Not good enough for Google but works for Bing

[movieguy]

Right now I am extremely frustrated and I don't know where else to turn for help.

Here's a little background on the project:
Domain is 10 years old, ownership transferred 1 year ago (out from parking garage).
Domain is in the movie niche.
Website has been online and fully functional for the past 7 months.
Over 10k real twitter followers, 1k facebook followers.
Pages are indexed in google, yahoo and bing.
No malware reports found (no downloads offered).
Backlinks are great, strong ones too.
Highest Moz OSE Spam score backlinks are 6 and 5 (no need to remove right?).
Adding new content to the site daily, news articles and movies.
Content is fully unique, each movie costs around 25 dollars to produce. (Writing 500 word unique movie description)
Ranking 1st on Yahoo and Bing for several terms receiving hundreds of clicks per day.
Only ranking for domain.com search in google. No other terms are ranking.

Am I doing something wrong here? The pages are amazing and content is all unique.

Sorry I cannot disclose the url here.

[Rob_Banks]

movieguy,

Was there an actual question? The background is decently complete, but what next?

Generally, if I'm looking for current movie information, I look for the cinemas located near me. I search by cinema name, followed by location. I only have two nearby locations, both owned by the same company so it isn't complex.

Older movies I usually go to torrent sites.

Hopefully that is of some help.

[Rob_Banks]

Apologies for being a bit oblivious.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, movieguy.

[netmeg]

It's a crowded niche. What are you doing that everyone else isn't?

[jambam]

All I can say is amazon has a movie site..<<< thats your answer. Google is just a amazon affiliate search engine.

"It's a crowded niche. What are you doing that everyone else isn't? "

Algorithms cannot know that.....its like if I mention randomly something different like I like potatoes at the end of my movie review I will rank better because im doing something different?

By the time you do rank for a keyword on google... maybe users are no longer searching for that movie as much too?

[movieguy]

I am not targeting the straight movie term, it has an extension to it.

Movie Name + Hulu

[dipper]

Have you checked your robots.txt to make sure you're not blocking (just) google from indexing the site?

[seoskunk]

Hey movieguy congratulations on your ranking in Bing.

[tangor]

Yikes! movie entertainment of any kind is a hard sell, even for the majors!

But you've made the decision that is your niche, so make the most of it.

If you are getting good results in Bing that's a great start (as Bing, while not "king" is no slouch.

However, the recent transfer of domain (one year back) might have some aspect with G who saw that site stagnant for 9 years. They may be in a "wait and see" hold at the moment. How long has it been since you rolled out the new and improved site, 7 months? Might not be enough time for the different aspects of G's algos to have visited you, other than the regular indexing bot---those animal named parts of the G machine. (Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, etc.) as some of these take a Quarter or longer before next roll around.

It will be difficult, but wait for some results after a full 12 months.

We all want the web to move fast... but it does not. Especially in G's case.

Oh... and that Hulu you indicate as an extension... it is actually Hulu? You might be confusing G, who has video aspirations of their own. :)

[Kratos]

You've not given us the real information to rank.

Facebook, Twitter and age of domain have NOTHING to do with ranking in Google.

What kinds of backlinks does that domain have? I have a feeling you've purchased an expired domain tying to hop on the domain's "authority" and its "age" and you've bought into the whole "social" and MOZ scores.

What is the PR of the domain? Yes, the PR (not MOZ score)

Has it only been parked during all those 10 years or was it used for something else in those 10 years? Be careful as wise people who use expired domains will make it very difficult for you to check this.

Are there at least 10 good backlinks to that domain from authority domains and do the 10 backlinks have at least a current PR 3?

The way I see it, you're trying the classic buy a domain and hope on its "authority". Unless you've purchased a PR 5 domain (homepage) with dozens of juicy backlinks from the same niche or related, you're not going to go anywhere. I'm saying this because this is a common "trick" and people are buying bogus domains left and right.

I happen to know the movie industry in Google (via a BH friend) and what you're trying to do and it's a VERY competitive niche with hackers doing the rounds.

[tangor]

Kratos... a parked domain pretty much clears any "back links" as far as an SE is concerned. IE, it is dead. OP is starting from scratch, in a tough niche, getting good traffic, some response from social media and... and ... and...

It is a tough niche with other players who have NOT been parked, and have been active far longer. Sad to say it will be an uphill battle and I wish all good hope for success. But I won't hold my breath.

And, movieguy, these $25 "movies" you are posting... are these simple excerpts of films? If so, do not expect any respect, even under Fair Use copyright laws.

However, if this is talking head reviewers of films, that might be different, in which case, give it a little more time.

Instant web fame rarely happens these days. That "viral" stuff is so 2001ish. Look to a year or more before the uptake STARTS and then hope for six months of quick growth to follow. Seeds planted on the web these days take a while to germinate before they grow, much less bloom.

[Kratos]

@Kratos... a parked domain pretty much clears any "back links" as far as an SE is concerned.

@tangor Not true. Anyone who knows how to cloak pages to different UA like ia_archiver will know how to sell you a bogus domain that looks like it was parked. I see it every single day. Caveat emptor when buying a domain and the fact that the OP has said nothing of what backlinks the domain is even more suspect.

