Google Page Ranking
Key phrases are interesting. Anyone in the industry would assume that the title “Google Page Ranking” has something to do with Google Page Rank. That’s not why I chose it for the title of this article though. I went to Google Insights for search and I was looking for a phrase that related to Google and ranking but was non SEO related. I’m guessing (maybe wrongly) that Australians that are typing this into Google are looking for information on what influences their pages getting ranked in Google. I’m also jumping to the wild conclusion that they are business people.
Previously I’ve shown you what the main elements are to getting a page ranked in Google . Today I want to show you what you should check when things go bad and how to prioritise fixing them. To do this I’m using delimiter.com.au as our example site as there was some discussion on Twitter yesterday about their Google traffic dropping. Watch the video above to see the detail but these are the main elements that I checked and found needed some closer inspection.
Delimiter
Google Index Check
Always do a site:yourwebaddress.com search in Google. How many pages does it return? Do you know if it is an accurate number? If it is way too few it means Google isn’t finding your content. If it is way to many, as is often the case, their could be duplicate content or other content you don’t want in the index.
Cache date
Is Google visiting you regularly? Check the cache date of your front page by clicking on the cached link in the search results. If it has been longer than a fortnight, you may not be updating your content enough. This can be an issue if your competitors are.
Check the code
Google likes clean code. It’s easier for the algorithm to assess and it usually means a good experience for it’s users. Make sure you have your page title as the first meta tag in your header. Have a good description tag. Don’t worry too much about the keywords meta tag. Only have one of each of these tags. Sometimes a plugin for your content management system may produce more than one. This seems to be the case with Delimiter.
Page Speed
This has been important for around a year now. If your site is slow Google does not want to send it’s users to it. According to Google studies half a second delay can mean a 20% drop in conversions. Google is always trying to improve it’s product and part of that is having the user hit the back button less. If they hit the back button less it means that unlike Bono, they have found what their looking for. Slow pages will often trigger the use of the back button. Have a look at Google Page Speed to see what Google suggests you should do to make your pages load faster.
Unique Content
Even if you are producing unique content Google may not know you published it first. Grab a chunk of text off your article and Google it inside quotation marks. If their are a bunch of sites above yours, Google believes they are more authoritative for that content even if you did publish it first.
Dedicated IP
Unless you control your own servers and you have a good idea of the traffic to them, it is a good idea to have a dedicated IP for your website. The more sites per IP address the harder it will be for you to rank. We’ve seen some sites on the same IP address as thousands of other sites. Basically they are on an underpowered server.
Back link Check
Use Webmaster Tools to see if you have had some back links disappear. Maybe there was a site linking to you that no longer does This can affect traffic as well as ranking depending on the type of link.
Google Shopping Launches in Australia
Google Shopping has finally launched in Australia. Here’s a video I did on it about two years ago and some of the things you should be thinking about beyond your catalogue feed. Google Shopping review
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
