Why is my website not ranking?

I get this question surprisingly often. It’s not a silly question, it’s a good question and there could be a number of things that could be attributed to your site not ranking. This post was inspired by a late phone call on Friday by a gentleman wanting to know why his site “was not in Google” (sic). This immediately sounded as if the website in question was not indexed yet. But he meant “ranked”.

Is your site indexed by Google?

I think newbie’s get confused between “indexed” and “ranking”. Indexed means Google has found your new site using a few methods, crawled all of your pages and your site now resides within Google’s index.

Ranking means Google has indexed your site and also “ranks” your site according to the category and topic of your website. This means Google will basically compare your “antique cars” website with other antique car websites and determine WHERE it should place your site in relaton to your competitors.

How can you check if Google has indeed indexed your site? Open up Google and type in the search box: site:www.mysite.com. You will see a list of pages that Google has crawled and indexed from your site. Here is an example of how my horse riding site was indexed by Google.

Where does my site rank in Google’s index?

Some of your competitors’ websites are 10 years old, have 500 pages indexed and could have thousands of other sites linking to theirs. Your website consists of 5 pages, its 2 months old and no one is linking to it yet, so how can you expect Google to rank you top in the same category as your seasoned competitors?

There are a number of ways to check where your site is ranking. You could either do a manual search for your chosen keyword phrase, in other words page by page, or you could invest in a 3rd party product that can trace thousands of keywords and tell you exactly where each of them rank and by which search engines. A very handy tool if you want to impress your client or boss.

(My boss on the other hand doesn’t care that much for good rankings, he wants to know whether the good rankings are bringing in the good money as in “Show me the money!”)

Back to where you are ranking. Does your website rank for it’s own name? This is crucial! Your website needs to be number one for “Crazy Freddy’s Funky Automotive Spares”. This isn’t even asking Google to show results for “hydraulic oil lifters” or “tappet covers” – this is for its own name! It’s imperative.

If your website does rank for it’s own name on the first page then fine! This means that Google has indexed your site successfully.
If your site does not rank for it’s own name, it could mean that Google has most probably not indexed/crawled your site yet or that something more substantial is wrong with it. (see my on-page factors page)

Some handy commands to feed into the Google search box:

1. allinurl:place keyword here – this asks Google to show you results of every website that uses this keyword in it’s URL. (website address)

2. allintitle:place keyword here – this asks Google to show you results of every website that uses that keyword in it’s page title.

Interesting stuff to give you some idea of what’s being used by other website owners.

For argument sake let’s pretend that you cannot find your website anywhere in Google using a search for your various keywords. It’s indexed alright, (you can see it using the above mentioned site: command) but you can’t find it doing a manual search for various keywords.

Why is my website not ranking and what can you do to help your site?

1. It takes time. Up to a few months in some cases. If your website’s reputation was damaged using unethical ranking methods (black-hat), you have dodgy link farms linking to you or you use sketchy on-page tactics to try and fool Google it might actually never recover at all.

2. Make sure you have read all the other posts on this blog. This will give you an excellent foundation from which your site will be launched successfully and ethically.

3. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your website needs to grow and become something worth ranking. It needs to become some kind of an authority on your chosen topic or field.

4. Keyword research. Are you targeting the right keywords that would allow you to compete in the same space as the top guys out there? Are you using synonyms or derivatives of the very competitive keywords out there in order to catch the sub-stream traffic as opposed to main stream traffic?

5. Get other websites to link yo you. The more relevant the website and the higher its authority in Google the better for you!

6. Write good content around your top keywords so that Google has something to index that describes your main keywords.

7. Tweet about your website on (www.twitter.com), use FaceBook to tell others about your site.

8. Write articles for other webmasters adding a link to your website at the bottom of the article along with your name.

All this will help Google find your new pages faster and start ranking them based on authority and what other websites think of it. If other people link to you, it means they like your site. If they don’t, well then…time to try a new angle.

There could be many reasons for your site not ranking yet although it’s indexed already. But follow these simple guidelines and you should be up and running shortly.

Remember that no matter what people say, there is no fast track or quick way to get a top ranking in Google the ethical way. Black-hat might get you there quickly and probably for a few days only before Google’s algorithms will hunt you down and kill you. You will never rank again.

Good luck
goodseo