Website not ranking but the blog is!

[Karen_Dauncey]

I am hoping someone might be able to help me, I am doing some work on a website. A new version of the site was recently launched and since then rankings have plummeted and the new blog pages are ranking better! When the new version of the site went live, the domain changed to the non-www version, plus an incorrect robots.txt file and we have never really been able to fully recover (both of these things were beyond my control!). The robots.txt file was corrected and some of the external links links changed to the non-www but there is a 301 redirect in place so changing to the non-www shouldn't have been the reason to drop the site out completely.

Before the launch of the new website, the site was ranking on the front page of Google for a lot of relevant keywords such as outdoor blinds, outdoor blinds Perth, cafe blinds, patio blinds, etc. The quality of the links is pretty bad and I am attempting to remove them before doing a disavow of all the really bad quality links but unless we were really unlucky I don't think it's the links right now that are causing the problem.

I have ran the site through numerous crawl tests, checked the robots.txt, there are no messages in GWMT, the pages are indexed but I have a feeling there is something wrong with the site that is stopping this site from ranking well. If anyone could give me any insights I would be really grateful. I know the site could be better structured from a keyword/ structure perspective but the site was ranking fine!

[customerparadigm.com]

Karen -  Are you still seeing issues with the site not performing well?  If you'd like to post the URL, I'm happy to take a look and see what might be stopping the site from being indexed.

Thanks!

• Jeff

[Karen_Dauncey]

Thanks so much for responding Jeff, I am still having issues with the website so if you have any ideas I would really appreciate it.

[customerparadigm.com]

Karen -

So, I've taken a look at the site, and it looks like:

1. The site loads quickly - 1.29 seconds, according to a Pingdom Website speed test.

To me, this means that your hosting is fine, and that you don't have any problems with the user experience, or how long the images or other assets take to download.

2. The home page has about 825 words of content.  This might be an area to increase the content, perhaps.  You do seem to have seven images on the home page that don't have ALT tags on them.  This is best practice, and while you shouldn't try to stuff keywords in them, you're raising a red flag and missing an opportunity.

3. Your site has a 33 domain authority, and the home page has a page authority of 43.  You have 5,061 inbound links from 92 root domains.

Your site has 1 facebook share, and zero likes, and 0 tweets and 0 Google +1s.  I think from a social media signaling perspective, your profile needs more inbound social media love to rank better.

4. Here's more technical information on what a search spider simulator found:

Access and Status
search spiders are not blocked by robots.txt
Status code after all redirects: 200
0 Redirect(s)

Title
Outdoor Blinds Perth | Patio Blinds | Cafe Blinds | Bozzy Shade Blinds

Title length is about right

Meta Description:

Bozzy Shade Blinds - a leading provider of outdoor blinds, patio blinds, cafà blinds and shade sails in Perth and WA.

The description length is about right, but watch out for the illegal characters.

Key words
The words shown below should be words that make sense for your webpage content:

blinds - used 45 times on page
outdoor - used 18 times on page
shade - used 12 times on page
bozzy - used 11 times on page

Links
The tool found 104 total links on the home page of your site:

48 unique links
38 unique internal links
6 unique external links
3 links not counted (href='#' or 'mailto:' etc.)
24 image links
0 nofollow links - (listed below if present)

My $0.02:
There may be too many links on the home page.  According to the "Feed the Bot" site, this might be normal for well linked to major media/news sites and online retailers. [But] if you aren't famous and you don't have a lot of links to your pages this is probably too many links. You are likely confusing users with too many choices and may appear to search engines as spammy. If you have legitimate reason for so many links, you may want to organize your site better so that there aren't so many links.

You also need to work on better social media sharing to increase your presence.

Also, it looks like the domain was last modified today (12/30/2013).  I'd recommend renewing it out a couple of years...