Why is my key word rank so horrible?

[mr_w]

I've been with seomoz for a couple of months now. I've been working hard trying to rank for the key word "kayak fishing" on my site yakangler.com. My onpage report for my home page is an A, my moztrust rank is higher than my competitors. I don't have the most links but I don't have the fewest either. Why am I ranking so horribly. Last I checked I wasn't on the first 50 pages for Google search. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[William.Lau]

Hi Mark,

Sometimes the search engines can be a pain to understand but here are some of my thoughts.

Your anchor text profile is not that great for the keyword "kayak fishing" from what I see, you don't have any at all. This is not to mean focus and get links with only anchor text "kayak fishing" but it would help to get just a few for things like "kayak" and "fishing" and then "kayak fishing" and variety of the two.

I also noticed that a lot of your competitors have almost exact match domain names, i.e. kayakfishing.com, kayakfishingmagazine.com, a lot of these domains that rank have kayak fishing in their domain name. Exact or similarly matched domain names usually rank better thus making domain selection very important.

I would try to work out some more anchor text around those keywords as well as trying to get links from other sites that rank well with those keywords.

[UnderRugSwept]

I would proceed with caution with the anchor text thing, but I have to agree with William about the exact match domain name. It's my belief these still help ranking a great deal, perhaps even more than Google admits. Still, that shouldn't put you beyond page 50. I would do a Google search for that term in private browsing and go all the way to the end to see if you're there at all. if not, you may have a penalty for that keyword.

[irvingw]

if you are on page 50 for "kayak fishing" there is a good chance that you are penalized for that term

your site seems to be loading incredibly slow - see what is hanging, check out your page speed time in WMT

add the main keyword to the beginning of your title tags see that all the first page results have it that way on their sites

clean up all broken links on your site and other WMT recomendations

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=kayak+fishing&oq=kayak+fishing&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.627.3012.0.3207.13.12.0.1.1.1.350.3220.2-10j1.11.0...0.0...1c.LetvirXYPp0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=13df23ca690bfc6f&biw=1920&bih=968

look at your blog and forum indexing (you have a TON of indexed pages on this site (110,000) try to weed out the flimsy content page so Google doesn't think you're spamming them)  no index category pages and others that may be creating duplicate content in the index like this:

http://www.yakangler.com/articles/how-to/fishing  - this should not be indexed, only the individual articles

noindex user pages and other sections like this. Look in google MWT for duplicate title tag ang meta desriptions you'll see a ton, try to make them all unique

1. Kayak Fishing Community - YakAngler.com

   <cite>www.yakangler.com/yaksocial/707-troutbeard/profile</cite>YakAngler.com is kayak fishing's ultimate resource, offering fishing forums, kayak fishing community, articles, reviews and more.

2. Kayak Fishing Community - YakAngler.com

   <cite>www.yakangler.com/yaksocial/800-rhinojoe2014/profile</cite>YakAngler.com is kayak fishing's ultimate resource, offering fishing forums, kayak fishing community, articles, reviews and more.

3. Kayak Fishing Community - YakAngler.com

   <cite>www.yakangler.com/yaksocial/555-mountaindewman/profile</cite>YakAngler.com is kayak fishing's ultimate resource, offering fishing forums, kayak fishing community, articles, reviews and more.

[mr_w]

Thankyou everyone for the input!

Irving, I checked my sites load speed via google's page speed insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=www.yakangler.com&mobile=false and I got a 93 out of 100 should I be using a different tool?

[mr_w]

Changing out domain name is not an option we are already heavily invested in the brand "yakangler", would buying a domain name with the keyword "kayakfishing" in it be worth it maybe to a 301 or park it or something?

[mr_w]

Marisa how do I do a search in "private browsing"?

[UnderRugSwept]

It depends on your browser. If you're in Firefox, go to Tools > Start Private Browsing. With other browsers, it'll be something similar. Perhaps in Edit or Options, ect.

[mr_w]

Ok did the manual check ad we are on page 47 "private browsing" on Google for the United States...  Not sure why, I've never done any black hat links or anything...

[UnderRugSwept]

I don't know if that's good news or bad news. At least if you were penalized you'd have some kind of an answer. I think your solution lies in Irving's response. Blogs are great for SEO, but left to their own devices they can wreak havoc on your site and rankings. What does your SEOmoz crawl report say? How many errors does your site have?

[irvingw]

If you create a new site keep it in mind but at this point i wouldn't change it. Once you create a site you are pretty much married to the domain and even more so as time goes by.

I don't think incoming links are your problem, did you get a "unnatural link profile detected" email from google in webmaster tool?

[irvingw]

see what google WMT says under site performance. your homepage is REALLY hanging for me over here in NJ when i try to get to it. takes like 20 seconds before i see your homepage render - see if you have any funky tracking, social media or other types of code that can be causing this. Google is not going to show results for pages that don't load.

[mr_w]

"I don't think incoming links are your problem, did you get a "unnatural link profile detected" email from google in webmaster tool?"

No I didn't get any emails like that from Google

[mr_w]

Yeah it's showing some bad #'s Home page 17.9! I have a facebook like and google + buttons on the top of my home page...

[mr_w]

I have alot of errors but most of them are "blocked urls in the robots.txt"

Just checked again today and I'm on page 41 instead of 47... so guess that's a good thing or maybe just a fluke for today.

[mr_w]

I've made some changes my home page seems to be loading faster now

[poolhall]

I would suggest nofollow/noindex your tag pages.  A search for site:www.yakangler.com tag yields 73,800 pages.  In my experience G does not like tags.