Not ranking in Google - why???

[EduardoRuiz]

This will be a bit long, so please bare with me.

I have a client in the auto parts industry who wants to rank their homepage for 13 different keywords. We are ranked first page for all keywords in Yahoo! Mexico and Bing Mexico, but not ranking first page at all in Google Mexico.

My client's competitor, however, is clearly outranking my client in Google. When comparing both pages, my client's, while not 100% optimized, looks better optimized than their competitor's. Looking at all metrics using Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs, etc... my client's site looks MUCH better on all fronts.

I know ranking a single homepage for more than 10 keywords is a difficult task. Our competitor is however, ranking for them, so it's not impossible. The keywords are not even that competitive according to Moz's analysis. I decided to create an optimized page for each keyword to try to rank these pages, but still my client wants the homepage to rank (again, if the competitor is ranking, then it's possible to do this) and I am afraid these pages I created could result in keyword cannibalization ultimately affecting the homepage's possibility to rank.

My client had a previous SEO agency working for them and basically all they did was create fake blogs and have lots of keyword rich links directed to the site's homepage. I got the complete link profile from several tools and submitted a disavow requests for as many fishy links I could find, but that hasn't shown any results so far. Note: when looking at the competitor link profile, they have basically just a few links and no external links of real value whatsoever.

My client is obviously very frustrated, and so am I. In my SEO experience, it shouldn't be such a difficult task to accomplish, however nothing seems to work even though everything seems to point that my client should rank higher. So now I'm running out of ideas regarding what to do with this site.

Any insight you could provide would be SO helpful to me and my client. If needed I can provide my client's homepage URL and also their competitors homepage for you to review. i can also give you any extra information you need.

Thanks a lot!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Sounds like you were hit by Penguin and/or a manual penalty.. check his analytics and GWT accounts for more insight on that (i.e. when google organic traffic dropped).

I would focus on building more links to the brand name and modifying any current links to improve the anchor text ratio. If he has a manual penalty, you'll need to submit a reconsideration request.

If you share website info, I can take a look.

[RobMay]

Oleg might have a point. A quick tool you can run to get a snapshot of his analytics, overlayed with the various updates for Penguin and Panda (and other non-named updates) that could have affected it. Use this tool quickly, and you should could correlate a penalty with his traffic. Titled the PANGUIN tool It's useful to get a quick look at his analytics when you connect the Google account. You will see a drastic drop in organic traffic, and it will align with an update Google did which may be the penalty Oleg was referring too.

Without direct access to his analytics, the site, his URL, the non-ranking keywords, the competitor site, etc, it's about the best we can do!

Hope it helps, if it's the case!

[EduardoRuiz]

Hello guys. Thanks for your answers, I really appreciate them.

I have definitely thought Pengiun has the culprit of this, but when looking at analytics (see attached image) there hasn't been a huge traffic drop that would make it obvious there was an algorithmic penalty, also there hasn't been manual penalties against the site.

I am guessing my client's keywords didn't bring much traffic anyway before the theoretical penalty, so that's probably why there is not a decrease in traffic? Can this be a keyword-specific penalty?

My client's site is www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx

Competitor's site is www.saferefacciones.com

Sample keyword: "refacciones bmw" (my client wants to rank for variations on these keyword, just changing the brand name".

Thank you so much!

pWSOjhO

[MibuKotaro]

I have to ask did you grab a screenshot of Organic traffic only or all traffic?

I am also wondering while looking at your competitor I can't find any indexing of the site or rankings. Is there another competitor

[EduardoRuiz]

Duh, sorry the image shows ONLY organic traffic.

[EduardoRuiz]

The image shows only organic traffic. Not sure what you mean about not finding my competitor. I can see it in Google results first page for the target keywords. Thank you Sean.

[MarieHaynes]

It certainly is possible that bad links are affecting the site's ability to rank well.  If you disavowed, then there's a good chance that you won't see the benefit of that disavow until the next Penguin refresh and in some cases, two refreshes need to happen.  You're right - you would expect to see a drop that coincides with the date of a Penguin refresh if Penguin were the sole culprit but there's still a lot we don't know about Penguin.  Hopefully it will refresh soon and you'll see some improvement.

You may want to assess the site for Panda issues as well.  Google has 735 pages indexed.  If a good number of these are ones that don't add significant value on their own then this can cause Google to lose some trust in the quality of your site.  Here are some pages that are indexed that probably shouldn't be:

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/Tienda/ifrBlank.aspx

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/Tienda/ifrLogin.aspx

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/Tienda/ifrComprar.aspx

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/Tienda/NoResultados.aspx

I'd go through the site and either noindex or remove pages like this.  If there is a Panda issue then Panda tends to refresh about once a month but Google doesn't announce the dates of refreshes anymore.  Again it can sometimes take a couple of refreshes to notice a difference.

Here are a couple of other things to consider:

-There is very little text above the fold of your home page.  This could trigger the above the fold page layout algorithm.

-The page might be keyword stuffed.  I don't speak Spanish, but when I translate the page the word "parts" appears 22 times.  If keyword stuffing is an issue, then removing they keyword stuffing can often produce good results quite quickly.

Ah!  I just did Google translate and realized that "refacciones bmw" for which you want to rank is "BMW parts".  It certainly is possible that you are being demoted for keyword stuffing.

[EduardoRuiz]

Marie, you are awesome. All your insight has really helped me to understand better what we can do and what requires waiting. I'll take some actions ASAP.

Just a quick question about something I've already mentioned - can the fact that I created specific pages with optimized content for each keyword affect the homepage's possibilities to rank due to keyword cannibalization?

Look at this page, for instance, this is the one I created for "refacciones bmw":

http://www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx/refacciones-bmw

Am I shooting myself in the foot with this? Consider our competitor has NO optimized content whatsoever, not in their homepage nor nowhere else.

Thank you!

[MarieHaynes]

You're very welcome.  

I have to say that I don't really know for sure the answer to your question on keyword cannibalization.  What you may want to do is start a new topic to ask specifically about that and then people with more knowledge on the subject than me can chime in.  I'm interested in seeing if anything changes once you make your changes though!

[RobMay]

Just optimize your pages to focus on INTENT now, rather than specific keywords, thus reducing the chance of keyword cannibalization. Have an idea where you are going for each page, but really narrow down and focus the efforts. It's not really all that long, but Rand did an excellent write up on this (it's from 2007), but worth exploring further for sure to get the basics down. There is also a WB Friday from March this year where he touches on it. Anyways, hope it helps!

[JaneCopland]

Hi Eduardo,

If you're suffering from a Penguin issue, you may see the site's results improve over the next few days or weeks. Google confirmed last night that they are rolling out Penguin 4.0, starting yesterday. Most people have seen more movement in US results so far, but there have certainly been some international changes, and it's no longer 2011 when non-US results took a very long time to update after Google first released Panda.

If nothing changes for the site in the next few weeks, either Penguin is not the issue or you have not done enough to remove the bad links. Have you tried removing them, not just submitting a disavow report? Removal is recommended; if removal turns out to be impossible, that's when you need to use the disavow tool.

The site's issues could stem from on-site, meaning that you'll need to look through the ideas presented here and conduct a full on-site audit.

[MarieHaynes]

Just seeing this now and wanted to clarify that Jane was talking about a Panda update rather than Penguin.  I know you knew that Jane.   We're still waiting for that Penguin refresh!

[JaneCopland]

Yep - cheers! Thanks.

[EduardoRuiz]

Thank you both! Now when is the damn Penguin update coming?!?! hahaha I wish we could have an answer.