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[ElevateCreativeAU]

I've recently started work on a new clients website and done some preliminary work with on-page optimisation, and there is still plenty of work to be done and issues to resolve. They are ranking ok on Bing, but they are not getting any ranking on Google at all (except paid) - I tried the site:domain.com search and comes up with no results... so this confirms that something is going on with the google search rank!

Can anyone shed light on what can cause this or why this would happen?

My next step is to look at their webmaster tools (haven't had access yet), but if anyone has any tips to resolve this or where to look, that would be great!

Thanks!

[ElevateCreativeAU]

Thanks again for your help! I will give those ideas a go.

I hope to get to the bottom of it, if for nothing else than to learn more!

Cheers.

[FedeEinhorn]

Hey,

It depends on the penalty, if any.

If you have no manual actions under the Webmaster Tools, that's a hint. However, it could be an algorithmic penalty.

If the penalty, again, if any, applies to the whole site, then changing the site's contents while making sure your entire site (backlinks too) is in compliance with Google's quality guidelines, then the penalty should be revoked.

If the issue is actually only the fact that Google can't access the site, then check why, fix that ASAP and you should be ranking again in no time (check using the fetch as Googlebot to make sure that is/isn't it first).

To sum up, you should run an extensive analysis on links, content, server responses errors and find the cause of the "penalty", then work on fixing it to start ranking. Once you do, you can continue with the other SEO/design tasks.

As I said before, opening a thread in Google's Webmaster Help forums could be of much help.

All the best!

[ElevateCreativeAU]

Thanks again for all your helpful suggestions. Here's an update on this...

Access to GWT and analytics and some more Moz tracking have revealed some server connectivity and crawl errors on the site. So I'm thinking the bots are having trouble accessing the site and hence are penalising... Bing is sill ok strangely!

At this stage there is a hold on resolving this as we are also in the process of developing a new site for this client - so we plan to now just focus on getting this site live and hopefully all the crawl errors etc will be flushed out.

One last question - is a google penalty linked to a domain or the site/files? So if we launch a new site on the same domain, but new server (host), and new files, do you think this will clear any penalties?

Thanks again.

[David-Kley]

If all the pages are not indexed, then yes I would assume a penalty. One of the more common reseaons a site gets penalized is due to improper linking, either inbound or outbound in nature.

If you do not yet have access to webmaster tools, there are still steps you can take. This is something you are going to have to do anyway, once you figure out what the penalty was for.

First place to start: links.
There are a wide variety of backlink tools out there. Here are a few you can try:
http://raventools.com/marketing-tools/link-manager/
http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/researchtools/ose
https://ahrefs.com/

Start looking for the spammy or paid links. How can you tell? Simple. If a link has a domain like rankmehighingoogle.com or something like that, chances are it's a bad or paid backlink. The example given is a silly domain name, but you will see some like that come up. If you are unsure of a links quality, manually visit the sites to see what they are all about. If the home page has a 0 or a ? for pagerank, chances are the linking site got hit with a penalty and you should disavow that linking domain.

Another way to test is to search for the linking domain in Google. If you search for a web directory site or linking domain specifially by their name and they are nowhere to be found, Google most likely hammered them for some practice they were using.

Since you dont have access to GWT yet, this would be a good way to see what is going on with this site. You stated that you just started doing the optimization for the client, so you most likely havent had time to research the domains history yet. Once you have access to GWT you will be taking a look at links anyway, so while you are waiting for access be proactive

[ElevateCreativeAU]

Thank you Devanur. I will look into this.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

I 100% agree with FedeEinhorn.

roofrackworld.com.au seems penalized somewhere around November 2013 to December 2013.

Go here: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Give an offline access to the tool for your Google Analytics account. Select the date range from September 2013 till date. Look for any Google update related penalty.

Please post your observations here so that we can take it from there.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[ElevateCreativeAU]

Glad someone else thinks it is weird!

Thank you for your help and suggestions... I will get access to webmaster tools and see what I can find.

[FedeEinhorn]

Holy... this IS weird.

Checked the robots.txt and there's nothing blocking the indexing, robots meta tags are present with INDEX.

You clearly need urgent access to Webmaster tools, seems like a penalty for pure spam or something like that, as there's no 1 single page indexed, while there are other sites linking to it.

What I would do? Before doing any further onsite SEO, get that resolved. Go to Webmaster tools and check any manual action, message, etc. Try the fetch as googlebot. Then go to Google's Webmaster forums and ask, usually someone from Google jumps in.

[ElevateCreativeAU]

I was looking for more general advice on this issue initially, to see if others had encountered this problem. But happy to share domain if it helps... with the disclaimer as I mentioned above, that there is clearly much more work to be done to get a good rank - but this issues seems to be bigger than on-site optimisation...

www.roofrackworld.com.au

Thanks

[FedeEinhorn]

Care sharing the real domain?