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7 Most Possible Reasons Why Your Website Is Not Ranking and Ways to Fix Them

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Sometimes it feels like you are just working and working and pumping out content on your side and nothing is happening. You are crafting these awesome articles and you have all these great tips to share with people, but nobody ends up on your site and that can be a really frustrating place to be. In this article we lay out some of the main reasons why articles are typically not ranking in google so you can sort of use it like a checklist to see if any of these things are true for your website.

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Sometimes it feels like you are just working and working and pumping out content on your side and nothing is happening. You are crafting these awesome articles and you have all these great tips to share with people, but nobody ends up on your site and that can be a really frustrating place to be.

In this article we lay out some of the main reasons why articles are typically not ranking in google so you can sort of use it like a checklist to see if any of these things are true for your website.

Competition and Time Ranking Factors

You started over the last 3 or 6 months that might be the first reason why your articles are not ranking simply because they are not old enough, they have not had time to rank in google.

Also, many articles are not ranking in google is because they cannot beat the competition. You always need to do the search queries that should trigger your articles before you start writing and see if your website is up for the competition. Check out number one two and three in google and check the word count and check how big those sites are if it is anything you can beat you know for the first couple of articles on your site is really important to go for really low competition stuff where you can rank a new site. You need to go for what we call underserved topics so you can rank a new site without any back linking.

Bad Site Structure: On-Page SEO Ranking Factors

7 Most Possible Reasons Why Your Website Is Not Ranking and How to Fix Them
7 Most Possible Reasons Why Your Website Is Not Ranking and How to Fix Them

Little Tip for Your Blog Structure

A little tip here let us say you have a category with around a hundred blog posts and now you have these archive pages that are maybe showing ten blog post per page then you will have created ten archive pages. Make sure that google can easily get to number five six seven eight nine and ten from the links at the bottom.

Make Sure You Are Not Blocking Google from Crawling Your Website

Some WordPress themes will only show a link to the previous and the next page that means you that google can only find the surrounding pages and not the next pages out there. So instead, you should use these links where you can get to number five six seven eight nine and ten down there. That means that google will be able to find all the archived pages as soon as they have crawled the first one and that is a great way to make sure that google finds all your content. So, it actually has to change to rank in google.

Also be a little careful when you are using pages in WordPress. Whenever you are working with blog posts they will be put inside these category pages. So, there will be a link to all those but if you are using pages they are not necessarily linked to from anywhere under unless you place a link to them. Make sure to play some navigational links at the bottom maybe in a menu or somewhere else if you have a lot of content pages that are built on pages and not posts.

Low Quality Content and High Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate Effect

You might find that many people will bounce right away when they land on your site then just see your site and be out of there. That is definitely a bad sign in google so make sure that does not happen – you do not get to click baby with the titles. Make sure you can deliver on everything you promised in that title and also play some of that very best content towards the top to make sure that people do not bounce off immediately. Because it is a bad sign that might derail your site because google sees it as bad content.

Google May Have Not Even Found the Content Yet

Another reason why your website is not showing up in google maybe because google have not even found the content yet. If you are using a dot-com domain which you should google will eventually at least find the front page. If everything is clickable from there, you will be good to go at least in the long run. For a new website, many times google will not find these new articles before it has been several weeks. You need to ping google here and you need to go into search console and tell google exactly which URL’s you are putting on the site. That will enable google to find your content quickly and put that in the search results. You need to let google know inside search console when you put out new content for a new site.

Use Google Search Console

There is been some major glitches inside google search console where the content has been falling in and out of the search result page. In order to avoid that you need to ping them when you put up your content.

Fix Malware or Hack Issues

Your site can also disappear in google if you have gotten hacked let us say there is some malware on your site or some really bad articles that have been injected into your site by a hacker it can be really hard to detect and know if this happened.

There are two ways you can go about this.

