We are ignored by Google - what should we do?

[GreatFire.org]

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.

[Devanur-Rafi]

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.

[GreatFire.org]

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.

[Devanur-Rafi]

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.

[pauledwards]

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?

[GreatFire.org]

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.

[pauledwards]

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?

[MattAntonino]

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.

[MattAntonino]

http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/

This is a recent test - and one that may apply (though I still maintain it's link profile.)

[Devanur-Rafi]

Great post Matt. You nailed it.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[GreatFire.org]

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?