Ranking issues...

[darnoc92]

Hi Warriors!

I'm certain this question, or a similar one has been asked before but I couldn't find a specific answer.

I have been working extremely hard at getting my site ranked on Google in a fairly competitive niche (gluten intolerance) for almost a year now. I don't expect to have an easy road and anticipate a lot of work but what am I missing? I have contributed 150 different articles that are unique, well written and provide useful information to potential readers. I have also created an almost 4,000 word, unique explanation about gluten intolerance and have 'worn a white hat' the entire way with my back linking practices by contributing my knowledge to forums and articles. My question is why has my site slipped from page 4 to page 7 and seems to keep falling? I don't spam, cheat, comment or back link on unrelated high ranking websites. There should be some merit for integrity, right?

How much does site speed help/hinder Google rankings?

How much doe a sites age matter?

Another big question I have is; am I creating duplicate content by having the gluten intolerance explanation on each page of my search engine? (I have a blog that has posts listed similar to google with page 1-15).

I will keep up with my efforts but there must be some answer as to why my site, that provides GREAT content, still sucks with ranking.

If you have any comments, recommendations etc. I would love to hear them! My site is: Gluten Intolerance | Gluten Sensitivity (GS) - In Just 10 Pages

Best regards and thanks in advance!

Conrad

[kkchoon]

Hi Conrad,

Nice site you have there. I am surprise you haven't get much traffic or rank on page 1... may be you are too focus on white hat method for ranking?

I think white hat is good way to build natural link, build relationship and trust, but very bad for getting ranking, and rank keywords for traffic... you might want to read my article about white vs black hat methods - Black Hat Vs White Hat - How Leverage Both For Short and Long Term SEO Benefits

May be you should start few link building campaign to get your site rank for your targeted keywords, and 2 of my favorite methods are - profile link + blog network (AMA, MAN).

Another way to go about this is outsource your keyword ranking to any guaranteed service, which is one of the service we are providing. Let us help you deal with the ranking while you can focus on your business.

Kok Choon

[manny2513]

Yeah the hard truth is that while you go the honest way to rank your site pretty much all your competitors for that keyword are not doing white hat things and at the end of the day you gotta remember that GoogleBot is a program not human and it doesn't measure "good intentions" it measures links and with tools like SENuke X and many others out there building lots of links for sites there is no much room left for %100 white hatters like yourself. I will not recommend you to go out and spam others sites to get rankings but you can definitly start building way more High PR links to your content with 1 or 2 automated link building tools.

[Dale21]

Google does not give merit for integrity, lol. You have a nice site, maybe you need to look into some article marketing and other backlinking methods. I did a quick search with site spy which is not always accurate and it showed no page links and only 5 domain links.

You should check out what your competition is doing in terms of backlinks so that you know what you are up against. If your site is slowly falling my first inclination would be you are not currently active with backlinks.

I am not sure what you meant when you said you have contributed 150 articles, to who? If so, are you sure you have active links pointing to various pages on your site? Hope this helps..

[Tim Wallace]

Hi Conrad,
In my standpoint, you should firstly analyse your competitors. maybe you do the right thing you do, however, you have stronger and stonger competitors, they have more time and more people and more energy to improve their ranking, so competitors analysis is so necessary and improtant.

By the way, you can improve the ranking of keywords with low competitiveness.

[darnoc92]

Originally Posted by kkchoon

Hi Conrad,

Nice site you have there. I am surprise you haven't get much traffic or rank on page 1... may be you are too focus on white hat method for ranking?

I think white hat is good way to build natural link, build relationship and trust, but very bad for getting ranking, and rank keywords for traffic... you might want to read my article about white vs black hat methods - Black Hat Vs White Hat - How Leverage Both For Short and Long Term SEO Benefits

May be you should start few link building campaign to get your site rank for your targeted keywords, and 2 of my favorite methods are - profile link + blog network (AMA, MAN).

Another way to go about this is outsource your keyword ranking to any guaranteed service, which is one of the service we are providing. Let us help you deal with the ranking while you can focus on your business.

Kok Choon

I appreciate the article you provided and will be sure to read it.

