Rankings Issue

[leatherupseo]

Hey guys, and gals,

So our site http://www.motorcyclecenter.com/ is having the hardest time ranking in the big G. We've built links, optimized, and all the other basics. If you guys have a chance, could you take a glance, and tell us what you think, as to why this site is having such a hard time. Much appreciated!

[ketlad]

you might be sandboxed

[leatherupseo]

Well were being indexed well, were just having a hard time breaking onto the 1st page for a lot of our terms.

[jay.raman]

I have just had a really quick look at your site and have noted a couple of things:

Correct me if I am wrong, but it doesn't look like there is any actual content (body text) on the homepage? I would have thought you would need at least a few sentences describing to visitors and google what your site is about?

Also - Are your product descriptions unique? I know I have had a lot of issues with duplicate content over the past year (since the panda update) where Google is filtering out pages that have not enough unique content. Often generic product descriptions get caught up with this. There are some good ways to help make your product page unique and more appealing - I recommend taking a look at this post .

It looks like a lot of your navigation is quite deep - for example your Parts page is 3 layers deep - http://www.motorcyclecenter.com/l/Motorcycle-Parts/932.. This might be making it tough for Google to crawl deep into your site. I know it depends on how your site is set up, but if you could have www.motorcyclecenter.com/motorcycle-parts as a landing page optimised for 'motorcycle parts' - that would be ideal to help rank.

Just a few thoughts....

Cheers,

Andrew

[loopyal]

Hello.

I think google doesn't like some things about your site.

You rank #14 for motor cycle center.

I see you have a hidden div that contains a login box, right up in the top left corner, so the first 50 words on your page relate to your menu and that login text.

The rest of the text on your page consists of a mass of motorcycle-related words in links, but nothing in the way of text to tell the crawler what your page is really about.

Surprisingly, the on-page report gives you an A, but this report isn't smart enough to understand that you don't have any human-readable descriptive text,

I suggest you do a Crawl as Googlebot and see what it tells you.

[jay.raman]

I think it will be valuable to do a competitor analysis to see what they are doing better. What is there link profile like, what keywords are they targeting, what is their page optimisation and content like etc?? This will give you some areas to focus on.

[bradkrussell]

Agree with both Andrew and Alan. Add a few lines of text such as "Welcome to Motorcyle Center. We stock America's finest motorcycle gear, motorcyle parts, biker jackets, motocross helmets and more. We're experienced motorcyle enthusiasts with over xyz years in the industry..." etc etc. Just a basic introduction to your site, what you're about and why people should shop there. The why shop with us banner is just an image, so perhaps incorporate some of that in to your SEO text. "One stop motorcycle shop - largest selection of motorcyle gear, no risk shopping on your favorite motorcycle parts" etc etc.

Also, you're page title is way too long. Try to rank for 2-3 key terms on your homepage first, then go after your secondary terms next.

Your top level categories should have better URLs. "Shop-for-men" doesn't describe anything about "Mens Motorcycle Apparel"

Hope this helps,

Brad