Hi all, I would like to be brief, but if there is interest I will go into more detail. My website (4 years old) is having trouble with SERP on pretty much all search engines. We are a dynamic website - we post news and reviews on video games. So we can't just optimize for a specific keywords as content always changes. We are google news syndicated, no problems in webmaster tools, page rank 3, have all keywords and meta tags configured without spam etc. But our SERPs are usually very poor - for example, almost all searches like "Game X Review" we rank beyond page 10 (even though we have an article page with that exact title). The annoying part is this: there are sites who are in the top 64 results which are horribly optimized, have little content, and even NO META TAGS configured on the page. Yet they rank so much higher than us. How is this possible? Other stats: we have over 10k backlinks from our long running time, whereas sites that are ahead of us have barely any and also low traffic and low PR.... so what's wrong with the algorithm?? Does anyone have any ideas why this happens? I'd really love to chat on Skype with someone about this - maybe even hire you for a small fee if you know the solution to our problem. thanks!
sorry for various reasons I'd rather not post the URL If you think you can help, please let me know (this isn't a simple SEO optimization problem, need someone very knowledgable)
bluedot33, as the others have said... without knowing the URL it does make it harder to diagnose any potential problems your site may be having. The first thing I would ask is: Is this a recent problem? Have your rankings decreased recently or has the web site always suffered from poor rankings? Having 10,000k links means nothing if they are all low quality. It is more than possible to rank a web site at the top of the search engines with just a handful of links if they are of the right quality and not manipulative in nature. Based on what you have said, in that you can't target specific keywords because the content is always changing I would guess that you don't build many external links in the form of "Game X Review" which points to the specific review page on your site... thats fine... but it would lead me to believe that there is a problem with your internal link structure. Lets say you have published a review 45 days ago. So it's a relatively old review, how many links do you have to click on your web site to find that review? What is your URL structure like? I know you don't want to specify the domain, but show us what it looks like in this format: domain.com/rpg/title-of-game domain.com/category/rpg/?id=84848 Lastly, have you checked your site for duplicate content issues and / or have you implemented the canonical tag?
Thank you all for the replies - No, we aren't doing anything blackhat... - I think we've always had low-ranking SERPS but it's just now that I am really starting to try and figure out why - I don't think our links are of bad quality. We've been linked from major/respectable sites in the industry (PCGamer, VG247, etc etc) - Well we usually have just a couple of links to that review on our own website - from the review archive, front page, etc - Our URL structure is organized and we do use re-writes (so we get website.com/articles/3823/game-x-review) We have no problem appearing on top News results for Google, but of course that's only temporary. We do not use canonical tags, but our review pages are unique and don't have duplicates.
I think you should target more keywords instead of 2 or 3. Try to write top class article and press-release and submit in do-follow submission websites(Be remember don,t submit one article or press-release more than one directory)
Generally speaking these kind of issues come about because of numerous faults, seldom is it just one issue Good luck
Hello bluedot33, There are a few possibilities coming in my mind, that might be the problem, but need to review your site to know about the actual condition. Please share your site URL, So that I can review it and let you know. As you have mentioned that for some reason you can't share your URL openly, If its comfortable, kindly share it through pm. One thing, I want to bring in your kind notice that I am here only to learn, share my knowledge, So payment is not required. I will be glad, If I can help someone. Looking forward for the URL to understand the main reason.
