My website is abnormally being ranked on google

[garynezri]

Hello,

In april 2016, I changed my domain from .fr to .com. The change went pretty smooth and my website quickly showed up as .com on google.fr and google.com in the same spots it was previously ranked.

In July 2016, I initiated a change of template (it was about time to change my website design). I was still using wordpress with yoast, and the pages had the same structure and content as before so it didn't affect the ranking.

In the next month, my website needed a better server so I had to move the website to a new server, I messed up with the IP address and for a few days if you were to type my website in .fr it wouldn't redirect in .com.

Funny thing as soon as google got aware of that, it started ranking my old .fr domain over my new .com domain in google.fr (because I presume my .fr has a higher authority)

But then after setting everything right It started re-ranking the .com in google.fr in the same spots.

A few months go by...

Beginning of October for no apparent reasons my .fr domain started taking over the .com in the ranking of google.fr..meaning that my old domain was showing. Since then I don't know what to do.

I found out that one of my competitor has been trying to link my website to p$$r vi$$a and so on.. and he also tried to link my website with anchor text his website name..

This issue only seems to show on google.fr because on google.com my website is not being affected.

I was recommended to move to wpengine (I am with go daddy).

[CleverPhD]

Just for context.  I have one website that I have been involved with for over 12 years and something we have seen is that Googlebot has a very, very long memory. We see some really old URL structures being attempted, even when there is not an external link to it. I just say this for context as you have to remember, even though you have the 301 in place, Google remembers your old website structure, especially when there are links to it. Add that to the fact that you have switched back and forth will add to the memory.

Getting back to your specific issue, we had a similar issue once, not with different TLDs but URL structures on the same domain. Google would keep showing the old URL structure in the search results and in the Search Console data even though we had 301 redirects in place for years. Yes, years. It was the strangest thing as we would click on the results in the SERPs, it would show the 301 redirect to the new page, but Google was not updating.

The solution was to canonical link each page to itself (unless you need the page to canonical to another). That seemed to get Google to associate the correct slug on our site.

What had happened with us was that we had used a 302 redirect for a specific group of pages before using the 301 redirect. For some reason this messed up Google and it was not until we put the canonical to self in place that things got fixed.

My hypothesis is that in all of your switching around from .com to .fr and back again, somewhere in the billions of pages that Google crawls, it got mixed up.  Try the canonical link to self on a few of your pages and see if that works.  If it works roll it out site wide. The second thing you can do it use the Google site migration tool to give another clear signal to Google on what is going on. Make sure that you have search console access for your .fr site first and that you have everything setup properly on the .com version as well. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en

Regarding the untoward linking that a competitor is doing. That may be part of it (hard to tell). I would say to be safe, disavow the domains of the questionable sites linking to you. I know that Google said that this is really not needed, but it would not hurt and considering all the TLD confusion going on, it may help.

Good luck!

[RuthBurrReedy]

I think it's unlikely your competitor's linking is affecting this issue, but agree with CleverPHD that disavowing those domains would be a good precaution to take. Self-canonicaling, then doing a Fetch+Render on your core pages, would be the first thing I would try as well.

Since the .fr domain has higher authority, you may also want to reach out to the highest-authority sites that link to your .fr domain and see if they will update their links to point to the .com version instead - it sounds like Google's idea of which of the two sites is the "real"/authoritative version has been reset, so everything you can do to shift authority to the .com domain will help.

[brettmandoes]

I'm a bit curious, it sounds like you haven't redirected the old site to the new one? If you have, have you performed a change of address in Google Search Console? And lastly, are there language differences between your .fr and .com sites? Have you set up your hreflang tags on one and not the other?

All else being equal, if you have two sites and one is optimized for a french audience via hreflang tags and a .fr domain, it would not shock me at all to see that Google is displaying one over the other on google.fr. Also consider that your french users could be clicking on the .fr site and boosting its ranking that way, causing Google to consider your old domain a more relevant source of information for your audience.

I very much doubt your competitor is affecting your ranking. If anyone could bowl sites on Google with that kind of cheap tactic they wouldn't have a working search engine in today's day and age. More likely your competitor is harming his own rankings.

Switching hosts will do nothing. Stick with GoDaddy and save yourself the trouble and expense.