Can't get my exact match domain to rank - any ideas?

[Shane]

I've been developing this site over the last couple of months, but I can't get it to rank for anything other than the full domain name.

The site is www.buildersinsurance.com.au

I have plenty of other similar insurance websites and have been able to rank them fairly easily, but this one's not even in the first 30 pages...

The content is all original, there are no dodgy links and I can't think of any other reasons why it's not ranking. The domain was bought in the aftermarket.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[zhenjie]

Could it be a possible Sandbox you received early on? If you haven't broken first 30 pages in a while it certainly seems like something is holding it back. Definitely don't see anything SEO or Content wise wrong with your site at first glance.

 

[Shane]

I'm not sure about the sandboxing, I've never experienced this with a new website.

PS. Love the new ZZ site!

 

[FirstPageResults]

How long has it been live Shane? Also do you have Google Webmaster Tools setup? If so any messages?

PS. Love the new ZZ site!

ahh man now I feel like licorice allsorts

 

[joe]

sitting pretty at #436 for me

I can't honestly say with confidence what would be holding you back. Sometimes it just feels like there's a completely random "golden ticket" that some sites get that others don't.

Found a couple of 404's
accident-and-illness-insurance.htm (linked from your [brand]-builders-insurance.htm pages (6 of them))
income-protection.htm (linked from homepage)

two instances of the homepage / and /index.html
might wanna 301 index.html to /

that's all fairly trivial stuff, though

the links aren't dodgy but goog might think they look a bit "paid". A bit of diversity wouldn't go astray.

Perhaps link out to some authoritative sites?

PS. Love the new ZZ site!

brilliant! at last an honest seo guarantee

 

[Shane]

How long has it been live Shane? Also do you have Google Webmaster Tools setup? If so any messages?

It's been live for around two months, and I setup Webmaster Tools a few weeks ago to see if there were any problems.

There were no messages, but there were a few crawl errors for pages I hadn't setup properly. Those have been fixed, and everything is looking okay.

Found a couple of 404's
accident-and-illness-insurance.htm (linked from your [brand]-builders-insurance.htm pages (6 of them))
income-protection.htm (linked from homepage)

Thanks Joe, just fixed up those two errors.

I'll just keep adding content and links and hopefully things will improve.

 

[James]

Potential reasons -

- Title tag too optimized (go for more natural)
- Competitors have way more links.
- Un-natural link profile 1 anchor text, looks paid.
- domain age and authority too could come into play.

focus on quality content, quality links, natural website building.

Regards

 

[Shane]

Potential reasons -

- Title tag too optimized (go for more natural)
- Competitors have way more links.
- Un-natural link profile 1 anchor text, looks paid.
- domain age and authority too could come into play.

focus on quality content, quality links, natural website building.

Regards

All fair points, but I've used the same strategy on other insurance websites for which I rank number 1 or at least page 1.

If I was down on page 2 or 3 I could understand, but not even in the first 30 pages? There has to be something more to it...

 

[James]

All fair points, but I've used the same strategy on other insurance websites for which I rank number 1 or at least page 1.

If I was down on page 2 or 3 I could understand, but not even in the first 30 pages? There has to be something more to it...

But the problem here is that your strategy is not working for this niche, hence why you need to try something different, I was just giving you a few ideas.

 

[DavidL]

On-page optimisation looks really good... backlinks are a bit weak but as you say nothing to deserve such poor ranking.

It's a competitive niche but that doesn't explain it all. One thing of note is that you are also competing with 'building insurance' as Google relates those two words which makes it even tougher.

But I agree - there's something more to it...

 

[Data Glasses]

sitting pretty at #436 for me

I can't honestly say with confidence what would be holding you back. Sometimes it just feels like there's a completely random "golden ticket" that some sites get that others don't.

Found a couple of 404's
accident-and-illness-insurance.htm (linked from your [brand]-builders-insurance.htm pages (6 of them))
income-protection.htm (linked from homepage)

two instances of the homepage / and /index.html
might wanna 301 index.html to /

that's all fairly trivial stuff, though

the links aren't dodgy but goog might think they look a bit "paid". A bit of diversity wouldn't go astray.

Perhaps link out to some authoritative sites?


brilliant! at last an honest seo guarantee

can i ask what you used to get that exact figure .....seems like a handy tool

 

[johno69]

Possibly Rank Checker FF plugin.

 

[James]

Also did you use to have the domain indexed with the non www version? then switch it over to the www version recently?

 

[joe]

can i ask what you used to get that exact figure .....seems like a handy tool

Nothing too fancy, just stepping through &num=100 results at a time + SEO for Firefox to quickly find the position number.

Shane, I get the feeling it's some kind of filter. All I can suggest is flesh out some of your thinner pages, add new stuff regularly and diversify your anchor text. I'm not sure I'd recommend "de-optimising" but it would be interesting to see if that made any difference.

 

[enjoi]

I'm no seo expert but have you checked what your rank is on yahoo/bing ?
Perhaps it's just a google issue ?

 

[Shane]

Also did you use to have the domain indexed with the non www version? then switch it over to the www version recently?

I didn't, but potentially the previous owner did? When I do a site: search in Google it shows 23 of my pages all with the www.

Shane, I get the feeling it's some kind of filter. All I can suggest is flesh out some of your thinner pages, add new stuff regularly and diversify your anchor text. I'm not sure I'd recommend "de-optimising" but it would be interesting to see if that made any difference.

Yeah it's definitely something strange, and I've never experienced anything like it with any of my other insurance or non-insurance sites.

I have two other sites that rank in the top three pages for 'builders insurance' based on a single relevant page, so this site should definitely be doing better than page 40 or whatever it is!

As you suggested, I'll just keep adding content and mix up the anchor text links a bit.

I'm no seo expert but have you checked what your rank is on yahoo/bing ?
Perhaps it's just a google issue ?

I checked both after your post and I'm not ranking well in those either. But that said, none of my sites rank particularly well on Bing or Yahoo anyway.

I'll keep plugging away at it. Thanks guys.

 

[Shane]

I've jumped up to page 13 since my last post. Still crap, but better than page forty-something!

Looks like fixing a few of those broken links has helped a lot.

Thanks for the help and suggestions.

 

[xwdomains]

more high quality backlinks and some article marketing.

 

[joe]

I've jumped up to page 13 since my last post. Still crap, but better than page forty-something!

Looks like fixing a few of those broken links has helped a lot.

Thanks for the help and suggestions.

Moving in the right direction. Interesting the homepage isn't in the top 1000 results but internal pages ranking:

#119 builders-warranty-insurance
#218 commercial-vehicle-insurance
#219 tool-insurance

Did you make any other changes? Add any content?

One other thing I'd recommend is a non-www to www (or vice versa, pick a canonical and stick with it) redirect. I crawled the site again and you effectively have two identical sites, one on the www subdomain and one without www.

This is an easy fix, just put the following in your .htaccess file (make sure to replace domain dot com with your actual domain!).

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Make a backup of your existing .htaccess, if you have one.

 

[coreyg]

only 38 backlinks according to back link watch
are these backlinks related to builders or insurance?

Cheers
Corey