Why isnt this site ranking?

[Atomicx]

I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks.

Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions.

vonderhaar.com

Thoughts on the matter?

[benjaminmarcinc]

Hey,

i look at your site and also googled your web address and it is coming up, how long ago did you launch the website? Have you done anything to market it?

[KeriMorgret]

Looks like you may have been hacked at some point. Go to Google in incognito mode, and type site:vonderhaar.com and start going back a few pages. This page is an example of a blog page that is filled with spam http://www.vonderhaar.com/blog/kprsd40080f/. Looks like it might have just happened, as I see today's date on at least one of the posts.

[Atomicx]

The blog just launched too. I will have to look into how they got hacked.

[Atomicx]

The site is years old. It used to rank alright but has been dropping a lot

[David-Kley]

Here are a few items:

http://www.vonderhaar.com/blog/vlgbx32493/ << today's date

http://www.vonderhaar.com/blog/o8c6b1bf0f/

http://www.vonderhaar.com/blog/010zdvi4r6/

I'm guessing the site had the wrong permissions, and someone was ablt to get into it.Tons of links to beuy oreos and Jordan shoes. Many of these pages have a lot of unnatural links to questionable sites with exact anchor text.

Could be they dont have a manual action yet, but I wouldn't leave it this way. Check the folder that these posts are coming from, and delete it if possible. Set new permissions of 0644 and for coding files 0444 if it will still allow the site to load. Sometimes a 444 is too strict, and will not allow a user to access the site, depending upon your file setup.

Another thing I noticed is that none of the pages that arent spam are optimized well. Take the homepage for example:

Vonderhaar's offers chimney cleaning and fireplace repair for your home. If you're in the Cincinnati area and need masonry work, call us today!

vs a competitor's description:

American Chimney and Masonry offers chimney sweeping and chimney repair services to the greater Cincinnati Ohio area for over 30 years. A+ Rating by the BBB and over 85,000 customers

Bit more organized, a bit more direct.

Compare this site to a competitor. The site you are managing doesnt have any compelling reasons for a user to contact them:

http://www.vonderhaar.com/
http://amchimney.com/ <<< number 1 organically
http://www.karlmattesco.com/chimney_installation.html <<< number 3 organically

I used to work at a company that stated that the design of the site had nothing to do with how many leads the client got. I dont work there anymore.

Backlinks are also a large contributor to a site's ranking. If you say it has a poor or non-existant backlink profile, could be a large reason of why it doesn't rank.

NO HEADER TAGS:
seo-browser report

This is how search engines see your site. Lack of header tags isnt good for users, as it doesnt separate your content, nor for SEO because it doesnt make the page summary evident and clear.

Lack of google authorship:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http://www.vonderhaar.com/

There are many other reseaons why its not ranking, but that should give you a good place to start. You need to analyze your competitors and give the site more focus.

[Atomicx]

The blog was hacked yesterday. All of those blog posts were up for less than an hour and promptly deleted. So I highly doubt they had any impact on the rank.

I 100% agree that this site is ugly and not well formatted. But the client is unwilling to change that or pay for a design. So we have to try to build a house on a bad foundation to begin.

Most pages have header tags

And while I see all of these things as issues, I am more concerned with why the site would rank and then suddenly disappear entirely.  Backlinks are obviously a big thing, but it is a small local niche site where I can say that a large portion of the companies also do not have backlinks or even an seo company helping.

The site gets "A" grades on their moz on page reports for keyword targeting so I feel they should at least be somewhere to be found.

[spencerhjustice]

I'm seeing them on the first page for both "Cincinnati chimney repair" and "Cincinnati chimney cleaning" which appear to be your 2 main keywords. These are both showing in the local pack.

[Atomicx]

Moz rank tracker shows both not being in the top 50

[spencerhjustice]

It doesn't look like moz counts local results, but I still have moz pulling http://www.vonderhaar.com/ at 33rd for "Cincinatti Fireplace Cleaning" with http://www.vonderhaar.com/mantels.php.

nhW4cuP.png

[Atomicx]

Moz shows many of my other clients with local keywords like that. I see vonderhaar in the map listings but not organic results