I'm invisible!

[benhond]

Dear all,

Earl 2015 i launched www.taobao.nl.  Its a platform that shows the products of chinese marketplaces in our local language (auto translated) and provides the option to pay in our local currency & methods.

(i blocked all the auto translated product pages via http://www.taobao.nl/robots.txt)

All content (category pages, general pages etc) are unique and written by us.

In the past I've set up several websites and shops and i know it always takes time and effort to get a site to good positions, but i never experienced that my efforts did not pay of. Until now

The url is not blocked by Google and i see a (very) limited amount of traffic in WMT & Analytics, but the site is >page 30 on its most important keyword 'taobao'.  This, while the competition on this keyword is low in my country (google.nl).

My main competitor (taobao.com.nl) seems to do worse on most SEO elements i was able to check, but they rank very well on 'taobao' and all related keywords.

What could be the reason of this very poor ranking and what should i really adjust / improve?
(besides backlinks: i'm working hard on that)

Your input is deeply appreciated!!

Sander

[hectormainar]

Without looking too deep into the site, I see at hrefs.com you only have 10 referring domains, and only 7 of them are not "nofollow".You should focus on a linkbuilding strategy at first.

Also, minimize and join your .js files. You load way too much external files for a site like that.

Why do you block product pages? They are the most importante pages on an ecommerce site.

[benhond]

Hi Hector,

Because the product pages have auto-translated content. I understood this has a negative effect on a sites ranking.

Sander

[Andy.Drinkwater]

To be appearing so far down the SERP's, it sounds like a trust issue from Google.

How old is the site? Have you performed an audit to see if there are issues lurking anywhere that could be causing problems? As Hector said, you are no-following links from the menu, but based on what you said above, this is to prevent the fact this information is pulled in from other sites? I suspect problems might start from around here.

From Google, this might seem like a strange way of doing things. There is no harm in allowing the links ( I would not advise no-following these), but you can no-index pages that you worry might get caught up in duplication.

Let Google crawl your site and see the pages you don't want indexed.

-Andy

[Mike.Bean]

Johannes,

Auto translated content does not have a negative effect on your SEO, just on user readability. Using Google Translate across your entire website will make your website hard to read in those translated languages. Take a page that is translated, and translate it back to English. It is the quickest fix yes, but more work needs to be done with the translator toolkit.

Thanks,

- Mike

[benhond]

Hi Mike,

The thing is that the original product content is Chinese.  English would be readable for my Dutch audience, but Chinese is no option.

All content on category pages and general pages are normal unique content in my language.

The site is about 6 months old and the domain has no history.

Regards,

Sander

[benhond]

Hi Andy,

"Have you performed an audit to see if there are issues lurking anywhere that could be causing problems?"

Is there any tool in specific that you can recommend?

Thanks!

Sander

[benhond]

Hi All,

I just tried this checker:  http://pixelgroove.com/serp/sandbox_checker/ and it seems there might be a penalty on the domain.  Does anyone know how i can be sure this is the case and how i can ask Google to re-evaluate?

(there is no warning in Webmastertools, so i can't submit a request for re-evaluation via that way)

Regards,

Sander

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I wouldn't take too much notice of that as it thinks my site is penalised or sandboxed - which it is neither It only looks at your homepage, it seems. Tested a couple of others and you definitely can't take anything away from it.

A penalty is difficult to spot if you haven't noticed a sudden drop in traffic. It takes quite a bit of digging.

-Andy

[Stramark]

most of your incomming links are from palminvest.nl That business went out of business. Out of business i a very public and bad way.

I would start with preventing that and getting you some good links.

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.taobao.nl

(leuk idee wel verder

[benhond]

Thanks & bedankt

I'll disavow that link in WMT. Useful info!

[benhond]

Update:  The bad links have been disavowed and WMT does not mention them anymore (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/external-links).

Also the no-follow tags have been removed.

Still working on high-quality links (:-)) and im trying to add content on a daily basis.

So far no results.