Australian search - ZERO visibility and stumped
-
Fair warning, this is going to be long, but necessary to explain the situation and what has been done. I will take ANY suggestions, even if I have tried them already.
We have a sister site in Australia, targeting Australian traffic. I have inherited what seems to be an incredible rat's nest. I've fixed over two dozen issues, but still haven't seemed to address the root cause.
NOTE: Core landing pages have weak keyword targeting. I don't expect much here until I fix this. The main issues I'm trying to resolve first are with the unusual US-based targeting, and the inability of the homepage to rank for anything.
The site is www[dot]castleford[dot]com[dot]au. Here's the rundown on what's going on:
Problems:
-
The site ranks for four times as many keywords in the US as it does in Australia.
-
The site ranks for a grand total of 5 keywords on the first page for AU keywords.
-
The homepage, while technically optimized on-page for "content marketing agency", and with content through MarketMuse, has historically ranked between 60-100, despite having a fairly strong DA with fairly weak competitors, based on AHREFs keyword difficulty, and Moz keyword difficulty. Oddly, the ranking has gone up to 5-7 for three day spurts over the past year.
-
Infrequent indexing of homepage (used to be every 2-3 weeks, I've gotten that down to 1 week).
Sequence of events:
-
November 2017 - they made some changes to their URLs - some on the blog and some on the top nav LPs. Redirects seem okay.
-
November 2017 - Substantial number of lost referring domains, not many seem to be quality.
-
January 2018 - total number of AU ranking keywords more than halved.
-
May/June 2018 - added a follow inbound link sitewide to an external site that they created. 20k inbound links with same anchor text to homepage. Site has a total of 24k inbound links.
-
July-Sep 2018 - total number of US ranking keywords halved
-
November 10 - I walked into this mess.
What's been done:
-
Reduced site load speed by over 150% (it was around 20 seconds).
-
Create sitemap (100 entry batching) and submit to GSC.
-
Improved MarketMuse score for the homepage.
-
Changed language from "en-US" to "en-AU"
-
Fetch and render - content is all crawlable and indexed properly.
-
Changed site architecture for top nav core landing pages to establish clear hierarchy.
-
All version of GSC created, non-www and www http, and non www https and www https
-
Site crawl - normal amount of 404s, nothing stands out as substantial.
-
http to https redirect okay.
-
Robots.txt updated and okay.
-
Checked GSC international targeting, confirmed AU.
-
No manual links penalty
I'm clearly stumped and could use some insights. Thanks to everyone in advance, if you can find time.
-
-
Well, seems that GSC contradicted this report. I don't think that's the issue.
-
Incredibly helpful. Thank you very much!
-
Hey Irene,
Here are a few things to take a look at:
1. Internal linking structure (see image attached via screaming frog) - the homepage is the 5th most internally linked page. Increasing that, should help with ranking it
2. Have you done local SEO work in Austrailia - claimed locations via a tool like https://www.yext.com
3. Build links from .com.au sites to help Google see where you are located.
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
-
URL or sitemap submit to search engines?
Hello, I have just updated content at some URL site links, and I also added new URL content. Should I submit URL or re-create a sitemap then submit it to search engines? And please advise me some tools for submit them?
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
Consistent top 10 in G image search - but a different 'stolen' version every time!
I have a photo that was uploaded back in 2005. It is an aerial shot and has received a fair bit of traffic over the years. I'm pretty sure it was ranked #1 in Google Images for the town name for a while. Now, however, it never ranks. Well actually it does. But every single time it is a version on a different website that is being used without permission.
Technical SEO | | Cornwall
And I'm not talking about one website. Every time I fill out a DMCA and have the image removed only to see a completely different website featuring in the top 10. This has happened 5 times so far and I'm just about to fill out another DMCA request. What is going on? Surely Google in its infinite wisdom is smart enough to check the timestamp or date cues on page to figure out which is the original. These other sites are often complete unknowns compared to my site which is a 12yr old authority site on the subject.
