Site not in Google top 50 for key terms

[BoomDialogue69]

Dear Moz Community,

Our site - http://www.sportsdirectnews.com publishes a high volume of daily sport stories and aims to follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines, yet our pages don't appear anywhere in Google's SERP's.

We've looked in details at the issue and think it could be something to do with:

a) Unusual links

or

b) High page loading time

or

c) Too many on-page links

If you could have a look at the site - http://www.sportsdirectnews.com - and give your professional opinion as to why our website is not appearing in SERP's, we would be most appreciative.

SDN

[kchandler]

You can take this analysis with a grain of salt since it only entailed around 5 minutes of my time but i think it has to do with the percent of unique content to ads on your page. I clicked through around a few articles in the formula one section and all of them had close to 6-7 paid advertisements (mostly above the fold) and only a few sentences of copy.

Then taking it to the next level the page load time was relatively slow but it seemed almost all to do with the advertisements slowing the load time (using fiddler to inspect). My advice, either limit down the amount of advertising you are running on actual article pages OR write more and higher quality content.

Best of luck!

• Kyle

[jesse-landry]

Few things going on here.

I agree with kyle that the user experience is poor due to those ads and that will absolutely hurt things. Slow load times are a huge problem as well.

Beyond that, your link profile needs some work. It's quite skewed. There are 22,000 links coming from 25 domains. That's a huge disparity that really shouldn't happen. Also, as far as anchor text goes I notice a huge number of links pointing at sports news and <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="športové novinky" data-id="39055838023">športové novinky (which I'm assuming is sports news)</a> <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="športové novinky" data-id="39055838023"></a>

This could be a potentially bad thing.. even though they're only coming from a couple domains. But you really want to make sure your anchor text is branded and not forced with keywords at all times. A few here and there is good, nay great, but all of them being targeted keywords is begging for a Penguin penalty.

Have you received any unnatural link warnings in GWT? Definitely check if you haven't..

And then check out all of your on-page reports here at Moz. There are a ton of onsite things that I'm sure could be done to this site and the Pro Tools here will help you discover what the big ones are for you.

Most of all.. you just need to build some high-quality content and become an authority on all thinks sports news all the while gaining relevant backlinks organically.

[kchandler]

Great point on the unnatural anchor text, that would definitely have a greater effect in regards to top 50 rank. After clearing up your link profile the content portion will get you the rest of the way.

[BoomDialogue69]

Thanks for taking the time to view our indexing issue Kyle. Just a few questions about your post: Are you saying that the adverts are a problem because they slow loading time, or because they are adverts and not indexable text content? Do you think removing some of the adverts that slow loading time and also adding more text would, when combined, have a dramatic increase in Google indexing our web content?

[BoomDialogue69]

Thanks for posting your response Jesse. Yes, we noticed a message from Google in Webmaster Tools relating to "unnatural inbound links", to which we have submitted a reconsideration request to Google. With regards to links, we get a large number of daily links from a wide variety of websites (mainly news and sport sites), up to 300 'inbound links' as a traffic source a day, depending on on the news stories web publish. What can be done to disavow links when Google doesn't tell us which links are 'unnatural or spammy'? We analysed our inbound links and nothing stands out as particularly spammy.

[BoomDialogue69]

How do we manually clear up our link profile Kyle? Thanks.

[kchandler]

Hey Justin, it is a pretty long and specific process. However there is close to 50 different blogs and articles published on MOZ alone for it. I'd start here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amoz.com%2Fblog%2F+%2B+unnatural+link+removal

Hope this helps!

• Kyle