Buzz Insurance Rankings
We only found out when we decided to check out their site, but apparently Buzz Insurance has shut down!
We thought that was a bit strange considering how aggressively they were with their online marketing strategies so in today’s video we took a deeper look into their SEO strategy and found more issues than a magazine stand.
Most of our research into Buzz Insurance came from simply searching their site in Google, so in this week’s blog post we thought we’d show you how to do it to your own site to find issues with how Google is indexing your site. First off type site:yoururlhere.com into Google to get an overview of what Google’s bots have uncovered when visiting your site. This results page will show you all of the pages Google has indexed from your domain and will allow you to see what kinds of issues you may be having.
- If you don’t have as many pages as Google thinks you do, you might be dealing with issues around duplicate pages that could be severely affecting your rankings. You can solve duplicate page issues by either noindexing the duplicates or by using canonicalisation to tell Google which page is the correct page.
- If you have less pages than Google thinks you do then you may have pages that are telling Google’s bot to bugger off. If you see a noindex tag on pages not showing up in Google’s search results then that specific page won’t be crawled by Google’s bots. Simply remove the noindex tag and the next time Google bot visits your page, your pages will appear in the index. Most pages are noindexed for a reason so make sure it’s something you want searchable in Google before you remove the noindex tag.
- If none of your pages show up you’ve told got your entire website telling Google to sod off. Search your root directory for your robots.txt file and either remove the disallow line or change it to allow in order for Google’s bots to search your site. A subdirectory can also be cordoned off from Google with it’s own robots.txt file so keep an eye out for any chunks of your site that may not be showing up.
- Alternatively, Google may have given you the finger and flipped the switch on your little corner of the Internet by removing you from their index. Unless you’ve done something that violates Google’s guidelines in a bad way then it’s safe to say this isn’t the cause. Unfortunately if this is the case you’re probably better off building a new site as Google will rarely explain their deindexation decisions.
It’s worth remembering that Google Webmaster Tools will give you a far better analysis of what Google’s bot found with your site, but checking up on your indexed pages regularly can help you at a glance to determine some of the root causes of your ranking issues.
If all the above doesn’t work there are a slew of more technical problems that can be causing issues with how Google’s bot reads your site. If you have any questions or think you should be ranking better, feel free to leave us a comment below and we’ll investigate for you!
Now if only we’d have written this post before Buzz Insurance decided to buzz off…
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
