Keyword plus domain search - and still not ranking first

[epmaniac]

my site is not ranking (as first result) for keywords even if i add my domain name against the keyword in the google search

when i do the same thing with my competitors site, their site gets ranked

what could be the cause of the problem?

[ecmedia]

If that were so easy, all people would do is to register domain names with the exact keyword they wanted. In order for it to rank, you still need to do the hard work of creating such compelling content that people will link to your domain.

[tedster]

Sorry ecmedia - we had a technical bug that kept the full title for this thread from displaying. The search in question is [domain keyword].

epmaniac -

1. Are you searching for the full domain name, including the TLD - for instance, [example.com keyword]?

2. What do you get for the site: operator search [site:example.com keyword]?

[epmaniac]

@my site was a reputable site with thousands of direct visitors, it used to rank for its keywords alone,... but now it wouldnt come on top when domain name is added with keyword


@ tedster

i am searching with and without TLD... my domain name is sort of a brand in its niche, so previously any keyword if added with my domain (with or without tld) would return always my site

i am seeing results in site operator but, i dont know why my site is not ranking........ many a times, when i do keyword + domain search on google, my subdomain's landing page appears on top while the REAL LANDING PAGE is inside the + expandable menu.....

something is really strange, please help,

[epmaniac]

funny thing is scrapper sites who have scrapped my content and who have my domain's name in their link and my content (keyword rich) in their text are ranking higher than me when i do KEYWORD + DOMAIN search.......

does it indicate that authority of my site has gone so low?

is it indicative of penalty?


we do have many quality back links from related sites and few western newspapers....our site went from being one of top 50000 site to nothing

traffic has decreased over all by around 20000/day level,... but in prev 1 month it has shown 3% improvement

[edited by: goodroi at 9:15 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2011]

[goodroi]

here are some things you may want to try:

1) log into google webmaster central and see if there are any messages waiting for you

2) check to make sure your website is up and being crawled by google. sometimes webhosts servers go down or an employee breaks the robots.txt file & blocks google.

3) make sure your website has not been hacked. look at the code on your page and the cache google is showing.

4) start remembering all changes you made to the site over the last month. did you buy links? did you let your distributors copy all of your content, etc?

5) start analyzing the traffic decrease. is it just one keyword or is it all keywords? is it all day or just part of the day? is it a decrease in google referrals or a decrease from all sources?

[scalax]

@epmaniac

One of my websites is doing a similar behaviour to yours.

Short story: the website disappeared from Google around 8 January first for one set of keywords (and all the keyword group connected to it) and then for all the Keywords. Suddently it appeared again in Google around 19 January then on 24 January (at 23 o'clock CMET time) the websites got dropped down of about 50 positions.

This is the summary of the current things happening related to your issue:

1) if i do a [keyword] search my website appears around -40/-50 positions lower than before (it used to rank in the top 5 positions)

2) if i do a [keyword domain.ext] the position is around -30

3) if i do a [keyword www.domain.ext] the position is around -40

4) if i do a [keyword site:domain.ext] it ranks first

Currently we think that is happening either one of those things:

a) we have been hitted by a penalty
b) the last update Google released (early last week as Matt Cutts said, and it coincides with our ranking and traffic drop) lowered our ranks somehow

Answering to goodroi questions to throw more data in the pot:

1) no messages in gwt
2) all crawling is fine and the crawling stats are going higher (however they have been spiky all january, but this is something happened also on current healthy domains)
3) no hacks detected
4) no links bought; we are checking all the changes made in the last month in our changes log to see if there is something technically wrong but at the moment all is fine
5) all keywords

Anyway we have reacted by increasing the quality of our content and removing many orphan pages from the structure by implementing 301 redirects where possible or 404 when we think it was needed (to give Google a sign that we have removed those pages that were not linked anywere).

Soon if the things doesn't change we will fire a reconsideration request describing all the detailed website history and changes made to the website.

Hope that this helps

[epmaniac]

hi there,

if subdomain is (made virtually) not mapped on a separate IP ADDRESS, would it cause issue of duplicate? would its landing page canibalize main domain's landing page as both subdomain and main domain would be considered same one single website

we had subdomains made this way,

also today i noticed, when i tried to access website by typing IP ADDRESS, i couldnt open my website,... server ip displayed hosting default page (plesk page, which appears when their is no content on the site)..... could it have resulted in drop?

[scalax]

@epmaniac

I don't think that the Ip Address issue you talked about is the problem: if you are on a shared virtual server with a shared ip address it is normal that by accessing it trough the IP Address and not the domain name you get addressed to the default apache webserver (i've seen this many times).

About the domain and subdomain: do you have the same pages both on the domain and on the subdomain ? If that is the case it can be a duplicate content issue expecially if a large set of pages is present on both the domain and subdomain.

[epmaniac]

i am on a dedicated server

2) its not the same page, ((as title,meta description and keywords are different), but target landing pages on both subdomain and main domain are keyword specific i.e. subdomain and main domain both contain red-widget's page

so in the above case, could same keyword competing on subdomain and main domain but mapped on same IP address,... would google treat them as pages from 1 website? thats why subdomain's pages are trumping the main domain's pages... and main domain's pages are suffering?