Not only that but a parked domain can get a huge amount of links (bad links) from referral spam especially Xrumer blasts (one of the nifty tricks to make money back in the day when the regular internet joe thought a parked page was a site itself -- still works to 1 1/00 of how it used to work).

So no, the fact that the domain was parked is meaningless. I still think that the very likely scenario here is that OP bought an expired bogus domain.

[martinibuster]

I believe Kratos is right to look at the domain as a possible source of the OP's Google ranking issue. A domain might be penalized for something that happened prior to the OP's registration and use.

This is the OP's problem:

Only ranking for domain.com search in google. No other terms are ranking.

The only thing the OP ranks for is their domain name. It doesn't rank for any search terms. Is that true? You have zero search query referrals from Google? If that's true then there is an issue that resembles a penalty. It can be technical as a previous member suggested wrt to the robots.txt. There can also be an issue with meta tags (no-index) because some SEO CMS add-ons no-index content, presumably in a badly considered attempt to help the publisher avoid dupe content issues.

I believe Google is more link sensitive than Microsoft. So that's another possible issue.

[fathom]

We're buying devalued domains that went back to ICANN but link profiles even more that a year "OFF THE MARKET" come alive with fresh content.

You need to prove or disprove a devaluation. The quickest way get your current website off the domain and add content that has absolutely nothing to do with the movie niche.

You automatically clear PANDA and PENGUIN issues.

[tangor]

I'll take my drubbing, kiddies. The other assumption (besides fraud) is kosher... I tend to think positive. :)

OP's biggest problem is the niche. I had a local ticket agency ask me to take over their failing website and shoved a wad of cash in my face. I reluctantly said "no" because I could not guarantee any improvement over their competitors for the simple reason the niche was saturated by others with even more cash to waste (and doubtfully making any money as a result). I did make a few suggestions (kill the abusive ads and get somebody else to do their presently hideous video promos) and charged them nothing. Reminds me... should take a look and see if they did that. :)

I stay away from entertainment sites in general, but others (netmeg, I believe) find it bread and butter and better. It can be done, but it takes hard work, constant attention, and never dropping the ball.

[fathom]

Whether their overall BIGGEST problem is this chosen niche doesn't much matter if the domain is devalued. Assuming they have a GSC account and can tell no manual review is active, that leaves PANDA/PENGUIN. Changing the overall theme to something that has ZIP to do with movies or entertainment will afford the understanding of being devalued as the new content and all natural links will do what they are meant to do "to rank as they should" since there is no manipulative practices to do with e.g. breeding dogs meant to find cancer. (just a random recent news item)

[tangor]

Just to make sure.... examplemovies.com is now about Russian sputniks? And those fresh links will bring the domain back to life... as examplemovies.com?

Just gotta ask... why buy devalued domains in the first place? You are starting in a hole.

As far as Panda/Penguin (even though this is a G based thread), there are other methods/SEs to get things jump started. At some point, even G will see that! (Remarking that by hammering Bing for a client Panda'd and getting to page 1 item 1, G suddenly woke up again)

[fathom]

Just gotta ask... why buy devalued domains in the first place? You are starting in a hole.

Sometimes the hole is more like a tunnel.

Great link profiles and no competition. $1.19/domain and if you know how to get manual reviews revoked for PURE SPAM beat spending thousands of dollars for the same thing.

[Kratos]

@fathom Have you successfully had the "Pure Spam" manual penalty revoked on an expired domain? I ask because the Pure Spam penalty is the harshest of all and the most rare of all manual penalties and is only given out to sites that are there to act as link schemes (as far as using expired domains go).

Usually a bogus expired domain with a Pue Spam penalty is not worth the effort to pursue due to its history. As said the Pure Spam penalty is the most uncommon one from my experience and it's the harshest one. Would be interested to know if you've personally revoked this penalty on any expired domain and how long it took you.

[fathom]

Yes.

But you are right, not easy to do.

But my team had revoked more than 50 Manual Reviews before we even encounter the first PURE SPAM domain. Since we own it for a year anyway, and I don't care about the original topics we have great flexibility with each project and at best a year to fix.

Never taken more than 6 months.

As for the "USUAL" they also usually don't have great link profiles so we are grabbing the UNUSUAL ones.

[Kratos]

Thanks. Were they sites used for PBNs in the past and thus the Pure Spam penalty?

Did you own them and got the penalty (then fixed it? Or did you buy the domain with the penalty already attached to it and thus de-indexed?

Thanks again for any replies.

[fathom]

As far as I can tell none were used in a "backlink" network.

While the intent was never to actually purchase devalued domains about 1/3 of our recent ICANN purchases were penalized in some way.

Some merely hacked and recovered in mere days, since our hosted account was never hacked.

Though, with the PURE SPAM domains, trial & error has taught me much over the years about getting a revoke. Even if, an expired domain that was sent back to ICANN was used ONCE in a PBN, that condition requires content with links. Since my domains haven't been used as in PBN since 2011, not even for a single website, there isn't a single link anywhere in the domain.

e.g. PURE SPAM > EXPIRED > back to ICANN | history ends || History begins ... The new trend NO WEBSPAM ... Worse case links are reset... None have been YET.