Subfolder ranks worse than the rest of the site

[karasd]

We have the strangest problem. The blog for our website ranks very poorly:

www.lifeionizers.com/blog = average position in SERPs = 200. The site itself has an average position in SERPs of 12. The blog has a few terms it ranks #1 for such as branded terms and:

is mineral water alkaline = 1.3

kangen water vs alkaline water = 2.6

kangen water pyramid = 1.2

ph of redbull = 1.1 (Used by Google as answer in knowledge graph)

But the blog ranks terribly for most search terms. This blog has about 440 pages of in-depth, well-written authoritative content. Readers are well engaged, the blog has a bounce rate of ~3.5% with average time on page of over 6 minutes. The problem can't be the quality of the content.

Does Google levy penalties against specific subdirectories? Or is this a configuration problem? Bad links have been disavowed.

[MonicaOConnor]

The bad links have been disavowed but have any good links been built? Refresh some of those links with good, high quality, relative links. Share some of the pages on social media and add a couple of videos if you can, from Youtube. All of those things should help you.

[karasd]

Yes, we've built good links for the site, and the blog has acquired good organic links all on it's own. We share regularly on social media and the blog has videos from YouTube on it.

This is the strangest thing. The blog has been built and maintained using white hat techniques, with every effort to provide value to the user, and play by the rules. Yet Google still treats it like we're pushing payday loans or something.

I've been fighting this for a year and a half, with no improvement. As a company, we are at our wits and and may just shut the blog down if this persists

[MonicaOConnor]

Without seeing the site I am not sure what else it could be. Are the blogs targeting specific key terms? If so, did you analyze them to see what metrics you need in order to compete with the people on page 1?

[karasd]

Yes, this blog targets specific terms related to alkaline water, water ionizer, ionized water, kangen water. We used to be competitive for all those terms, until Google nuked us. We fixed everything we could find, SEO-wise, but have seen zero improvement for those search terms.

I'd expect that if you improve the copy on a page, and promote it in social, that it should do better than position 200 (Google supplemental index). But SEO optimization on-site has had no effect on how this blog ranks. It improved from 220 to 200 after Penguin ran recently, but that's it

[MonicaOConnor]

Did you have a Penguin penalty by chance? You said you disavowed bad links, but if you were penalized was the penalty removed? I think the terms that you are targeting are extremely competitive and you need to do some more off site op to get them ranking well. Run a competitive SERP and see what page on looks like.

[karasd]

We've seen a lot of Keywords improve significantly (+200 positions improvement in SERPs) but then a week or so later, they simply drop back down to where they were. We've seen other terms improve, and stay improved. We've also picked up about 500 keyword phrases since Penguin 3.0. The site as a whole has improved it's position in SERPs by about 20 positions since Penguin

So the answer is a definite we don't know.

[MonicaOConnor]

All on the subdomain? Google treats your subdomain as a separate site from your domain. If the penalty was on the subdomain level, that is where you need to focus your efforts. You have to treat them as separate entities.

[karasd]

I have been treating them as separate entities. I've focused on testing the blog, and fixed everything I could find - it had no effect. I've voraciously pursued scrapers with takedown orders etc, it had no effect.

I'm reaching out now, because I'm out of ideas, done everything I could, and nothing has worked. We are considering abandoning SEO entirely because there seems to be nothing we can do to get our rank to improve. I'm hoping someone in here can help me figure out what the problem is before we abandon ship

[MonicaOConnor]

I think that it could just be that the key terms are extremely competitive. I would advise actually having someone take a look at the site in depth. Anything someone says without actually seeing the site is just speculation and maybes. I'm sorry I can't be more help!

[evolvingSEO]

Hi - this was an interesting one! But I think I have found some of the issues.

1. I'd really let Google crawl the categories. They are currently blocked from crawling in robots.txt - http://www.lifeionizers.com/robots.txt - this is an issue because I suspected part of the problem may be due to crawl efficiency. One reason I say this, is because Google has yet to index a blog post from about 2-3 days ago.
2. This is a small thing, but link to the 200 OK version of the blog from your main menu. Right now, it links to /blog but then redirects to /blog/ with the trailing slash. Any little bit friction you can reduce the better.
3. Because you have a lot of things in that robots.txt file - I would definitely perform some fetch and render tests in webmaster tools. Here's the thing, Google has said if you block CSS or JS from being crawled it will harm your sites ranking - so definitely do fetch and render and make sure that's not the case.
4. The order of "Recent Articles" in the main content area in the blog homepage: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/ - don't seem to be "recent" at all. At least they are not in chronological order. This is confusing for me (and others users probably) so likely very confusing for Google. Most would expect the /blog/ homepage to list the most recent posts by published date. Especially since it is labled "recent". If these are supposed to be maybe "popular" I would label it as such.
5. Lastly, with this much old content I would do a thorough content audit (directions here or here) of your blog. You should prune old, poor, outdated, low-traffic content just like you'd prune a plant - this will certainly help user metrics signals and keep your indexed:trafficked ratio healthy!

Those are just some of the immediate things I saw. I'd start there.

[evolvingSEO]

I just want to add for record, one thing that was really interesting. That is this page: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss

Was cached in Google but not indexed - which is odd. And to me a sign that Google is not crawling and processing the blog correctly. I've attached screenshots since they may very well index the page shortly.

Cache - http://screencast.com/t/cZcGbIHb

Site: search not indexed - http://screencast.com/t/IJQbyMhd

[karasd]

We recently deleted that page. It was ranked at ~1000 in SERPs, so that indicated to us that Google had a major problem with it. Since we couldn't figure it out, we got rid of the page.

[evolvingSEO]

Do you reactivate it? It's still live:

http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss

[karasd]

My mistake, we deleted a page with a similar URL. That page was published on Dec 9th. Three days is not an uncommon lag for Google to index a new blog post. WMT shows that we are only indexed to the 7th of December. Google appears to re-index our site once per week:

Lastest index 12/7

Previous index 11/30

Previous index 11/23

Is this unusual? And thanks for your help! This has been a very frustrating problem!

[evolvingSEO]

Hi - I wouldn't focus too much on that - I would take the suggestions made in my first answer and start with those! You really don't want to block crawling of categories!

[karasd]

I've unblocked the categories in Wordpress. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

[karasd]

You were right about the Fetch and Render. I found tons of scripts and images that were blocked. We're unblocking them all. I'm still working on your other suggestions, we do have a lot of old content. My plan is to leave all the evergreen content, and purge everything else

[evolvingSEO]

Great! So glad it's helped so far, please keep us updated

[karasd]

Got to work on those blocked scripts. It turns out they are all outside resources:

• Hubspot
• Zopim Live Chat

According to Google, if outside resources are blocked, you have to contact the vendor about unblocking them. I contacted both Hubspot and Zopim, they will get back to us in about 2 days. Thankfully, we didn't have any of our scripts/CSS blocked.

I'm also working on that redirect. It turns out that if I shut it down, and redirect to the 200 OK page, that the blog will then render search result pages that will be indexed. That will give us a massive duplication problem. Its because of this that we did the redirect in the first place.

We're considering getting a Wordpress pro to come in and fix it right. Any suggestions?