Weird rankings on my website, can't figure it out

[Draden67]

Hey guys,

One of my post popular pages for "Rust Hacks" use to be - http://www.ilikecheats.com/01/rust-cheats-hacks-aimbot/

Now when searching Google for site:ilikecheats.com rust hacks

This page shows as the highest ranking - http://forum.ilikecheats.com/forums/221-Rust-Hacks-Rust-Cheats-Public-Forum

What's weird is it seems the entire front end (Wordpress site) isn't ranking well anymore on page #1 of Google and the forums are ranking better currently. I did have a huge penalty from backlinks last year but cleared it. I got Yoast to do a site review and I'm cleaning up everything now. I also cleared most of the bad links via the disavow tool.

Another example is when I search for "warz hacks" the forums show up in 4th place but the main website isn't showing at all back to page 10. If I search site:ilikecheats.com warz hacks the links directly to the main site doesn't show until page #2. So is this still a penalty that is carried over or is something else going on? Can't seem to figure it out, thanks in advance for looking.  

Any ideas what's going on and why the main pages no longer rank - http://www.ilikecheats.com

[cibble03]

Hi,

I just searched for "warz cheats" and you subdomain come up in position 7 and 8.

forum.ilikecheats.com/.

"Rust hack" your subdomain is position 11 and 12

Maybe your main site is still under a penelty and your subdomain is not?

[Draden67]

No penalty in Webmaster tools and the manual penalty was removed back in January.

[evolvingSEO]

I just wanted to point out a few issues I saw right away;

• Internal linking might be playing a roll. The site is not linking to these hacks pages right from the homepage, it is down a second level via the "download hacks" link. Yet the forum is being linked to universally across the main navigation.

• In fact the forum comes on top for most internal links --> http://screencast.com/t/MYjf3dNzZGE

• Bear in mind Google will treat privacy pages and sitemap internal links differently, because they know these are standard pages linked to universally, so you don't need to go removing links to those - but you should think about overall site architecture in relation to your content pages.

• The top YouTube video won't play - it says: "This Video has Been Removed as a Violation of YouTube's policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content". That can't be good for the pages quality score.

• All comments below are unanswered. This is your opportunity to engage with visitors, show some extra and helpful content etc - I would respond to some of the commenting.

• I see 225,000 pages indexed on the entire root domain. Is there really this many pages with actual content that people are looking at and using on a regular basis? Maybe it's a good idea to do a content audit on the site and remove or consolidate low quality and/or extra pages.

• I am not familiar with this industry and type of site - but Google seems to be trying to rank forum pages for other domains as well - and only a few "landing pages" - as these landing pages just try to get the visitor to register, only only after they register can they get access to the content. Google is reluctant to rank pages in which the user can not easily complete the desired action on that page. Maybe this industry is out of that norm?

• Make sure you are not blocking CSS and JS from being crawled in robots.txt - http://www.ilikecheats.com/robots.txt - there's a lot of stuff in your file there, and Google now prefers to crawl these files, so I would check you're not blocking that. Use the new fetch and render tool in webmaster tools.

• You've got an infinite crawl loop happening --> http://screencast.com/t/hNekO6fx3A - I found this with screaming frog SEO spider. Something you'll definitely want to resolve.

• Lots of pages link internally via 301 redirects, which can also hurt crawl efficiency

• Did you intend to make this page a "post" and not a "page"? http://www.ilikecheats.com/01/rust-cheats-hacks-aimbot/ - see my video about the differences - either way you should be updating this page, and fixing issues as they arise to make sure users are happily finding what they need on it.

Is doesn't seem like there is any one silver bullet thing to fix, but it seems like Google might be having trouble figuring out which page to rank for certain queries - so perhaps the architecture, keyword targeting etc is not clear enough.

I also suspect the forum may be more trusted and authoritative due to user metrics. It's likely users are visiting the forum more often, staying longer and engaging due to the nature of the forum. But you can certainly help Google out by clarifying the site structure and page targeting a bit better.