Don't get it!0 -
Huge drop in ranking, but only for a single search term
Hello All, We've just noticed a huge drop in ranking for one of our key search terms. On January 9th we dropped from page 1 (Google UK) to page 7 - out of the top 50 completely! Nothing has changed on the page for a number of months, and rankings for other search terms seem unaffected. Has anyone else been affected recently in a similar manor? Sorry if this sounds a little vague - but we're struggling to understand how this might have happened. It seems very odd that only this particular search term would be affected so dramatically. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Safelincs0 -
What caused my huge drop in search ranking?
On February 8th, 2012 my site's non-branded search traffic dropped overnight by over 80%. It appears I've been hit by a Google penalty. I submitted a reconsideration request and one of Google's staff replied letting me know it was NOT a manual penalty. So it's clearly a result of an algorithm. What is the cause? I haven't made significant changes to the website in the previous months do to being out of the country and the holidays. I'm extremely careful not to out source SEO so there is no chance of questionable link building strategies, unless my competitor launched an attack on my site. I've considered these possible causes: Duplicate content - My site had some redundancy from a marketing plan before Google Panda launched. Last month, I removed all duplicate content. Unnatural link building - I've been moving slowly my site, page by page, from adbio.com to bioworldusa.com after a brand change. Perhaps the 301 redirects triggered a flag in Google's algorithm. I've since removed all redirects to see if that will fix the issue. Poor User Experience - I recently upgraded my Drupal CMS and had to change themes. Currently my theme is an ugly, grey theme which may cause a higher than usual bounce rate. I've been trying to compensate by making sure the content is high quality. The penalty affected these website: www.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) blog.bioworldusa.com (2/8/12) www.adbio.com (2/17/12)
Technical SEO | | bioworld1 -
CSS Hiding Text - Does this matter to search engine crawlers
Hello, I'm working on a site and a developer is using CSS to mask crawlable links below. Then, java, advanced search links go on top of this. So, if you disable Java, but have CSS enabled, you don't have a lefthand nav. With both CSS and Java disabled you have a fully crawlable website. Is this a red flag? I understand a user without java would have a problem since most people don't disable CSS. But, is this a problem for search crawlers? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Blenny0 -
Site disappearing from search for a certain keyword
I was wondering if someone has encountered the same problem as me. I was doing some changes on the frontpage of one of my clients' website, especially some redirections, and my site has disappeared from Google for the main keyword on the page. So, if I look for my page on Google, instead of seeing my page first, I no longer see my page, at all. All I've done was a 301 redirection from index.html to the domain name. Now, I changed everything back to how it was before. More precisely, I've done that 2 weeks ago. But, no change in Google. I checked Bing and Yahoo, my site appears first when I search for that specific keyword. Any ideas how long will it take for Google to see that I am not doing anything wrong with redirections? Or any idea at all?
Technical SEO | | webmasterles0 -
Can search engines penalize my site if I block IPs from some countries?
I have spotted that some countries in South America generate lot's of traffic on my site and I don't want to sell my service there. Can I be penalized for blocking IPs from certain counties? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Xopie0 -
Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for Filter Search result pages--Why?
Hi, We're getting 'Yellow' Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for URLS that are in effect product search filter result pages (see link below) on our Magento ecommerce shop. Our Robot txt file to my mind is correctly set up i.e. we would not want Google to index these pages. So why does SeoMoz flag this type of page as a warning? Is there any implication for our ranking? Is there anything we need to do about this? Thanks. Here is an example url that SEOMOZ thinks that the search engines can't see. http://www.site.com/audio-books/audio-books-in-english?audiobook_genre=132 Below are the current entries for the robot.txt file. User-agent: Googlebot
Technical SEO | | languedoc
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /.js$
Disallow: /.css$
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /utm
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /customer/
Sitemap:0