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
-
Fetch as Google
I have odd scenario I don't know if anyone can help? I've done some serious speed optimisation on a website, amongst other things CDN and caching. However when I do a Search Console Fetch As Google It is still showing 1.7 seconds download time even though the cached content seems to be delivered in less than 200 ms. The site is using SSL which obviously creams off a bit of speed, but I still don't understand the huge discrepancy. Could it be that Google somehow is forcing the server to deliver fresh content despite settings to deliver cache? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Google User Click Data and Metrics
Assuming that Google is using click data from users to calculate rankings (bounce rate, time on site, task completion, etc.) where does Google get the data, especially from browsers that aren't Chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Buying a Google News website, against Google Terms?
We are looking at buying a business that has a number of websites Is it against buying a business that has a Google News website and continue to use the site? Once the business is sold, would google remove the site from its News?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Google Plus Authorship
Situation Description: I have a website called Website A. I wish to migrate alot of the content from Website A to Website B. Website B will be on a completely different domain name and environment. Authors of Website A will act as contributing authors for Website B. It is also possible that other contributing authors of other websites C and D commit to writing content on Website B. Questions (1) Does it make sense to create a google plus profile under [email protected] and link from content on websiteB to their google plus profile under [email protected]? (2) Does AuthorRank affect PageRank? If yes, if I take the above approach would websiteA be effected or websiteB since the content writers of websiteA are contributing to websiteB? (3) Is it ok for userA to have a corporate google plus profile assuming he might also have another google plus profile under a different address? I always think it make sense that there exists a google plus profile at an employee level and another google plus profile at a personal level. (4) If an employee leaves the company, do I leave his/hers Google Plus profile alive? The fact that no more content would be published under that particular profile, would that negatively effect author rank over time? (5) Another interesting observation is that UsaToday, CNN etc do not use authorship? No authors link to their twitter profile or google plus profile. Shouln't they be doing this in terms of author rank or is author rank not that important? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo12120 -
Question about Google Search Results
I have a question regarding google search results. I have a website www.911signalusa.com when you type this into google search box the URL comes up repeatedly. I have several competitors here is one of them www.emergencycity.com when you type in their name it only come up as the first result. How did our SEO guys make this happen? I have another site tha when we type in the URL it only comes up as the first result. However when you do site:www.------.com All of these site are indexed in Google. It is not causing any problem we knoe of but it appears to me that our 1 site has it better? Or is it that maybe there are very minimal links to the site? Thank you for your time and consideration in answering my quesiton.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scamper0 -
How to make Google forget my pages ?
Hello all ! I've decided to delete many pages from my website wich had poor content. I've made a php 301 redirect from all these old pages to a unique page (not the home page, a deep page). My problem is that this modification has been made a week ago and my position in the SERPs have crashed down... What can I do ? I believe that I'll get up again when Google will see that these pages don't exist anymore but it could take a long time 😞 (these page are in the Google cache with a date older than my modification's date) I've read somewhere that I should put a link to the destination page (where old pages are 301 redirected) but I don't understand how it could help... Can someone help me ? Tell me what I've done wrong... These pages were very poor and I've deleted them in order to boost the global quality of my site... It should help me in the SERPs, not penalize me...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | B-CITY0 -
Google Places not appearing
is it possible to be sandboxed for a google places page? one of our clinics has a places page, and it was doing fine (http://www.google.com/maps/place?cid=5542269234389030356) but now whenever we set our location to trinity,fl and try to search for weight loss, weight loss trinity, etc.. it doesnt come up. it only comes up if we search medi weight loss trinity. also, when we go into our google places dashboard and try to edit the pictures, it doesnt show the same pictures on the actual locations page. for example, in our dashboard we have 5 pictures, but on the actual places page, 3 pictures are showing (none of which are in our dashboard). any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AustinBarton0 -
Google indexing flash content
Hi Would googles indexing of flash content count towards page content? for example I have over 7000 flash files, with 1 unique flash file per page followed by a short 2 paragraph snippet, would google count the flash as content towards the overall page? Because at the moment I've x-tagged the roberts with noindex, nofollow and no archive to prevent them from appearing in the search engines. I'm just wondering if the google bot visits and accesses the flash file it'll get the x-tag noindex, nofollow and then stop processing. I think this may be why the panda update also had an effect. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0