Original content, widely quoted - yet ignored by Google
-
Our website is https://greatfire.org. We are a non-profit working to bring transparency to online censorship in China. By helping us resolve this problem you are helping us in the cause of internet freedom.
If you search for "great firewall" or "great firewall of china", would you be interested in finding a database of what websites and searches are blocked by this Great Firewall of China? We have been running a non-profit project with this objective for almost a year and in so doing have created the biggest and most updated database of online censorship in China. Yet, to this date, you cannot find it in Google by searching for any relevant keywords.
A similar website, www.greatfirewallofchina.org, is listed as #3 when searching for "great firewall". Our website provides a more accurate testing tool, as well as historic data. Regardless of whether our service is better, we believe we should at least be included in the top 10.
We have been testing out an Adwords campaign to see whether our website is of interest to users using these keywords. For example, users searching for "great firewall of china" end up browsing on average 2.62 pages and spending 03:18 minutes on the website. This suggests to us that our website is of interest to users searching for these keywords.
Do you have any idea what the problem could be that is grave enough to not even include us in the top 100 for these keywords?
We have recently posted this same question on the Google Webmaster Central but did not get a satisfactory answer: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5c14a7e16c07cbb7&hl=en&fid=5c14a7e16c07cbb70004b5f1d985e70e
-
Thanks very much for your reply Jerod!
Google Webmaster Tools is set up and working. Some info:
-
No detected malware
-
1 crawl error (I think this must have been temporary. Only reported once, and this url is not in the robots.txt now):
- http://greatfire.org/url/190838
- URL restricted by robots.txt
- Dec 10, 2011
-
Pages crawled per day, average: 1102
-
Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds), average: 2116
The robots.txt is mostly the standard one provided by Drupal. We've added "Disallow: /node/" because all interesting urls should have a more interesting alias than that. We'll look more into whether this can be the cause.
Anything else that you notice?
-
-
Hi, GreatFire-
We had a very similar problem with one of the sites we manage at http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/. The website is pretty good, the domain has dozens of super high-quality backlinks (including EDU and GOV links), but The Googles were being a real pain and not displaying the website in a SERP no matter what we did.
Ultimately, we think we found the solution in robots.txt. The entire site had been disallowed for quite a long time (at the client's request) while it was being built and updated. After we modified the robots.txt file, made sure Webmaster tools was up and running, pinged the site several times, etc. it was still being blocked in the SERPs. After two months or more of researching, trying fixes, and working on the issue, the site finally started being displayed. The only thing we can figure is that Google was "angry" (for all intents and purposes) at us for leaving the site blocked for so long.
No one at Google would come out and tell us that this was the case or even that it was a possibility. It's just our best guess at what happened.
I can see that greatwall.org also has a rather substantial robots.txt file in place. It looks like everything is in order in that file but it might still be causing some troubles.
Is Webmaster tools set up? Is the site being scanned and indexed properly?
You can read up on our conversation with SEOmoz users here if you're interested: http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-refuses-to-index-our-domain-any-suggestions
Good luck with this. I know how frustrating it can be!
Jerod
-
Hi GreatFire,
With regard to the homepage content - you really don't have much there for the search engines to get their teeth into. I would work on adding a few paragraphs of text explaining what your service does and what benefits it provides to your users.
I disagree that your blog should be viewed as only an extra to your website. It can be a great way to increase your keyword referral traffic, engage with your audience and get picked up by other sites.
Just because Wikipedia have written about your topic already doesn't mean you should't cover the subject in more detail - otherwise no one would have anything to write about!
As you have the knowledge on the subject, involved with it everyday, and have a website dedicated to it - you are the perfect candidate to start producing better content and become the 'hub' for all things related to the how China uses the internet.
Cheers
Andrew
-
Hi Andrew,
Thank you very much for your response. The two main differences you point out are very useful for us. We will keep working on links and social mentions.
One thing I am puzzled about though is the labeling of the site as "not having a lot of content". I feel this is misunderstanding the purpose of the website. The blog is only an extra. What we provide is a means to test whether any url is blocked or not in China, as well as download speed. For each url in our database, we provide a historic, calendar-view to help identify when a website was blocked or unblocked in the past.
So our website first and foremost offers a tool and a lot of non-text data. To me, expanding on the text content, while I understand the reasoning, sounds like recommending Google to place a long description of what a search engine is on their front page.
If you want to read the history of the Great Firewall of China, you can do it on Wikipedia. I don't see why we should explain it, when they do it better. On the other hand, if you want to know if website X is blocked or not in China, Wikipedia is not practical since it's only manually updated. Our data offers the latest status at all times.
Do you see what I mean? It would be great to hear what you think about this.
-
Hi GreatFire,
Your competitor has a much stronger site in the following two main areas:
- More backlinks (resulting in a higher PR)
- More social mentions
Focus on building more backlinks by researching your competitors domain with Open Site Explorer and MajesticSEO. Keep up your activity in your social circles, and also get going with Google+ if you haven't already.
You should also fix your title tag to include the target keyword at the start - not at the end. So it would read something like 'Great firewall of china - bringing transparency from greatfire.org'
Looking through your site you don't appear to have that much content (this was also mentioned in your Google Support thread) so I would focus on building out the content on the homepage and also further developing your blog. For example your 'Wukan Blocked only on Weibo' blog post is not really long enough to generate you much referral traffic. Larger authority articles of 1000+ words plus with richer content (link references, pictures, Google+ author/social connections) etc will help you far more.
Conduct the relevant keyword research for your blog posts in the same way you did with your root domain. This will keep your website niche focused and generating lots of similar 'china firewall' terms.
Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Andrew
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google WMT/search console showing thousands of links in "Internal Links"
Hi, One of our blog-post has been interlinked with thousands of internal links as per search console; but lists only 2 links it got connected from. How come so many links it got connected internally? I don't see any. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Apps content Google indexation ?
I read some months back that Google was indexing the apps content to display it into its SERP. Does anyone got any update on this recently ? I'll be very interesting to know more on it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoomGeek0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
What is better for google: keep old not visited content deeply in the website, or to remove it?
We have quite a lot of old content which is not visited anymore. Should we remove it and have a lot of 410 errors which will be reported in GWT? Or should we keep it and forget about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Is there a way to stop my product pages with the "show all" catagory/attribute from duplicating content?
If there were less pages with the "show all" attribute it would be a simple fix by adding the canonical URL tag. But seeing that there are about 1,000 of them I was wondering if their was a broader fix that I could apply.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cscoville0