  1. Go into search console and see if you suddenly got a lot of weird links pointing to your else that you will never really put on your site because what typically happens is that these hackers will inject articles about Adult or casinos or whatever quick loan something with a very hydrophilic commission and they’ll replace those articles on your site in order to rank to themselves and get better rankings for some scam site out there. These articles will typically get a lot of links from other scamming sites so long story short just look for really weird links to your site inside google search console and see if you can point these two pages on your site that should not be there.
  2. Also if you want to locate these pages that may or may not be there to sort of do a check if this is the case you can also do this site:domain.com search to see exactly what google has indexed on your site. If there is anything that looks totally weird and articles that you did not put up there make sure to contact somebody who knows about this stuff. A good programmer who knows how to clean up a site. You can also contact the people over with Wordfence. I know they are pretty good at cleaning up this stuff.

Again, here you should also turn to search console if you suspect this is the case. Because google will show you are inside search console if your site is getting penalized if there are some manual actions taken on your site from google side.

Google Penalties for Plagiarism or Duplicate Content

Your content may also not make it into google because there is some duplicate content. That means that an article in your site is also appearing elsewhere that can be on your own site let us say you have an article sitting five different places on your own site with different URL’s and the same content. It can also be other websites who grab this article and place them on their site. So, make absolutely sure that you are never placed the same content across different URL’s if you want to do that anyway or if you want somebody else to feature the same article that you have sitting on your site you can use what is called a canonical tag. Just google it you will figure out what it is but for most bloggers that is not necessary. Just do your best to never place the same content across different URL’s because that will get your site d ranked in google pretty quickly.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Let us talk about keyword stuffing here let us say you really want to rank for this keyword or this phrase then sometimes you’ll find a lot of content online where people tell you to just repeat that sentence of that word all through the article. Or maybe you are hired a writer who did this you know because they did not know any better. You need to check for that you can use this extension called SEO quake that will show you the number of words on the URL and it will also show you exactly how many times each word appears on that page just check some of your good natural articles and see where these numbers should be, you will quickly get a good feel for this. See if you find any outliers if you find one key word to just be repeated constantly through an article make sure to fix that because google hate that and they will see it as an attempt to cheat them on your way to the number one position and instead they are going to send you to a page number ten or fifty.

The other thing I just briefly touched upon here is bad links pointing to your site this can actually be an attack from somebody else who want to hurt you. But that is rarely the case. Being an SEO consultant, we have been contacted by many people who thought somebody was attacking them with bad links or just sending spam links to their site to d rank them. A few times it was the case but in most cases these links pointing to their site was just scraped content and finding their content and spinning it into articles where they would link to a picture or something like that and that is totally natural.

Page Speed: Slow Page Speed Hurts User Experience and Affects Google Rankings

Page Speed-Slow Page Speed Hurts User Experience and Affects Google Rankings

Another reason why your website may not show as high in the search results as you wanted to can be due to slow page load times. Let us say your website is loading in ten seconds and all the other pages in your industry are loading in two seconds then we will place you below them in many cases. Google is constantly bugging you inside google analytics and also in google search console if your website is too slow. So, since google is taking their time to place these reports two places, they really want our attention on this matter it is important to get the page speed fast and it is not that hard really. You just need a good caching plug-in, and you need to make sure that your image are not too heavy and use CDN if you can.

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Jithender Reddy
I'm Jitender Reddy the Founder of Digital Clerks. Digital Clerks Is an Agency with Tools and Content That Help Entrepreneurs. I Concentrate on the Development of Digital Marketing, SEO. PPC, Social Media Marketing, and Email Marketing Educational Content in Order to Help Individuals Like You to Expand the Power of Tactical Digital Marketing to Grow Your Business Online.
About Me
Jithender Reddy
I'm Jitender Reddy the Founder of Digital Clerks. Digital Clerks Is an Agency with Tools and Content That Help Entrepreneurs. I Concentrate on the Development of Digital Marketing, SEO. PPC, Social Media Marketing, and Email Marketing Educational Content in Order to Help Individuals Like You to Expand the Power of Tactical Digital Marketing to Grow Your Business Online.
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