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5 Reasons your website is not ranking on google
Published 2022-07-05 22:59:41
Updated 2024-07-19 14:04:26
Written by jbick
A helpful guide as to why your website may not be ranking on google. This comes from an experienced web designer since 2005. The single most important factor to google ranking is content that creates unique value. There are some other common sense factors that are easily within your control and are often overlooked as to why you may not be ranking on google.
Getting content ranked on google is paramount to any businesses success. Google seeks to promote the best and unique content for there users. At google it is all about the end users wants and needs.
Google-bot is less focused on quantity and more focused on content quality. Some of the older tactics used in years past such as web scrapping or content hi-jacking are now less important as they once were. A new saying has arisen: CONTENT IS KING.
Having worked on over 50 websites in different niches including e-commerce and comparison shopping, here are 5 common reasons your website has not been ranking on google.
Quality issues hindering google rankings
Duplicate Content:
Google has a goal that it aims to show you exactly what you are looking for on the first result. Although duplicate content is not an official penalty, it can affect rankings to a point of not being ranked at all. Duplicate content is defined as any piece of content or block of content that appears at more than one accessible URL on the internet. Duplicate content can exist between internal pages and external pages so long as google is aware of both pieces of content.Google doesn't know your website exists:
Just because your website has been published, doesn't guarantee google knows about it. Google finds websites through links. If your website is new or has no links pointing to it from an already known source, your website is likely unknown to Google. Links pointing back to your website from an external source are known as backlinks. In addition to backlinks, google can learn about your website by submitting your website property to google web masters search console. If your website is unknown to google, it cannot index, therefore it cannot rank at all. Additionally, indexation does not guarantee ranking.Excessive Bot Traffic:
Google aims to provide it's users with the highest quality experience as possible. That includes how long it takes for a user to access a resource. It is estimated that a website that takes any longer than 3 seconds to load is losing traffic. The user "bounces" off the website before it even has a chance to fully load. If your website has a significant number of pages bots can become relentless going form page to page, in turn eating up your server's CPU resources. Bots ranging from unnecessary search engines, data marketing companies, and spam bots do have the potential to devastate your SEO ranking efforts. Blocking unnecessary bots from accessing your website's resources is essential. You can block bots with apache's .htaccess file. One of the ways Google measures "quality" is through bounce rate, they are looking for a good bounce rate. A good bounce rate is around 60-80%. Anything above 90 is inching on to high.Low Quality Content:
Content that does not meet up to Google's webmaster quality guidelines has a lower chance of ranking. There is no exact number or right or wrong way to achieve "Quality Content". There are however a handful of elements to stick with when creating content. The main rule of thumb to there being "Quality Content" is that the piece of content offers unique value. Additionally, things like link farms and directories are being deemed low quality.Misuse of robots.txt:
The robots.txt file is a very powerful control element over your website's crawling preferences. The robots.txt file can easily sabotage or help your website's ranking results. There are reasons to block certain elements of a website such as URL parameters that can be deemed as low quality or thin content in the eyes of Google. However, blocking a page that Google likes can be detrimental to your overall rankings and even prevent the spread of link equity throughout your website.
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