Thanks for answering the questions. - The fact that the problem has always existed means you haven`t been hit by any of the recent Panda or Penguin updates, which shows nothing bad has been going on. - Having only a few internal links to the review may cause a slight issue. If you can increase this then it would help, obviously it would depend on the design of your site as to whether any of these ideas would work, but just a couple off the top of my head: Top 10 Reviews (based on pageviews, or user rating, or number of comments, etc). A Featured Articles List (do your keyword research, see which articles should be delivering the most traffic and add those articles to the list. The idea behind these types of lists is that they are shown on multiple pages, not just the homepage. So that the increase the amount of internal links to your reviews. I would also make sure you have FB Like, Twitter and G+ buttons on your review pages to boost any social links your readers may be willing to give you. - Have you checked to see if your best links have been indexed by Google? Always a good idea and there is a cool little article on how to help make sure your backlinks get indexed over at SEOmoz (Look for Strategy 1): http://www.seomoz.org/blog/set-it-and-forget-it-seo-chasing-the-elusive-passive-seo-dream - If you don't already, then it might be an idea to allow comments to rate the article or comment on it. UGC is a very good way of not only interacting with your community but also increasing the unique content on the page itself. - You may very well have duplicate content problems. Just because it is only published once on your web site doesn't mean that it hasn't been syndicated elsewhere through the news feed. Google may still be having problems identifying the true original source of the content. It has happened several times where junk RSS sites have outranked the original source due to having a better link profile. I would really suggest you implement the canonical tag, it isn't that difficult. Possible: Because I can't see your site, this is just a possible problem. In blog web sites, tag pages and archive pages can also be a source of duplicate content, especially if you don't write a unique excerpt (that is one which is different from the main article). If that's the case, I would recommend setting "noindex,follow" on tag and archive pages if you haven`t already. - Your URL structure is okay, but it isn't the best that it could be. The closer your target keywords are to the left (in this case your article title), the better. So using the URL you provided: website.com/articles/3823/game-x-review A better version would be: website.com/game-x-review-3823 There is no need for the word "articles" to appear in the structure at all and you maintain your unique identifier of 3823 which I will assume was the id of the article for loading from the DB. Ok, that's about as far as I can go without seeing the site as I am starting to mention ideas which you may have already implemented, top lists, like buttons, etc. Good Luck!
Whats about your social reach nd website profile! Social factors are getting more and more important in the past!
I actually think that the OP's competitors must be doing black-hat stuff... For example, redirects. bluedot33, I respect and understand your wish to conceal your site's URL. I think you are in a highly competitive niche where black-hat thrives. You could target longer keywords and more of them. You could optimize for Google images/videos to get more organic traffic You could also report a competitor if you think they're cloaking or using redirect here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en To detect that, you could use an on page optimisation audit tool and click "fetch as googlebot" to see if the site shows different content to Google bot than to users.
Once again thank you all for the replies Thank you for asking! - We already have comments and share-links available on each page. - We will try doing that, for example linking to our game review if we post news about the game as well. Top lists may not work as it seems cheesy to do for our usual content. - We will look into the canonical URL. For different pages of the same article (For example review page 1, review page 2, etc), each will be its own canonical tag? - We've already done the noindex/nofollow adjustments with help from SEO users in the past. - Yes, I think we're quite well optimized already and have all the basic stuff covered, hence why I've decided to pose this as an open offer to anyone willing to help We have 1500+ FB and 4,000+ on twitter Unfortunately I don't think so (that would be an easy answer). Most of the sites that rank ahead of us are - as I said in the very first post - are usually so poorly designed (NO KEYWORDS! NO DESCRIPTION!) so I doubt they have the knowledge to do Blackhat. It baffles me and that's why I am trying to understand why we are below them.
Well, it's hard to tell without looking at the actual SERPs, but what black-hats normally do is they generate tons of doorway pages and rank them for all sorts of highly competitive keywords. When some of their websites get banned, they create new ones. What's telling about those sites is that they are usually low-quality and one'd wonder why on Earth they would rank so well, but they do thanks to redirects. This normally happens in competitive niches. Hard core black-hats don't bother taking up clients or ranking small entrepreneurs' sites for a few keywords. They normally play big and unethical. Google has made their life harder, but there are still dark arts methods that work. However, I could be wrong about your case.
Do you assign specific titles to each dynamically generated page? Do you have a sitemap for Google which is dynamically updating? Do you have a sitemap on site? The small number of internal links could be the problem. When doing URL rewrites, it's important to have the keyword as close to the left as possible. If your URL is website.com/articles/3823/game-x-review, that means game-x-review, the most important part, is in the 4th folder. Google may decide the content is too deep to be of any value. What you want is website.com/game-x-review-3823 or website.com/game-x-review/3823. If you want to rank for "articles", on the other hand, then the URL is fine
You must have been a victim of the Google Panda and Penguin updates which have caused a number of websites to suffer a drop in the rankings worldwide.
There is an article talking about how to rank high on SERP. Hopefully, it is useful. http://rapidpage.ca/blogitem_31.php