Website Issues

by 14 replies
16
Background history:
In May 2014 I was ranking for my focus keyword in position 3.
Once June rolled around my website was SHOT by google. My website was deindexed and my backlinks all removed.
I've been working on rebuilding my website and I'd have to say it's been overkilled.
However, I am still nowhere CLOSE to the first page of google.
Why is my website not ranking? My competition is a joke!

Here's an image with my website's stats vs. my competitors using market samurai.
Attachment 21564

My onpage seo is on point. I use Yoast SEO Plugin and i haven't changed my article since it's been dropped.

All clues as to what I'm overlooking and why I lost my position and cannot get it back would be greatly appreciated!!
I also added SSL onto my site for shits and giggles since Google seems to now use that as a ranking factor too.
#search engine optimization #issues #website
  • Hmmm. Sounds like you've been having some trouble lately. I would try and get an SEO service to help you with your keywords. This can also let you know when they change rank and what works.
    • [1] reply
    • I've ranked websites before myself. Everything checks out and I have the tools I need to investigate possible causes. However, nothing strikes me as out of the ordinary.
      Onpage seo work is perfect. The navigation is clean and simple. Tag cloud and rss in place.
      I'm only concerned about my possible internal linking.
      Example:
      Article A (Focus Keyword) has 2 addition articles pointing to it:
      -Sub Article 1 (Supporting keywords)
      -Sub Article 2 (LSI Supporting keywords)

      But that's about it.
      Not sure where I've gone wrong.
      • [1] reply
  • Market Samurai is the real joke. It provides almost no useful data for measuring competition.

    My guess is Google still does not like your site. If it was deindexed, you must have been doing something they really did not like. Did you file a reconsideration request? What did they respond with?
  • Your situation illustates why some people have gooten away from SEO and migrated toward paid traffic sources. PPC, PPV etc are not at the mercy of Google.
    • [1] reply
    • Technically, that is not true. How many times has Google changed the rules on advertisers? How many times has Google suddenly decided that a product, range of products, or entire niche is no longer allowed to advertise?

      I got started back when you could pretty much run an add for anything. Hell, you could run ads that did not even lead to your own page. You could just feed the traffic directly into an affiliate link.

      PPC (at least AdWords) is very much at the mercy of Google (as well as the FTC and a host of other regulatory organizations).
      • [ 2 ] Thanks
  • What niche are you in? And what day in June Do you see the drop starting on?
  • June 2nd-5th my website was deindexed.
    Its been a struggle since to rebuild backlinks and get indexed.
    If I do get indexed, then google throws me in pages 5 through 10.
    When I built backlinks it went to pages 5 through 6 and on my toughest keywords page 6 through 9.
    I've recently ran an audit report using Website Auditor and the results basically tell me nothing more than html and css errors with a plugin called sharaholic. I've since deleted it.
    Also, my robots was forbidding any bots to crawl my site. So Website Auditor claimed but if that was the case, then i'm sure i wouldnt be indexed or ranked anywhere in google.
    Aside from all of that there is nothing that says I'm doing wrong.
    My website's sitemap xml works fine now too (fixed the robots.txt)
    And that's that. Any other clues/guesses/critiques that may help resolve this would be greatly appreciated!
    • [1] reply
  • [DELETED]
  • You're right. Internal issues can be some of the hardest to find and to fix.

    I've solved the problem. Googlebot was being disallowed even though my robots.txt looked like:

    Code:
    User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://com/sitemap.xml
    Nevertheless, a simple addition to the code itself made it work.

    Code:
    User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /home/

User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /home/

User-agent: *
Allow: /home/

Sitemap: https://com/sitemap.xml
    Stupidly frustrating and a major mind ****...
    Rankings have boosted from Page 9-5 to 2 in mere minutes.
    Not sure if my website will tango some more or if it's set where it is due to the articles I have in place.
    Regardless, my domain.com/focus-keyword is ranking as I wanted it to and now I'm feeling a TON better!

    Thank you all for making me think outside the box and figure it out.
    Webmaster tools did NOT give my any crawl errors or anything.
    I actually used Website Auditor from Link Assistant to analyse my site and went through the entire investigative notion.

    Hopefully this helps someone else out in the future too!
Join the discussion

Next Topics on Trending Feed

  • 16

    Website Issues

    Background history: In May 2014 I was ranking for my focus keyword in position 3. Once June rolled around my website was SHOT by google. My website was deindexed and my backlinks all removed.