Welcome to the Q&A Forum

A couple years ago I wrote an article that may help:

https://moz.com/blog/going-beyond-moz-metrics-to-answer-why-is-this-site-outranking-me

(I disagree now with a few of my own ideas of what else may matter ... but the idea remains the same.)

Metrics aren't everything and can be skewed by things like volume, spam, and things that affect ranking that have nothing to do with link metrics. Keep in mind - link & domain metrics are one small part of ranking. Age of the domain, website speed, content of course ... all these things could play into rankings.

What does the content look like? Page titles related to KWs? H1 & H2s used similarly on both sites? Duplicate content on one?

Just keep in mind that these metrics are just a piece. You wouldn't think you bought a car if someone just handed you a steering wheel, right? Check the tires. Check the engine.

If you put duplicate content on the two sites it will be a problem, otherwise it will not.

This is a very generic question not really suited to the Q&A forum. We can help with specific questions and certainly if someone is feeling extremely generous or has a lot of time on their hands they can help but this is too broad for the forum in general.

You should probably start with the Beginner's Guide to SEO and let us know specifically how we can help. Also, depending on your current knowledge you may want to find someone to hire who can give you a jumpstart toward your marketing goals while you catch up on the basics.

I don't want to spend a lot of time on a generic question but just as a starting point, your homepage title is super spammy and needs to be changed.  It also looks like you've purchased links in the past or had an SEO company who treated your site very badly.

Good luck!

If it's related to your industry and most of your competitor sites have the same type of links, that may be what Google expects to see. I think site speed & backlinks are two places where every niche is unique to itself.

In a site speed example, I've seen photography keywords where every page 1 result the site takes over 8 seconds to load. Now, in an informational, mostly-text niche like say "george bush biography" that would be really, really bad. I think Google would expect to see sites in that niche load very fast. But photographers all have these full screen images, large portfolios, they're showing off the work, etc. I think the algo rightly realizes that if MOST sites that return a keyword are slower than average, site speed probably counts for a bit less overall as the distinctions are smaller.

Same with backlinks - if your competitors all have these borderline links and they have authority, and you remove yours, I would fully expect your site to drop rather than rise in the rankings. Disavow is good for removing authority but doesn't often give you a positive bonus. It just keeps you from negative problems. To beat a competitor you don't need to avoid the negative. You need to add positive. I would focus on that side of the equation to see the best results.

Bing and Yahoo rely more on on-page content for new sites than they do backlinks. Google prefers a good solid base of people linking to you most of the time.

According to Ahrefs you have 53 backlinks from 21 domains. 3 of these domains (and 12 links) are from Edmonton home & garden shows (ie. all the same people). Only 13 of these links are dofollow links and 40 are nofollow - a very strong ratio against you.

You also have pages that don't land in the same place they used to. You have links to /poker-tables/ but that redirects to /game-rooms/#poker-tables

Your Ahrefs anchor text shows about 48% of your referring domains link to the site using the word "hot" and 33% "tubs"

The backlinks you do have from sites like Hot Tub Galaxy, Hot Tubs for All, Just Cat Fishing, etc. are all extremely suspect and look like blatant spam to me.

I would suggest that the better question to ask would be: "why would Google rank this site at all?" At the moment, nothing off-site suggest they should. Sorry for the bad news. (Btw. if that's your PN, that's not how you do a PN.)

I see the exact match domain #1 - plantas de casas .com so that makes sense.

According to Majestic, you have 958 live links and 135,000+ historic links. That's a HUGE drop off in links. You used to have 1363 referring domains and now have 244. Those drops are cause for some worry.

montesuacasa.com.br has 46k links and 731 historic referring domains - many more links than you and many more still alive.

If I look through your historic links you were getting 128,000 from one site jeso carneiro.com.br - this site has pretty good authority itself but your link is now not found. So that was helping you to #1 - now it's not.

Pretty impossible to answer without seeing the site but things that I could think about:

Links, as discussed below, mainly pointing to the homepage. The "link juice" (I hate that term but it fits) flows down through the homepage to the main categories (such as Tyres) which then filters (again) down to "Honda Tyres" - but the Tyres page (or homepage) could also have a TON of outbound links, internal links to filter to, etc.

You could also have duplicate/non-existent content on the internal pages and Google may just not value them as much. Your URL structure could affect this. The backlink anchor text pointing to one or two of your category pages could affect this.

Again, without a URL we're just shooting mosquitos with a shotgun.

I don't think anyone has mentioned this but your number of internal links is borderline nuts.  I found about 190,000 internal pages.

If you remove those internal links and Google this:

"www.phuketproperty.com" -site:www.phuketproperty.com

You'll see that your site has 13,000-ish backlinks.  Take a look at the highest ranked ones.  They're mostly all cheap/low quality inbound links.  You don't have a huge backlink profile based on the tremendous size of your site.

To put it in perspective

www.microsoft.com has 688,000 internal links and  28 million incoming links.

www.century21.com has 11 million internal links and almost 50 million incoming links.

www.phuket.com has 5530 internal links and 287,000 incoming links.