Best regards,

Conrad

[darnoc92]

Originally Posted by Tim Wallace

Hi Conrad,
In my standpoint, you should firstly analyse your competitors. maybe you do the right thing you do, however, you have stronger and stonger competitors, they have more time and more people and more energy to improve their ranking, so competitors analysis is so necessary and improtant.

By the way, you can improve the ranking of keywords with low competitiveness.

This may be a dumb question, but how would I rank in a keyword that is less competitive? I want to dominate the 'gluten intolerance' keyword. What variations would you recommend?

Thanks

[darnoc92]

Originally Posted by Dale21

Google does not give merit for integrity, lol. You have a nice site, maybe you need to look into some article marketing and other backlinking methods. I did a quick search with site spy which is not always accurate and it showed no page links and only 5 domain links.

You should check out what your competition is doing in terms of backlinks so that you know what you are up against. If your site is slowly falling my first inclination would be you are not currently active with backlinks.

I am not sure what you meant when you said you have contributed 150 articles, to who? If so, are you sure you have active links pointing to various pages on your site? Hope this helps..

By 'contributing' articles, I mean I have written that many for my site and only contributed a few to submission directory's. As far as I have been reading, since the Panda update, Google doesn't really care for article submission sites such as Ezine.

My competition http://gluten-intolerance-symptoms (add the .com I don't want another link for them lol) has several deep/hard backlinks from .edu sites that have simply referenced them as a resource. I am currently talking with one university in California but it's a long process to build a relationship for a single link.

What kind of backlinks would you recommend? Again, my research shows that blog/forum commenting doesn't really help either.

Thanks again for this insight,

Conrad

[darnoc92]

Originally Posted by manny2513

Yeah the hard truth is that while you go the honest way to rank your site pretty much all your competitors for that keyword are not doing white hat things and at the end of the day you gotta remember that GoogleBot is a program not human and it doesn't measure "good intentions" it measures links and with tools like SENuke X and many others out there building lots of links for sites there is no much room left for %100 white hatters like yourself. I will not recommend you to go out and spam others sites to get rankings but you can definitly start building way more High PR links to your content with 1 or 2 automated link building tools.

What automated link building tools would you recommend? Again, I want to remain 'White Hat' and is there a way to utilize those tools and stay honest?

For me, integrity is as important as getting ranked.

Thanks,

Conrad

[Dale21]

Originally Posted by darnoc92

By 'contributing' articles, I mean I have written that many for my site and only contributed a few to submission directory's. As far as I have been reading, since the Panda update, Google doesn't really care for article submission sites such as Ezine.

My competition http://gluten-intolerance-symptoms (add the .com I don't want another link for them lol) has several deep/hard backlinks from .edu sites that have simply referenced them as a resource. I am currently talking with one university in California but it's a long process to build a relationship for a single link.

What kind of backlinks would you recommend? Again, my research shows that blog/forum commenting doesn't really help either.

Thanks again for this insight,

Conrad

Ok, first of all backlinks you simply must have. If you have 150 articles on your website and only 5 backlinks all pointing to your domain, and your site is continuing to drop that should be proof enough.... Only trying to help here, but you can write 150 more articles and it is not going to help you at all.

First you need an inner linking strategy on your site with your articles all linking back to your homepage. Then you need backlinks to your articles, Not to your domain or homepage.

It sounds to me you would benefit from one of several courses in backlinking. There are several types of backlinks and you need a good mixture. Article submission is a vital part and I have found to be the most effective. There are thousands and thousands of websites to submit to. Me personally, I belong to a blogging group and I have over 500 websites with varying page rank that I can submit to easily. Also, there are many edu sites and .gov sites you can submit to, why waste time trying to build a relationship with 1 university, you need many.

In another post you mentioned less competitive keywords. Since you have 150 articles that is easy. You just optimize an article with a keyword and build links to that article, and if you have a link back to your homepage the link juice will flow back to your main keyword.

BTW: You competition you listed has a pagerank of #3 with 1311 page backlinks with 1311 domain backlinks. Obviously he is using the strategy mentioned above.

Send me a pm if you like, happy to help.

[Ben K]

It seems you have not done link building . If you would do you would have better raking. Content is king . But you need links to get rank them . Great content also need some promotion to get attention and spread the word. By combining content promotion and link building you will get some good ranking.

