Ranking For Misspelling of Primary Keyword
-
I have been baffled for the past few months for ranking for the misspelling of our primary keyword BELIZE in the Google U.S. Serps.
We are nowhere to be found, but are ranking for the misspelling BELIZ (without the final "e").
We have been online since 1995 on page one everywhere. 11 months ago we did a site redesign changing over to WP as a CMS.
We changed all pages from widget-example.html to widget-example and properly 301ed all pages after deleting the old pages.
Then we accidentally de-indexed the site for a month due to a robots.txt error. This has been corrected 4 months now.
We shared this on the Google Webmaster forums and some kind folks helped with advice - nothing major in our opinion but we implemented most of the tips given.
We are doing fine everywhere with all search engines and Google itself in other areas Google.ca Google.bz Google.mx for example.
But in our primary market is the U.S. where the majority of our readers are - tourists and retirees looking for our information - we do not exist.
The joke is that searching for BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serps has us on Page One. It is a joke that is NOT funny - or maybe some human evaluator made a mistake or is playing a sick joke?
We have done a reconsideration request in case there was a manual penalty and we received the no manual penalty form letter.
I notice increasingly in Google Live Analytics people typing in our full domain name - I guess out of frustration not getting the site when inputting the primary keyword.
I find that I can write a new article and in a couple of weeks it ranks in the top couple pages. Many other pages are found via long-tail only.
I find it intriguing that yesterday I wrote a very small article, a press release actually, and today searching for the misspelling BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serp the root domain is ranked #2 and the snippet and image displayed is from this little article which is nothing really great.
I am new here. Thanks to anyone who can help.
The site:
-
Hi Mat
Being trying the GA and this is giving me a headache but looking at a tutorial on the web I am looking for Panda and/or Penguin and entered the dates given and will try to attach it here.
-
I'll ask again : When did it drop?
When ranking changes occur is important information in determining the cause. Although google updates continually big changes tend to get noticed and documented. If your ranking changes coincide with a known update (my guess is still one of the penguin updates) this will tell you what Google consider to be wrong and therefore how to fix it.
-
We have been on Page One on Google US from inception since 1995.
We notice on GWT about 2,000 backlinks from a defunct link directory. This goes up and down depending on the weather. Right now it has fallen to about 600. Here is a sample link:
http://caribbeanlinks.com/opensearch?query=Belize Cruise&hitsPerSite=4&lang=&hitsPerPage=20
We never asked to be linked there and have written several times but no response.
@NAKULGOYAL - we do well on long tail for example:
retirement in belize
living in belize
belize offshore banking
getting married in belize
belize maya
top ten things to do in belize
and many others
@mattbennet
I see your point but I do not believe we could be NOWHERE to be found for our main keyword - as stated above we have been on page one for our main keyword since 1995.
-
I looked at your backlink profile in OSE. You have the anchor text "belize" linked from a large amount of domains and with a very high amount of links. The domains linking with just the anchor text "Belize" take up nearly 23% of your link profile from linking domains. The amount of links coming to your site with the single keyword "belize" take up about 35% of your total incoming links. This is just for "Belize" and not the other various you have such as "Belize online" etc.
This is my person post-panda opinion, but I think this is likely to raise red flags with Google. It may look "over-optimized". I don't think submitting a site reconsideration requests would help - in fact, I fear it will only hurt as now Google will be reviewing all this information manually.
Second:
Your primary keyword is "belize" which is highly competitive. You may want to focus on something like "Belize Vacations" or "Belize Travel"
I just want to verify:
Have you ever ranked for the single term "belize" in the US?
Are you experiencing a decline in visits from other keywords which have historically performed well?
-
Ranking for the misspelling could be a red herring. They are by their nature far less competitive terms, so a site that can't rank for more competitive terms may do well on misspellings. Likewise for the long tail terms.
However, what you are saying does make me wonder a bit about penguin penalties. Do you know when you dropped out of the SERPs for your main term? Check back through analytics and see if you can pin it down to a week. I'd imagine it would be pretty obvious when it happened.
-
I see that you have variant anchor text links, which is good. I see an opportunity to try and give your links some internal juice. Can you get Belize and related keywords linked internally to respective pages ?
Other then that, I would continue to build content and links. I see you are ranking #2 for the misspelling, but nowhere for the correct spelling. It's not any kind of error, but the competition. You have the perfect domain. I think all you have to do is keep on building it.
The reason why your rankings could have dropped is the competition from what I have seen so far and the fact that Google has been trying to take reduce the effect of Exact Match Domains. In this case, you just need "strength" to be ranking #1.
How do you rank for other keywords/long tail etc ?
