We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
-
Hi,
We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case.
1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story.
2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us.
Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search.
Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your reply. I think the fact that we gained a lot of backlinks and then lost them was due to our very highly quoted and linked story in December (the Skype story, used as an example in our first post). Many websites put links to us on their front pages. Inevitably, these only stay until pushed down and off the page by newer stories.
We have not create fake links anywhere. According to Google Analytics, visitors have entered our site through links on 904 websites since Dec 1. The top ones are Reddit, YCombinator, Twitter, habrahabr.ru, Facebook, TheNextWeb and Wikipedia. All very legitimate links, as far as I can understand.
What do you think we should do? Why does https prevent using a link profile tool?
-
Great post Matt. You nailed it.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/
This is a recent test - and one that may apply (though I still maintain it's link profile.)
-
Actually, I'm pretty sure your problem is in your link profile.
http://www.highonseo.com/examples/ahrefs1.jpg
The first image shows your ahrefs backlink profile. You nearly-instantly gained a couple thousand backlinks. Then lost a bunch quickly as well
So my next question was "are these legit?"
Now look at image 2.
http://www.highonseo.com/examples/ahrefs2.jpg
Out of 92,293 backlinks, you have over 90,000 dofollow links, including over 80,000 sitewide links. 1600 .govs, which is nearly more than your nofollow links.
My brain can't process a link profile that looks like this. I would love to pull it into a link profile tool to check the DA of your backlinks but because you're https, I can't.
Just speculation on my part but if someone told me they had over 97% dofollow links, as many edu as nofollow and had a huge gain and then watched those links falling off, I'd quickly believe something was wrong. I always assume Google is two steps ahead of me. So if I think this backlink profile looks wonky, they must think it's worse.
-
I heard they will give the ranking of the content to the more powerful site? not sure if thats correct. If they thought you had copied it then perhaps no ranking at all?
-
Yes. But shouldn't Google be good at determining that? For one, they all or almost all link back to our original story - not the other way around. Secondly, our story is always published before theirs and Google should detect that.
If this is the case, it doesn't explain why we have no ranking at all on the title of our front page.
-
Could it be that the big sites quoting some of your text are seen as the orgininal source as they are very high domain authority websites?
-
No problem my friend. You are most welcome. If you wanted to go for HTTPS intentionally then it is ok. However, it seems Google does not treat HTTPS the way it should as of now. Probably at some point later this may change and who know if they have already rolled it out and it is just under way. Bigger changes like this take time to propagate fully through out. Till that time, all that we can do is sit tight and have our fingers crossed
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Thanks Devanur. Very interesting idea. However, we do want to keep our whole website as HTTPS - to make it more difficult to track what our users do on it, and also to encourage other websites to move the HTTPS as well. The more the better. For example, all of GitHub is already HTTPS-only. If HTTPS is indeed the reason it's quite a scandal that Google can't deal with it properly.
-
Hi there,
Though as per Google, it is ok (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M) to go for https for your entire website, personally, I saw in many instances where https URLs find it very difficult competing with http URLs in Google.
Normally, I do not see a need to go in for https for plain pages that do not need to be served over https. Only the secure pages that might need a login to access them may be served over https. Hope our friends over here will jump in with their views.
Let me conclude by saying, I would go for http for all the pages that I desire to rank high in Google and this view is based solely on my personal experience.
