There are dozens of things that you can do to improve your Google ranking but here are some tips that can actually have an immediate impact.
1. Eliminate poison words.
Make sure that your site doesn’t have anything to do with the kind of sites that you wouldn’t want your children visiting. (I have to tip-toe around the topic because I don’t want our site to have those terms in it either.) Sure you might be thinking that your site if free from any of the language or images that would be found on those sites but you’d be surprised. I’m working with a local municipality and much to their surprise, they have more than 1200 words in the site that are found in those kind of sites. Just a quick search through the site revealed a number of “poison words” that are harming their domain’s reputation and causing it to be punished by Google.
Search through your site pretending you’re a 14-year-old, immature boy who laughs every time he hears something that has a double meaning. Look for those phrases and eliminate them today. Watch your rankings increase as Google begins to trust your site again.
2. Check where your website is hosted.
Another thing that can unintentionally confuse your site with those types of sites. Where is your site hosted? What’s that mean? That’s the location of the computer that houses your website’s files and serves them to the world. Is it at GoDaddy? Or Hosting.com? There are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of hosting companies. Odds are, your site is with GoDaddy since they’re the most popular hosting company. And with that success in their business comes problems. They have so many clients that they can’t possibly keep track of all of them. So it’s likely that your site is hosted on the same server as other websites with objectionable material. How’s that affect you? It looks like you’re condoning it somehow if you’re sharing a server with that kind of site. Recently we discovered a way to see all of the sites that are hosted with our own site and wow was it an eye-opener. It was amazing to get a glimpse at the sites that are hosted on the same server as our own site.
Let’s just say, there were more than a dozen sites that we didn’t want to associate ourselves with. Frankly, it was a little embarrassing to see that. We all blushed when we looked at the list. It was disgusting. So what can you do? You don’t have a lot of control over the other sites that a company like GoDaddy has as clients. You could cancel your contract and host your site internally but that’s a big risk and it could be expensive. Or you could switch hosting companies but the new one could have the same problems, if not today but someday. So here’s what we did…we bought a dedicated IP address. That simple fix essentially separated our site from the bad neighborhood. We now have our own address, one that’s not tainted. We have control of the other sites that live in our neighborhood now. We control our address and aren’t affected by the others.
3. Declare the canonical.
This issue is a relatively unknown problem that many companies face. It’s the issue known as canonicalization. That’s a really scary sounding word but simply put, you shouldn’t be able to reach your website with the www and without the www. If you’re able to type it in and reach the site, either way, you may have a problem. You see, Google sees that as two separate websites with duplicate content. And boy does Google hate duplicate content. If you have two identical sites both sites will be punished. You have to eliminate the issue and ensure that only one version of the site is visible. There are a number of ways to hide one of the sites but you must do it if you plan to rank well on Google.
4. Check your IP address
. Did you know that your site is probably being punished by Google right now? Yep. It’s probably not ranking as well as it could on Google and is getting a lot less traffic as a result.
Odds are, if you’re like most people, you have a shared hosting account. That means that your website sits on a server at a company like GoDaddy and there are hundreds, if not thousands of other websites on the same computer.
The problem is, you have the same IP address as all of those other sites. It’s like your street address. That’s where you’re located in cyberspace. Since you share the same address, it’s like you’re in the same apartment building. Now, if you’re living next door to someone who is breaking the law and harming little kids, you can imagine how people might wonder why you never did anything when you noticed all of those little kids going into your neighbor’s apartment. Just living next to a sleazeball could damage your reputation. But, what’s that have to do with your website? Well, if you share the same server and have the same IP address, in Google’s eyes, you have an association with all of the other websites on your server. Imagine if a number of them weren’t the type of sites you’d want to have any affiliation with. Can you see how that could damage your reputation and cause your rankings to suffer?
If you’re worried that you may be sharing a server with hundreds of other sites, give us a call. We’d be happy to run a quick test and let you know. Hope that helps.
Chadd