Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Site not ranking in Google but comes up #1 in Yahoo and Bing
-
Hi everyone,
I've been working on SEO for this site for about 2 years and for some reason the site has just tanked in google. However it shows up #1 in yahoo and bing for the same search.
Phrase: "commercial foundation repair mn"
If anyone can shed some light on the issue I would really appreciate it. They do have a sister-site: american-waterworks.com that may be causing issues as they link a lot of content to amww but not the other way around.
Thanks
Eric
-
Hi Eric,
more info on the over optimization penalty here.
-
_Few issues - _
Titles are too keywords focused
Meta descriptions are same site wideHowever, as Ryan has clarified, ranking in Google is a different ballgame altogether. And one more thing, I cannot find your website listed in Google Local. Get your website listed in Google Local as it might help your website rank high in some local terms.
-
Simply put don't make your pages for SEO, make them for your users/visitors, do your main SEO offsite.
Time and time again though, we've experienced the google high - bing/yahoo low or the google low - yahoo/bing high.
It would seem each search engine reviews the others and do not want to display the same results, after all, what would be the point?
So figure out which one you want to target and go for it with whatever methods that get you up there. I think it'd be quite hard to get #1 for all search engines, unless of course your a site like wiki.
Good luck!
-
Thanks for the replies,
I haven't been involved in the SEO community as much lately, can you elaborate or point me to a resource about the "over optimization penalty"?
Thanks
Eric
-
Eric, try focusing on one location at a time in your title tag . At present you are trying to target 3 states ( MN, IA, WI) on the home page title tag. Build backlinks for the MN key phrase from quality sites. Be very careful with the over optimization penalty while you work with the on page factors.
-
Bing and Google are two independent companies. They often evaluate site rankings very differently for various reasons. A few items I noticed:
-
your sister site, american-waterworks.com already ranks on the first page of Google results for the given phrase.
-
the nfsmn.com links prominently to the american-waterworks site from the home page
-
Google frowns on a single company / site owner trying to rank multiple sites for the same term
There are many possibilities. Further analysis is needed to determine the root issue in your particular case. There are clearly other sites attempting to rank for the same term. The nfsmn site has hardly any links, it links out to multiple other sites from its home page and the content quality and site architecture aren't that good. I would not expect the site to rank #1 in Google for anything other then a perfect match for a non-competitive keyword.
I also noticed the american-waterworks site does not rank on the first page of Bing, yet it does in Google. Each search engine may recognize these sites are related and choose the site they feel is best suited for the term to rank.
-
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record. We use Google Mail internally. The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications. Example of one of the links: Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.
Technical SEO | | SS.Digital0 -
Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?
We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Technical SEO | | Jane.com
http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.0 -
Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions
Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | ruggero0 -
How do we keep Google from treating us as if we are a recipe site rather than a product website?
We sell food products that, of course, can be used in recipes. As a convenience to our customer we have made a large database of recipes available. We have far more recipes than products. My concern is that Google may start viewing us as a recipe website rather than a food product website. My initial thought was to subdomain the recipes (recipe.domain.com) but that seems silly given that you aren't really leaving our website and the layout of the website doesn't change with the subdomain. Currently our URL structure is... domain.com/products/product-name.html domain.com/recipes/recipe-name.html We do rank well for our products in general searches but I want to be sure that our recipe setup isn't detrimental.
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Wordpress versus html and google ranking
My current SEO has always recommended that I take my site to wordpress. I really don't want to move to wordpress. I don't like it... I just like writing code in raw html, css, and script. I feel like I have more control that way. Wordpress just seems like a platform for blogs (I have my blog in wordpress). My question is, do wordpress websites typically rank better? Is there benefit to moving to it?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Huge ranking difference between google and bing
I am trying to rank for the keyword "trash bags" I did a lot of on-page optimization and link building. We started ranking #2 on bing and yahoo but google seems to be stubbornly fluctuating between being as high as 20 and as low as 45 and even dropped our rankings for a couple of weeks. Is there any need for concern if google is acting so different from bing/yahoo?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0 -
Google.ca is showing our US site instead of our Canada Site
When our Canadian users who search on google.ca for our brand (e.g. Travelocity, Travelocity hotels, etc.), the first few results our from our US site (travelocity.com) rather than our Canadian site (travelocity.ca). In Google Webmaster Tools, we've adjusted the geotargeting settings to focus on the appropriate locale, but the wrong country TLD is still coming up at the top via google.ca. What's the best way to ensure our Canadian site comes up instead of the US site on google.ca? Thanks, Tory Smith
Technical SEO | | travelocitysearch
Travelocity0