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
-
Keywords for product title
Hi, I am trying set the product title for my product that I sell online, I have more than 300 products, I am now doing keywords research, any suggestion of the monthly search volume I should aim for each keyword? I just started and selling engagement rings
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | up8772910 -
Rankings drastically changing
I monitor our positions for a few keywords but they are very unstable. One day they will be at position 1, 2 or 3 and then all of a sudden not even on Google. We use an IP redirect to guide users to the correct site and I suspect this may be a cause. Could anybody shed some light? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanRowlands0 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
How to rank product pages?
Hi guys, Please advice me on something improving my product pages ranking. We are doing well for head terms, categories but not ranking for product pages. We have issues with product pages which I am think is hard to tackle. For instance we have duplicate products (different colors), duplicate content internally (colors) and from manufacturer websites. Product pages linked from sub-category i.e. Home > Category > Sub-Category (20 per page) using pagination for next 20 and so on. Product pages linked internally via widgets that says other Similar products, featured products etc. Another issue with our product pages is that we are using third party reviews platform and whenever users add reviews to product pages this platform creates an hyperlink to different anchors which is not relevant to product. Example - http://goo.gl/NUG652 Can somebody please give some advice on how to improve rankings for product pages. writing unique content for thousands of pages is not possible. Even our competitor not writing unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0 -
One word Keywords
Hey as you know that as a seo we are, we always optimize keywords which are at least 2 words, and lets say I'm trying to optimize a page for terms like "man clothing, man london clothing, man great collection, man stylus collection" and as you can guess I optimize this pages for this keywords by inputting them into title heading tags and body.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
So my question is , what if google takes "man" phrase from my 2 words keywords, and pretend as a my keyword. (I mean what if google thinks my keywords is man because as you can see in all of the keywords "man" is in all of them.)
And what if Google thinks the density of "man" probably would be %20 which is astronomic number.? Sorry for my bad english.0 -
Cannot find reason for drop in ranking
One of our clients is a lingerie retailer, that also sells swimwear and nightwear. They have a webshop, with landing pages such as /lingerie, /swimwear and /nightwear (only in Dutch). The nightwear page is doing ok (#5 in Google NL), but for the swimwear and lingerie pages, something strange has happened and I have no clue what it is. On May 7, the /swimwear page ranked 24 for swimwear in Google NL. In that period, the homepage was ranking at #40-50. One week later, on May 14, the homepage was ranked 24 for swimwear, and the /swimwear page was nowhere to be found. The homepage is currently ranking 17/18 for swimwear. Something similar seems to have happened for lingerie. The homepage was ranking at around 11-13 for a few weeks in April/May, the /lingerie page was ranking at 8 in May, and then after the 4th of June, both the homepage and the /lingerie page no longer seem to have any decent rank for lingerie. So, trying to find the problem: I checked the Moz On-Page Grader for all three pages/keywords. All pages get an A. Robots.txt hardly contains anything, and there's no robots meta tag to block the page. Checked Google Webmaster Tools just in case, nothing out of the ordinary. The page contains 342 URL's which is a lot, but that shouldn't be too problematic, I thought? I used the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to analyze the current top 10 for lingerie, and compared it to our client's stats. Page Authority in the top 10 is 37-68, our clients is 33. Domain Authority in the top 10 is 27-100 (wiki page), our clients is 43. MozRank for the top 10 is 6,6-8,0, our clients is 6,7. MozTrust for the top 10 is 7,0-7,1, our clients is 7,0. The basics all look fine! Now, the page could use some link building, the number of links is a little low compared to the top 10 entries. We're also in the process of redesigning the page, adding more products but also more content (text and images) to inspire visitors a little more. But being low on links doesn't seem a good explanation for such a relatively sudden change in ranking. As far as we can tell, looking back at commits by our developers, nothing changed around that time that could have this impact. Of course it's possible that we missed something, we're still looking. Also, it's strange that these sudden changes took place for swimwear and especially lingerie, but not for nightwear. I'd really appreciate any tips, hints etc. to find out what's going on here. Thanks in advance! Michel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DocdataCommerce0 -
Why am I not ranking in Google, but I am in Yahoo and Bing?
The website in question is: www.stbarthexclusives.com Our keywords are currently ranking for both Bing and Yahoo, but we're not appearing anywhere on Google. The website is being crawled successfully, but we still don't have any results. I hoping somebody can point me in the general right direction to fix/correct this problem. Additionally, there's a decent amount of "rel=canonical tags" on the website. If that helps your evaluation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Endora0 -
Keyword research Methods
I am Looking for keyword research guide .because there are many ask about keyword research no idea where i can start .plz expert advice highly appreciate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0