitive SERPs? I thought Google generally didn't like to rank the same domain for 2 pages...

I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...)

Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?

Thanks Nick. It's not just that blogger outreach isn't working - just that we're running out of opportunities to reach out to in our niche!

I'm very curious what other SEOs do when they reach this point, which surely they must do, when the number of relevant opportunities that have already been tapped outstrips the number of new ones hitting the Web...

We are conducting SEO and white-hat link building campaign for a client that is in the national (US) fertility/infertility niche.

So far we've done outreach to potential websites that we found to be a good fit for the campaign, although the conversion rate for getting Guest Posts, even Sponsored Posts is quite low. Furthermore, the number of these potential websites is close to running out and it's getting harder to find other websites with relevant metrics that are outreach-worthy.

Besides Guest Post/Sponsored Post outreach, we've done Link Reclamation, Resource Links and Broken Link Building. Also, we tried expanding the list of keywords to try and come up with some new leads (in sub-niches) but haven't had much success.

One peculiar thing that is happening when we do start a communication with the blog/website owners is that they get interested in the topic at first, up to the point of asking us to send them a Guest Post article and then.. silence, no response from them. We do a couple of follow-ups, but in most cases we don't hear back from them. We realize that there could be some editorial changes that they might want to be done, which we would be willing to do, but they just simply do not respond at all.

When talking to other people in the SEO business we get different opinions on how to proceed, ranging from creation of web 2.0 properties and linking them up with video content and the client website, to even creating SEO link wheels. We are quite committed to our client and would love to get their site ranking, but we're reluctant to use tactics that might yield only short term results and might end up hurting the rankings on the long run.

Other part of our strategy is creating quality content on our client's blog (within their website) and doing outreach to bloggers to get them interested in the topics that we are covering. So far these efforts have also not been very successful.

Basically, my question is when you are doing a link building campaign for a client, what is your next strategy when the link opportunities run out?

Thanks, we'll check all of the old URLs are redirecting correctly (though I'd assume given the htacces and WP settings changes, they would).

Will also perform the other check you mentioned and report back if anything is amiss... Thank you, Lynn.

Firstly, thank you both very much for your responses - they were both really helpful. It sounds, then, like the only solution is to keep waiting while continuing our link-buliding and hoping that might help (Lynn, sadly we have taken care of most of the technical suggestions you made).

Would it be worth also submitting removal requests via Search Console for the non-www URLs? I had assumed these would drop out quickly after setting the preferred domain, but that didn't happen, so perhaps forcing it like we did for the development URLs could do the trick?

I’m struggling with a client website that's massively failing to rank.

It was published in Nov/Dec last  year - not optimised or ranking for anything, it's about 20 pages. I came onboard recently, and 5-6 weeks ago we added new content, did the on-page and finally changed from the non-www to the www version in htaccess and WP settings (while setting www as preferred in Search Console). We then did a press release and since then, have acquired about 4 partial match contextual links on good websites (before this, it had virtually none, save for social profiles etc.)

I should note that just before we added the (about 50%) new content and optimised, my developer accidentally published the dev site of the old version of the site and it got indexed. He immediately added it correctly to robots.txt, and I assumed it would therefore drop out of the index fairly quickly and we need not be concerned.

Now it's about 6 weeks later, and we’re still not ranking anywhere for our chosen keywords. The keywords are around “egg freezing,” so only moderate competition. We’re not even ranking for our brand name, which is 4 words long and pretty unique. We were ranking in the top 30 for this until yesterday, but it was the press release page on the old (non-www) URL!

I was convinced we must have a duplicate content issue after realising the dev site was still indexed, so last week, we went into Search Console to remove all of the dev URLs manually from the index. The next day, they were all removed, and we suddenly began ranking (~83) for “freezing your eggs,” one of our keywords! This seemed unlikely to be a coincidence, but once again, the positive sign was dampened by the fact it was non-www page that was ranking, which made me wonder why the non-www pages were still even indexed. When I do site:oursite.com, for example, both non-www and www URLs are still showing up….

Can someone with more experience than me tell me whether I need to give up on this site, or what I could do to find out if I do?

I feel like I may be wasting the client’s money here by building links to a site that could be under a very weird penalty

I appreciate your responses so far. My response is almost a uniform yes to all questions. In terms of URL redirection, we simply changed it from non-www to www via htaccess, and in the Wordpress settings - I believe that's all that's required, right?

My developer, however, just reminded me of something, which I now think is causing the issue. BEFORE we published a new version of the site, he accidentally published the development version by not setting up robots.txt correctly, causing a duplicate of the site to get indexed (it still is...)

The reason I didn't sound the alarm bells is that most of the content was subsequently changed on the new version, so I didn't think we'd face any duplicate content issues - however, Google must now associate our domain with another it has indexed of which it WAS a complete copy...

This is obviously pretty bad and I'm 90% confident is causing the issue. My developer corrected the robots issue at the time and is currently requesting the removal of the sites via Search Console, per what this article advises: http://www.thoughtshift.co.uk/what-to-do-if-a-test-or-dev-site-is-indexed-on-google/

...but I have no idea what to do next. Should I abandon ship and tell the client we need to switch domains? Or wait until the dev site is fully removed and see if we start to rank, hoping this was just some sort of algorithmic penalty?

Hi guys,

I have a client site that I've recently come onboard with that was published late last year, not really optimized for anything, and in a moderately, but not very, competitive, search space.

Early April we optimized the home page and a couple of other pages and have since built about 5-6 (high quality, partial match) links to it, and a press release was done mid last month. The only other thing we did was change the site from non-www to www and set this as the preferred domain in Search Console.

Over 6 weeks since that all began, and we're still not on the radar at all for any of our main keywords - nowhere. The only thing we are really ranking for is our brand name, but this is the wrong (press release, not home!) page, and it's bouncing a lot. All of the pages seem to be indexed, and we are ranking for one other (inconsequential) keyword, but 99 is the highest it has reached.

An SEO friend told me to build some citations, but this is not a local business, nor are we trying to rank locally.

Can anyone please suggest why it might be taking so long, and what else I could try? I imagine more links will help, but results from our outreach are hard to predict, so if there were another safe link type that could help me figure out whether this domain is in trouble or not ASAP, that would be ideal.

Thanks very much in advance for any help you can provide.

Ulla