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In this modern age, every business needs to have a digital presence. Though there are many search engines, most opt for Google to find any service or answers to their queries. Yet, many an audience doesn’t go beyond the first-page search results in Google. There is a decrease in traffic from the second page, onwards. It implies that if your site isn’t showing on the first page, the audience may not find or contact you for your services. So, you need to make sure that your website ranks on the first page of Google.
Is it frustrating you did everything in the right way, but your website isn’t showing on Google’s first page? There may be several reasons why your website has a low or no ranking. Below is the list of reasons and how you could fix them:
- A VERY NEW WEBSITE
Have you recently created your website? Is it not appearing on Google? If the answer is yes, then there is no need to panic. Your website may not be in the range of Google as of now. It takes time for a search engine to find out about a newly developed website. Most of them determine the number and the type of external links on your website. If the value of your website’s domain authority is high, it is more likely to appear on the result page. Usually, Google takes approximately four weeks to learn about all the recent websites and change its results accordingly.
- LACK OF HIGH-QUALITY BACKLINKS
Although there are plenty of factors in Google’s ranking algorithm, high-quality backlinks seem to be the most powerful. Possibly your site isn’t showing up on top pages on Google because your competitors may have strong backlinks to their web pages. You can check backlinks of your competitors’ sites to get an idea and consequently build authoritative backlinks on your site. Bear in mind that most search engines, including Google, look for organic backlinks. A great tip to rank higher on a search engine is to build backlinks from top-quality sites with good domain ratings.
- CONTENT ISSUE
Google tends to rank those websites that have top quality content. Suppose your website doesn’t answer the queries of people and give them appropriate information. What good is your website doing?
Duplicate content is another issue causing hindrance in the path of your website not appearing on Google. It occurs when a website contains several inbound links that direct to the URLS already present. In such cases, search engines rank those websites that have more comprehensive content since duplicate sites will only fill up their index.
- TOO MUCH COMPETITIVE WORDS
The use of competitive keywords is the reason why most websites fail to appear on search results. Your website may be in the race with high-quality brands. Therefore, it might face tough competition to turn up. While creating a website, you need to work hard on choosing keywords. Try formulating long-tail keywords for your site. Though the downside of using such words is that people do not use long phrases while searching. However, these specific keywords can serve as a door to show up on Google. At the same time, Keep in mind that these words should be relevant to the content and bring much traffic to the website.
- NO INDEX TAGS
Often Google doesn’t show some pages in search results because your coding includes not to index those pages. If your developer has added a “no index” meta tag in HTML coding, there may be no indexing of your page. Even if you submit the Sitemap to Google Search Console, it still won’t index. The developers may use this tag during the development stage to prevent indexing and forget to remove it. You should check this tag in Google Search Console or any other tool to inspect your site pages’ indexing.
- GOOGLE CANNOT CRAWL YOUR WEBSITE
Are you telling Google not to crawl to your web page or even the whole website? Robots.txt file has instructions that tell Google to crawl individual pages or blocks search engines from pages. The disallow instruction in the Robots.txt file prevents Google from crawling the pages on your site. You can review the instructions manually by heading to www.domain.com/robots.txt. You should make sure Google can crawl the pages you want to rank.
By moving your site to a new domain, redirecting issues may occur. Having two different URLs may create confusion, hence resulting in the de-indexing of your site from Google. So, make sure that you redirect your website in the right way.
- SPEED OPTIMIZATION
Your website speed optimization plays a critical role in Google ranking. Google does not show the slow-loading websites on top pages. The size of images and coding are two factors that optimize the speed of your website. It is advisable to compress images before uploading them to your webpage. You can analyze your site’s speed on Google Page Speed Insights to check your page content and determine any issues.
- LACK OF AUTHORITY
Previously, PageRank – a ranking algorithm for Google was in use to determine web page authority. The algorithm uses factors like backlinks and internal links as a metric for ranking your page. Building backlinks may be quite challenging, so you should add internal links to your webpage. After its discontinuation, several online tools prove to be useful for calculating backlinks, URL ratings, etc. If you want to increase your page’s authority, you need to increase the number of backlinks.
- PENALTY FROM GOOGLE
Though the chances of this happening are very least, it can be a reason. Google penalizes a website mainly for two reasons:
- An employee of Google checks the website and finds out anything that does not meet their guidelines.
- If the information on a website does not match the standard of quality, then the algorithm holds back such web pages.
There are three types of penalties by Google:
- Deindexed: In this type, Google eliminates the domain of a website from its results page.
- Penalized: The domain of your website will still be working. At the same time, you cannot find a page through the method of direct search.
- Sandboxed: Google does not de-index or penalize a website. Yet, there is an immediate decline in the traffic of a website.
CONCLUSION
If your website does not appear on Google, you need to sit down and analyze where you are lacking. One must keep in mind that creating a website is not the only task. Optimizing it and removing all sorts of technical issues is the real game. A quick bonus tip for all the newbies: keep maintaining your SEO strategies. Since you are competing with many other websites, a regular update on SEO will take you a long way.
You may also like: Small Business SEO Tips to Improve Your Search Rankings Today
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