Is my domain holding me back in the SERPS?
-
Even after a good year or so, my site intensivedrivingschoolmiltonkeynes.co.uk does not rank in the top 10 (google.co.uk) for "Intensive Driving School Milton Keynes", and is nowhere for "Driving School Milton Keynes". Do you think the domain name is being penalised, or do you think there are other factors that contribute to the poor performance.
-
When you're buying a domain name, contact a good seo agency to see if they can see that the domain has had any penalties applied to it or not?
such as algorithmic or manual Google penalties applied in the past.
We did this when we purchased our garden room company, we wanted to see if the domain name, possibly had any Google penalties applied to it in the past
-
Thanks guys. Yes open site explorer does not register any backlinks. According to google webmasters tools we have 49 links in from 7 domains. I'll work through the points you raised.
I'm disappointed about the backlinks as we have, in the past, paid for blogger outreach with programmes like fatjoe and the hoth. I take it, you would not recommend these?
-
Agree with Donald above, I do not believe your website is being penalized in anyway for your URL. Some things to consider to help:
1. Setting up, and/or optimizing as much as possible, your social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest)
2. Create & Verify Your Google My Business Profile if you haven't already.
3. Use Moz Local to see what profiles your business has or doesn't have, then use Moz Local to help or do them manually.
4. Add Schema to Your Website to help Google properly index it.
5. Look at some of the backlinks the people ranking in the top 3 for the 2 searches you mentioned above using Moz's Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEMRush, and then see what links you can gain to your website as well from what they have. -
Hi Gemma,
Will need more information. Time is not the only factor the ranks a website. I used open site explorer and see that there are no backlinks.
Backlinks should be a focus area if you want to rank your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Change SEO focus from homepage to other page on the domain
Hi, we are (were) ranking top 5 with gietvloer-wand.nl by focussing the homepage for a certain keyword. We're trying to change to focus from the homepage to /gietvloeren with more content / information. How to go about this? how to tell Google that /gietvloeren is more relevant / important then than the homepage? Or any experiences how long it will take for Google to see that the page has more information than the homepage? It's a test and any experiences you can share would be great. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Heers0 -
Could you please provide some suggestions about how to improve the domain popularity and link popularity of a website
Could you please provide some suggestions about how to improve the domain popularity and link popularity of our website
On-Page Optimization | | nlogix0 -
Transfer Blog From External Domain
Hi All I am in stages of transferring a blog. We currently have partial manual penalty for unnatural links, and we received sample links of our own blog, which happened to be originally setup on another domain. e.g. example.co.uk and the blogs hosted on exampleblog.co.uk - the only way these were linked were through anchor text in each and every blog - so it's clear why this has been picked up. We are now going to transfer these across to our actual domain. Around 60% of the blogs had no meat, so we have pruned through these. What is the best solution; Redirecting ONLY the good blogs via 301 Redirect and 404 pages with no meat OR Redirecting ONLY the good blogs via 301 Redirect the others to Example.co.uk/Blogs Thanks Tom
On-Page Optimization | | TomPryor830 -
70 Domain Names Point to 70 Nearly Identical Inner Webpages
I have a new SEO client; his website has never been optimized. There are 70 domain names involved with this one website. Each domain name points to an exact replica of the main page, other than the fact that a small content box has different info in it, and sometimes the header graphic is different. So, 70 webpages that are 5% different from each other and 5% different from the main page. How badly is this issue affecting this website's ability to rank well, and what is the best way to solve this?
On-Page Optimization | | netsites0 -
Can Page Authority of a site be higher than its Domain Authority?
I own a website called Takeyourtips.com. While doing a search no Google, I found that the page authority of the home page (31) is higher than the domain authority (23). I was wondering if it's really possible because my understanding was page authority of a page is determined by its domain authority. Therefore, it the domain authority of a website is 23, none of its page could have a higher page authority. Plus, upon consulting an SEO expert, I was told that neither Domain Authority or Page Authority of a page carries any importance as far as higher ranking of a website is concerned. Is this true? Thanks in advance for the answers. Cheers, Sushant large
On-Page Optimization | | suskanchan0 -
Domain
Hello Team, I purchased a domain that's been around for a long time and I have built some decent pr to it. However, when I Google the domain name/future company name VIP Real Estate, it doesn't appear anywhere. Could it be that the domain name has a penalty? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Dallas0 -
SERP listing of a websites' 'categories'
Hi all, just wondering if anyone has thoughts on what I can do to encourage SERP listings that include website categories, eg http://www.google.com.au/search?q=seomoz&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a . I'm assuming search engines only display type of listings when the search query closely matches the domain name? Thank heaps!
On-Page Optimization | | TheWebSearchMarketingCompany0 -
Setting up a domain for a future site
Hi there, That may be a bit of a silly question to ask, but we've setup a new domain for an existing site. While the site is in the making, the site owners wants to already start promoting the new URL on stationeries etc. Hence, we need to setup the new URL so that it forwards to the site, but so that Google doesn't give it the history of a secondary (less important) domain. What is the best way to do this? Currently we've put in a 301 redirect, but will that bear no future consequences on the SEO of the site, when the site is moved to this new domain, and the old domain is 301 redirected. Thanks, SEOeclipse
On-Page Optimization | | Bozboz0
