Category: Google

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Why You Are Losing Placement to a Lower Quality Website on Google

I found this article last week that answers the top questions of:

  • How can I get organic placement. Someone has to be #1 on Google, why not me?
  • Why are other low quality sites placed ahead of mine in the search results?
  • I am doing everything right and still cannot place in the top 10 on Google.com

This article from Search MOZ is definitely worth your read and for those that learn visually there’s even a video.

Here are some of the better points from the video in a quick synopsis with my comments:

1. Just because you have more links, great keyword targeting, and terrific content does not assure that you will place higher than a competitor. The competitor may have more citations to their content, may have an authoritative domain (built over time), a better page experience, have a more compelling search snippet and therefore a higher click through rate garnering better Google search placement.

2. Look for your own weaknesses where the other site has strength. Do you have a poor snippet? (That is the meta description tag and meta title tag.) Is the title written in a way to encourage a search click? Does your page experience help of hinder your message?

3. Look at your brand and domain. Is your website ugly, brand indistinct? Brand bias and domain name maybe biasing your click potential. Start first by building or rebuilding your brand and improving your user page experience. Remember Google is watching your click through rate and the time spent  on your page as part of your site delivering value for a search query. Low numbers may mean that Google simply stops delivering your address in the search results based on past user experience.

4. Citations meaning not only links, but mentions, social shares are a key factor in Google placement. Are people talking about you positively? Are more people talking about you than someone else? Is there a variety of types of websites linking and talking about you? If Google is seeing negative comments, it may stop showing your results as users “vote” on your site by their own activity.

5. Acceleration rate of link growth may be important. If what you are talking about is timely and pertinent to your marketplace, you will grow links quicker. This is a great study for creation of free downloads, white papers and creation of timely content of great value. The key is to create memorable and sharable content.

6. Informational content may be an excellent way to garner more traffic. Just remember your content must have unique value that is different than others in order to place.

7. Local results that are delivered based on your reader’s location will be important. Keep in mind that Google may deliver a higher placement for your site for a search based in your own geographic area but not place your site well nationally. With geographic bias you’ll want to work to own your local market and then expand out.

8. Make sure you are addressing mobile device design. Google wants to return results for websites that load quickly and have a responsive design that caters to mobile, tablets as well as desktops. Remember, Google is looking to deliver the most relevant site that will deliver what the reader is looking for and is watching click-ins to your site. If someone clicks back to the search results page quickly (albeit bounce rate) after visiting your site, Google is thinking that your site may not be relevant for that query.

I definitely recommend watching the full video. The information is excellent and very instructive.

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Google Introduces Consumer Surveys

Google has just introduced a new program to track consumer satisfaction with your website. You can read the full announcement on the Google Blog. Personally I feel that this is another Carrot and Stick application from Google. The carrot will be you get free code and information about how your own visitors feel about your website. Google gets information that it may use to rank your website organically.

To me it sure looks similar to Friend Connect which had been retired. The more information that we willingly give to Google about our own website visitors the more Google knows about our traffic. It would be very naive to think that Google will not use this information we give it using Consumer Surveys for anything but its own use to know the mind of our own site visitors.

Does it cost money? Here’s the pricing:

“The default questions are free and you can customize questions for just $0.01 per response or $5.00 for 500 responses.”

Do I recommend that website owners use Consumer Surveys? Not at this time until we know more about what Google is doing with the information.

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Google – First the Carrot and Then the Stick!

If you’ve been in the web industry as long as I have (since 2001) you would have seen Google’s purchase of Urchin Statistics which became Google Analytics. It used to be that a website owner very carefully guarded their website activity; what generated clicks, page paths, traffic, and trends. When Google offered Google Analytics to the world for free, nearly every website owner flocked to implement this free application that previously was only available to those willing to pay $500 a month for a subscription. Voilà the carrot!

Google gave us the carrot with Google Analytics. The Stick?
Google gave us the carrot with Google Analytics. The Stick?

Little did we know that sharing our website statistical information would in the long run impact our own organic placement on Google.com. In this age of Snowden and the NSA and the harvesting of big data, one would have to be very naive to think that Google, having access to all this previously closely guarded information would not include some of this data into their algorithm to determine organic placement. Personally based on patent disclosures over the years, I could see that Google was patenting using click through rates to help to determine organic page rank. With over 200 factors impacting organic placement and Google having data from Google Analytics available for their own purposes, it only makes sense that by taking the carrot we’ve allowed Google to use the stick on us in regards to our own website placement.

By potentially using our own data as well as click through data from Google.com activity to rack and stack websites is not that far of a reach in today’s world. Although I don’t believe that our own data is being used maliciously to hurt our own placement by Google, it makes sense that Google is using aggregate data by industry and possibly even  our own website statistics as just one piece of their own racking and stacking algorithm.

It all started with Google Analytics, when we as webmasters shared this private information with Google. Little did we know years later that this same information might be used to lower or raise our own rankings. I do not have definitive information that Google is using Google Analytics data in their algorithm, but it would make sense for them to use aggregate data to develop benchmarks by industry so as to evaluate the importance of websites and rankings within that industry; just my thoughts for today.

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Site Placement 101

Have you experienced the Google smackdown and lost your organic placement? Have you dropped from the first page of results to the second or worse yet to so far back you cannot even find your own site?

If this is your case, what can you do – anything?

Crying about your placement on Google.com.
Crying about your placement on Google.com.

Here is my short list of things to look at and review to see if you can fix your problem.

1. If your website is mainly duplicated content like user generated content (reviews, event postings), or products and descriptions that many other sites share with you – you will most likely not be able to re mediate your problem. Sorry, hard cold fact via Matt Cutts the lead Google Web Spam engineer. If your content is like others Google no longer considers showing your site organically a value proposition for them UNLESS you create some other type of value for users than just spewing out what others already have on their sites or have already said.

2. If your site does not have duplicate content, there is hope to re mediate a drop through careful content review and update, on-domain blogging, code optimization, and a strategic plan to build value and information with the reader in mind first and foremost.

The changes that Google has made to their search engine in the last year have had very strong and sweeping impacts in regards to how a business sets up and manages their online presence. Getting organic placement is now that much harder to earn and keep, but it all remains about the value you offer to readers and in the greater scheme of things the value you provide to others trying to understand your industry.

So often I hear “my site has dropped, I want to be on page one, others are there why not me?” There are so many factors at play now in regards to organic placement that doing one thing, two things, or even three things just don’t work. Don’t ever lose sight of this fact – this is Google’s FREE search engine with results displayed their way and to their criteria, but most of all, Google is in the business to sell advertising not supply FREE search results for website owners.