Homepage Not Ranking in Google - How long do old (not current) bad SEO practices exert influence?

[jsherwin]

I'm trying to get to the bottom of a problem I have with the Google ranking for mauiactivities.com - it's far below what I would hope for. My research so far has uncovered the following, and any advice on where to go from here would be appreciated.

_Edit:_No problems with Bing or Yahoo - the site is #1 for primary key word 'maui activities'

1. Running a site:http://www.mauiactivities.com search in Google reveals that the homepage doesn't rank. At all. I looked through the 17 pages of results and can't spot it.

Edit: I have now, after fresh checks after submitting the homepage through Search Console, found it at #1 - still, the following applies ...

2. I've found that the domain (before it was purchased by my client in 2011) had some bad inbound links, specifically from scubamaui.com (no longer active). The links where white, on a white background. This web archive snapshot will reveal all.

3. Those bad links were 'cleaned up' (i.e. they don't show in the web archive) from 2014, and as mentioned above, the website is now 'down'.

4. Search Console doesn't have a manual penalty.

5. When I search for 'tropical divers maui' in Google I find www.mauiactivities.com is the 4th result. To me, this indicates a current relationship with the dead site (Tropical Divers Maui). No other term comes close to ranking to high for the homepage.

So, to summarise - can the old, dead Tropical Divers Maui website still be affecting the Google ranking, and what would you suggest I do next?

[davebuts]

Hi Jonathon,

I wouldn't be worried about the scubamaui.com hurting your performance - there are definitely bigger factors that would be affecting the site.

Looking at your backlink profile in Ahrefs, I can see that you have a lot of dodgy blog and profile links with exact-match anchor text. Have these links been disavowed?

Examples of some bad links:
http://skitripvacation.com/blog/travel/4168-excited-about-maui-activities
http://maribethvaladez213.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/activities-and-tours-in-maui.html
http://www.betternetworker.com/members/ptevemark7

There's also an issue with headings tags being used incorrectly, eg. you have 19 h1 headings on your homepage and 4 h1 headings on just about all other pages.

The first h1 heading on most of your pages is '__You are not logged in yet', which is not great.

You should only have one h1 heading per page and you should make sure it describes what the page is about.

Cheers,

David

[jsherwin]

Hi David,

Thanks for your thoughts. I had just come across the multiple H1 issue and have it as a 'to do' - agree it's not great. Thanks for spotting it and making a it a point.

We do have some bad site links, yes. There has been previous SEO work done in the past and I'm trying to understand what has been disavowed before submitting a new file myself. In the mean time I've been trying to get bad links removed manually.

I also wonder how much of these bad links (that ski trip article for example) were part of a prior SEO strategy ... Much of this is a guessing game.

I'll tackle these two areas and monitor what happens.

Many thanks,

Jonathan