Internal links are not usually 10x incoming links.  That could be part of it.  You have 13,000 not-quality inbound links.  And 200k indexed pages.

Not only can you but you should.

Pruning non-performing pages that you don't intend to rework and get ranking is very useful. I would definitely 301 the pages though, even if you 301 them all to the homepage (not really recommended if there's any better option.) Get a full site crawl with Screaming Frog, your sitemap or some other tool, import to Excel, add a column for your new URLs (homepage or other) and then just concatenate them into a long list of 301s.

Or do some wildcard magic and make it simpler. Depends on the url structures for that, I suppose.

But yes, I would definitely redirect and get rid of the tens of thousands of non-useful pages. It should actually help your other 100 as well.

I would say it is an issue.

A Wordpress site should have an SEO plugin to solve issues like this. Whether you prefer All In One SEO or Wordpress SEO by Yoast, either gives you canonical links and the ability to noindex and block certain things.

With Yoast Wordpress SEO I have my tag pages set to: noindex, follow

It seems to work well. My tags are not indexed.  You definitely want to noindex those. They could do it individually but that's the reason plugins like this exist - so you can easily control your duplicate content.

These type of links are generally demoted/do not pass juice in the first place.

Matt Cutts said in the past in an interview with Eric Enge:

Matt Cutts: Typically, we want to handle those sorts of links appropriately. A lot of the time, that means that the link is essentially driving people for money, so we usually would not count those as an endorsement.

To me, Shareasale is a huge provider of affiliate links so I would assume Google is well onto those links and doesn't count them. You aren't going to get a ranking benefit from these links, IMO.

Matt Cutts' blog has categories & archives. If he thinks it's ok, so do I.

http://mattcutts.com/blog/

Agree with Jordan - block the parameter for search in robots.txt and forget it. It won't bring search traffic in, it shouldn't get crawled but if it does, it's always a negative.

I had the same issue with my brands & sites for awhile.

I am "High on SEO" - imagine how hard it is to rank for that term when so many agencies tell their clients they can get them "higher search rankings" and "improve SEO" and "higher SEO rankings" - it was brutal at first.

After awhile, Google started to realize that even though Facebook and LinkedIn are more authority sites than my domain, a search for my brand should return my site.  Now a search for highonseo or High on SEO returns my site #1 almost always.

I think all that happened was time - I had to wait for this result to be #1 nearly all the time.

Same thing happened to my photography site.  Searching for Best Day Photo without the quotes, and it wasn't top 5 pages.  Now it's #1 logged out.

Google will eventually figure out that this is your brand name and the .com is relevant to the search. Just follow good SEO practices and link building.  Be a bit patient and the results will show you soon.

I love the way you phrase things. lol

I agree with EGOL here - it's definitely not helpful, it's definitely not needed, it could be harmful, and it's a sign of other potential issues. I would definitely work to remove it from the title.

Plus,
.... I mean what's it trying to accomplish? This tells me it's auto-generated or (stealing EGOL's word) "dumb." because it's a line break. You can't line break a title. I mean I could see some example of code that are meant to do something in a title (for instance, **for bold) but not BR? It makes no sense. **

You should include a noodp, noydir tag to try to prevent this.  I saw your title & description and they look fine. Usually it's duplicated content that gets your meta replaced (say Brisbane SEOs and digital marketing services in Brisbane | SEO | Marketing"  That would get you replaced in a heartbeat.

For yours, I don't see that - but they must think the Alexa is more relevant.

1. Change Alexa and ping those changes to Google.

2. Add noydir and noodp to your meta tags.

Hope that helps!

I would actually add a canonical tag and then handle these using the Parameters section of Search Console. That's why it's there, for exactly this type of site with exactly this issue.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en

You could - although I would suggest that if you create content for the long tail keywords it will perform better than if you just slap some labels on existing content.  I would think the plan would be:

1. Create new long tail content (blogs are #1 for this, I'd guess.)

2. Rank the long tail stuff and get more notice, thus gaining more backlinks and more pass through to your head keywords (short tail).

3. Then create a mix of long & short tail, keep growing in both areas.

If this is intended, it can be fine. If it's not intended, it's not good.

Do you own both domains?

Did you recently change domains?

Did you do this on purpose? (Or do you hire an SEO agency who did?)

It's not necessarily an SEO problem (as long as you don't redirect all 404s to your homepage at least. I've seen that be an issue in the past.)

However, use it as an opportunity.  Make the 404 a sales page if you have that many.  It's a lander now for "the product you were searching for is out of stock - here are the search results on our site for similar products" etc.  You can turn it into something productive to have that many 404s.

From WMT, mark them as fixed and then anytime one pops up, find out what is linking to the product and try to remove that link.  You don't want to be linking to 404s internally if you can help it (bad user experience = Google's nightmare) so having 1000s of 404s isn't bad but try to break any internal links to them.  (Xenu can help as well if you don't feel like waiting for WMT.)