Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements Page Blank / Site Not Ranking Well

[optin]

I have an ecommerce site that is not ranking well currently. It has about 1,000 pages indexed in Google but very few appear to be ranking.

I normally find issues in Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements but for some reason it does not see a problem with the site. There are problems, trust me. Moz shows many issues. Google nothing!

There is a problem somewhere but I am not seeing it. Why are HTML Improvements blank and the site not ranking? Am I in the dreaded sandbox?

Any ideas?

Sean

We didn't detect any content issues with your site. As we crawl your site, we check it to detect any potential issues with content on your pages, including duplicate, missing, or problematic title tags or meta descriptions. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site. For example, title and meta description text can appear in search results, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Sean

In my experience there are always many differences in the crawl reports from Moz and Webmaster Tools. Bear in mind, they are all just computer programs running automatically to detect "issues" - and that a human eye is the best tool at the end of the day.

To step back a little, your overall ranking will likely have very little to do with these sorts of things (titles, descriptions, etc). They can have a small effect but will usually not bump the needle way up. So just keep that in perspective when fixing things.

In general, I would aim to have your titles and descriptions unique, within length guidelines, compelling for users and so on. Google has a great guide here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en

There can sometimes be a delay in what Google shows you in WMT as well. They might not have crawled everything as recently as Moz. I do tend to find Moz will check everything whereas WMT will only alert you to the pages they find are problematic. (For example, you might have pages with duplicate titles, but Google has determined the pages not important - a quality check if you well - whereas Moz doesn't make this qualitative check, they just crawl and rate everything).

In order of priority I would fix WMT issues first and then move to Moz issues. But again, your overall ranking is likely more due to site authority & trust as measured by links and usage.