Hope it helps.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Website dropped out from Google index
Howdy, fellow mozzers. I got approached by my friend - their website is https://www.hauteheadquarters.com She is saying that they dropped from google index over night - and, as you can see if you google their name, website url or even site: , most of the pages are not indexed. Home page is nowhere to be found - that's for sure. I know that they were indexed before. Google webmaster tools don't have any manual actions (at least yet). No sudden changes in content or backlink profile. robots.txt has some weird rule - disallow everything for EtaoSpider. I don't know if google would listen to that - robots checker in GWT says it's all good. Any ideas why that happen? Any ideas what I should check? P.S. Just noticed in GWT there was a huge drop in indexed pages within first week of August. Still no idea why though. P.P.S. Just noticed that there is noindex x-robots-tag in headers... Anyone knows where this can be set?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Google Indexing our site
We have 700 city pages on our site. We submitted to google via a https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml but they only indexed 15 so far. Yes the content is similar on all of the pages...thought on getting them to index the remaining pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Google Not Indexing App Content
Hello Mozzers I recently noticed that there has been an increase in crawl errors reported in Google Search console & Google has stopped indexing our app content. Could this be due to the fact that there is a mismatch between the host path name mentioned within the android deeplink (within the alternate tag) and the actual URL of the page. For instance on the following desktop page http://www.example.com.au/page-1 the android deeplink points to http://www.example.com.au/android-app://com.example/http/www.example.com.au/4652374 Please note that the content on both pages (desktop & android) is same.Is this is a correct setup or am I doing something wrong here? Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMarketingWeTrust0 -
Does including your site in Google News (and Google) Alerts helps with SEO?
Based on the following article http://homebusiness.about.com/od/yourbusinesswebsite/a/google-alerts.htm in order to check if you are included you need to run site:domain.com and click the news search tab. If you are not there then... I ran the test on MOZ and got no results which surprised me. Next step according to :https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en#ts=3179198 is to submit your site for inclusion. Should I? Will it help? P.S.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
This is a followup question to the following: http://moz.com/community/q/what-makes-a-site-appear-in-google-alerts-and-does-it-mean-anything0 -
Google snippet chosen why?
We have a page about buying property in the Megeve area of the Alps in France. We are No.2 on Google.co.uk for the term "megeve property for sale" and No.1 for "megeve property". http://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/MegeveProperty/Properties.asp If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet: Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR. However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page: A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ... Does anyone know why Google would serve this particular snippet instead of the META description. Is it the number of strong and descriptive words used, or some other reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PPGUKLTD0 -
Effect of I-Frame on Google Rank
My commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) allows visitors to search for office space listings. The site sources listings through a third party and they are displayed in an i-frame. The i-frame directs visitors to listing pages such as: http://listings.nyc-officespace-leader.com/getspace.mpl?sp_id=A0173921&cust_id=offspldr Atleast 10,000 of these pages have backlinks to my site. My question is the following: Could these tens of thoudands of alpha numeric URLs be detrimental to my sites ranking on Google after the Panda/Penguin updates? SIte traffic dropped from 7,000 per month to about 3,300 after the April Google update. Rewriting content for dozens of pages and adding a blog have only somewhat mitigated the negative effects of Panda/Penguin. Could Google be viewing these links from the third party lisitng provider as a negative when they viewed these links as a plus before? Any downside to removing the third party links and parsing these listings from landlord websited and displaying them as part of my site with their own URL, title tag, description tag? Obviously the new URLS would not be alphanumeric. If these links have not caused the drop in traffic last April, what could be responsible? Thanks in advance for your opinion!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Google Penguin Winners and Losers?
Hi All, Just wondering out of the SEOmoz community who has come out on top after Penguin and who has been hit and why. Personally my site has come out on top. I started workig on the site back in December and NOTHING had been done, no link development, no onpage, nothing, a virginal website. The site was chock-a-block with issues both technically and in content. After 4 months of hard work, we have climbed from 100+ to top ten on most of our phrases and post Penguin we have climbed even higher as some of our competitors were dragged down into the murky depths. So I think thats a win (for now). My focus has been on Guest posting, social outreach, reviews and getting my on page right (still a ways to go, but our CMS is clunky to say the least). A little humour attached 😉 (Why has no one yet stuck Matt Cutts head on a Penguin?) Are you a Penguin Winner or have you experienced the wrath of the penguin. keep-calm-and-deoptimise.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aran_Smithson0 -
Google Previews highlighting Promotions?
I came across this today when doing a Google search - a site that has a small promo code listed on their page shows a preview with that promo highlighted...I dug around their code a little bit, but couldn't find if it was something they were doing to manipulate their preview in the search results. Is Google automatically highlighting promotions in previews, or did getmarried.com/magazine/ somehow manipulate the page to make their promo highlighted? And if so, how? You can see the site at http://www.getmarried.com/magazine/ and you can see the preview with the promo highlighted attached. ZDY52.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | klars5240