Many reasons can cause rank dropping - algo change , competitors are doing better job , your link sources are devalued etc.

You can do the following to improve ranking



You can do the following to build links :
Directory submission - free, paid, niche
Article Marketing - Article Directories ,Industry Related Site ( the best approch)
wikis related to niche
Social bookmarking
Guest blogging
Press release distribution
Video Distribution ( Youtube etc)
Social Networking Sites - (FaceBook Fanpage)
Blog Commenting - only to some selected sites releated to your niche
Some Link Trade - Only with releated and selective sites
Guest Blogging
RSS Feed submission

Etc

[Ben K]

You can also read this How You Can Get Traffic Without Backlinking which may help you to identify issues with your keyword strategy

[darnoc92]

Originally Posted by Dale21

Ok, first of all backlinks you simply must have. If you have 150 articles on your website and only 5 backlinks all pointing to your domain, and your site is continuing to drop that should be proof enough.... Only trying to help here, but you can write 150 more articles and it is not going to help you at all.

First you need an inner linking strategy on your site with your articles all linking back to your homepage. Then you need backlinks to your articles, Not to your domain or homepage.

It sounds to me you would benefit from one of several courses in backlinking. There are several types of backlinks and you need a good mixture. Article submission is a vital part and I have found to be the most effective. There are thousands and thousands of websites to submit to. Me personally, I belong to a blogging group and I have over 500 websites with varying page rank that I can submit to easily. Also, there are many edu sites and .gov sites you can submit to, why waste time trying to build a relationship with 1 university, you need many.

In another post you mentioned less competitive keywords. Since you have 150 articles that is easy. You just optimize an article with a keyword and build links to that article, and if you have a link back to your homepage the link juice will flow back to your main keyword.

BTW: You competition you listed has a pagerank of #3 with 1311 page backlinks with 1311 domain backlinks. Obviously he is using the strategy mentioned above.

Send me a pm if you like, happy to help.

Hi Dale,

I do need more knowledge in backlinking and what you said made more sense the the 500 articles I've read online. lol

I am working on internal linking but am having trouble with external linking, which is obviously key. You mentioned a number of edu sites to link to and, well I'm assuming you have an online consulting business, so to be honest, where do I start....

Again, I want to maintain a 'white hat' approach and not link to gambling/porn sites and only to related sites or close to it.

What site did you use to check their 1311 backlinks? I normally use Alexa and they moved from around 300 to over 700 in weeks....

Thanks again,

Conrad

[johnasthlon]

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Apart entire this all process, just watch your ranking in search engine.

[mosthost]

The content looks good to me. That said, this is the health niche, where the validity of the information matters. One strong related link from a health authority website could help your rank.

I don't recommend 'blasting' crap links for this keyword. You don't need it.

[awddude]

There should be some merit for integrity, right?

This just seems so naive to me. Google is a set of complex rules applied to millions of websites. It is far from perfect - and with the quality site you built you should treat yourself to some BlackHat techniques. (Only the best, highest reviewed ones of course)

Most of the world's billionaires do not play by the rules.

[Dale21]

Originally Posted by darnoc92

Hi Dale,

I do need more knowledge in backlinking and what you said made more sense the the 500 articles I've read online. lol

I am working on internal linking but am having trouble with external linking, which is obviously key. You mentioned a number of edu sites to link to and, well I'm assuming you have an online consulting business, so to be honest, where do I start....

Again, I want to maintain a 'white hat' approach and not link to gambling/porn sites and only to related sites or close to it.

What site did you use to check their 1311 backlinks? I normally use Alexa and they moved from around 300 to over 700 in weeks....

Thanks again,

Conrad

Hey Conrad:

Nobody should be linking to gambling or porn sites. You need to look for sites with related articles, not necessarily related domains. Change your way of thinking, you want links from relevant articles pointing to your pages and articles, not your domain or home page much at all. In other words lets say you have a site about pet foods, if another site with a domain of Joe's Hardware store has a category in it with info. on food or pet foods or pet care or buying a pet, that is golden.

If you would like more info. I am happy to help as I said. Just shoot me a pm or click on my signature below which will take you to a new site of mine, go to contact us page and you will see an email you can send to me. Then we can go into more details about what you can do.