An SEO professional was concerned about the performance of one of their sites and its geo targeting.
They own two sites: one very large site that is their primary bread and butter, and a smaller sister site.
Whenever the sister site publishes an article that may be a spin on whatever the first site may publish, the sister site ends up ranking higher, even though the first larger site is supposed to be the one that’s ranking above that other site.
After publishing on the sister site, their main site will start disappearing into oblivion in terms of search result performance.
They have done just about everything they can think of from disavowing links in Search Console,as well as using other tools.
They are at their wits’ end on this issue and are wondering if they are under penalty, and why this is happening.
John explained, after inspecting their domain, that he does not see any manual action or penalty that is associated with their domain name.
He also doesn’t see any issues with the links to that domain.
His suspicion is that there is probably not a lot of work needed in terms of disavowing links coming to that domain.
There is one thing that he did notice, however, which is that for the Search Console’s geo targeting setup, it’s targeting Pakistan.
For general English speaking news websites, it’s important to make sure that this geo targeting is turned off in order to target all English queries.
He also mentioned that these types of changes can be processed pretty quickly – anywhere from a week or two to perhaps a month or two.
That’s the timeframe that he would aim for. But, he also said that it could be faster, because for news websites, they focus on the newer content, and the freshness of that content would be a factor.
This happens at approximately the 26:48 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 5 26:48
Hi, John, Happy New Year’s to you in advance. Thanks for taking my call. So we have a situation where we have a news website that’s one of the leading financial publications in the country. They’ve always done well. And there’s another sister website, completely unrelated. But again, you know, it’s a smaller site, smaller traffic, a smaller number of stories daily, smaller number of stories overall.
The bigger website, the financial publication, overtime, we suspected that previous stakeholders did some nefarious activities. We think it’s penalized, but there’s no way for us to know that it’s been penalized. But lately, what we noticed was that the other website sometimes takes stories from the financial publication with attribution. And on the lesser website on Google News, it always seems to end up ranking higher.
And we realize that the smaller website with a lower page rank potentially is ranking higher, we figured that something is afoot, or something’s amiss. And we don’t know how to go about it. I’ve disavowed a lot of links, over 3,000 links, a lot of domains as well, we realize a lot of traffic is coming from Blogspot. You know, some of them are shady, we realized there was about two or 300 URLs that were marketing related. We blocked those about six to eight months ago, we still are not able to rank higher. In fact, what happens is on Google News, we’ll have a story.
We’ll exclusively be the first one, you know, the whole E thing will be trustworthy, we are exclusive, we’ll rank very high. And as soon as even this lesser website or other websites publish the same story, even if they do a spin on our take, or if they have a genuine story, or a copy of or extrapolating from our story, when they do that they suddenly start ranking higher, and we’ll immediately start disappearing into oblivion and and now I’m tasked with, you know, improving the SEO, the editors are frustrated. We put a story, it is original.
And I’m kind of feeling out of options on what to do. And the second part of the question is, you know, with the disavow list, there’s two ways to get the list. One is on these SEO tools, the paid tools, they come up with a lot of URLs that don’t show up in the Search Console. So we’re looking at those lists, adding them to a disavow list and adding them. Should we be looking at both sides or not and what are my options? And if there’s any recommended reading or any…or how should I go about this? Thank you.
John 29:29
Yeah, I think you posted on YouTube as well with the domain, right. So I took a quick look at the domain beforehand. And I don’t see any kind of manual action or penalty associated with that domain. I also don’t see any issue with regards to the links for that domain.
So my suspicion is you probably don’t need to put a lot of time into the disavow work and probably even just focusing on Search Console links, if you actually find something really problematic there, would be enough.
So that’s — kind of I think, from the overall point of view there, I don’t see anything really holding back this website in search. The main thing I did notice, though, is that you have geo targeting setup in Search Console for Pakistan. I don’t know if that’s by design, if that’s something that you’re trying to do. If you want to make a general English speaking news website, then probably it makes sense to turn off the geo targeting there.
So that might be something that can help you. The other thing, I think that I just realized in listening to your question is that you’re focusing very much on Google News.
And while Google News does a lot of things similar to Google search, I don’t know if it does everything in the same way. And in particular, with regards to the ranking there, I don’t know if there might be separate things that Google News would do that doesn’t apply to Google search.
So what I would also do there is try to contact someone on the Google News side, in the Help Center for Google news publishers, I believe there’s a form that you can use to contact the folks on the Google News side and to try to get some input from them as well.
So that’s kind of the direction I would take there. I think, when it comes to search, the geo targeting, if you want to target countries other than Pakistan, kind of like a general English speaking news website, then I would definitely turn that off, because that can have an effect there, and that it really focuses on Pakistan, and then slightly focuses less on other countries.
SEO Professional 5 32:02
All right, I’ll do that. Thanks very much. Just a quick question, how, how soon would these settings take effect? Let’s make it [inaudible]. How soon can I expect to see the results or the impact?
John 32:14
I don’t know. My guess is, it’ll be anywhere from a week or two to maybe a month or two. So that’s kind of the timeframe that I suspect it takes for something like the geo targeting setting to change. With regards to a news website, I suspect, it’ll be a little bit faster than usual, just because with a news website, we would focus on the newer content. And with the newer content, we would see the setting very quickly. So probably more on the shorter side for news website, but I don’t know all of the systems that are involved with geo targeting settings changes.
