Google Craping all over our site.

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.smokingblends.com/7MTZwhDA/

Hey Jim, we had a look at your site with Sybre. I decided to took it from there, I hope you do not mind.

I am sorry I need to disappoint you right off the bat — there is not much we can do (as SEO plugin). If you search for site:smokingblends.com you have all your important pages indexed, all with proper meta data. That is what WordPress SEO plugins essentially do.

You need to do an SEO audit. As you might imagine, that is out of scope of our support. However, I had a look at you and your competitors, so this is what comes to mind.

1. Site speed does not look like an issue at all. Quite the opposite. Check if your IP is not blacklisted or shared with some massively bad websites (but still should not be a problem). Same goes for the e-mail blacklists (domain & IP).
2. Check out your backlink profile and see if spammy, low quality websites are not linking to you. If so, disavow them.
3. Definitively have a look at Google/Bing webmaster tools, see if there are any warnings.
4. Consider buying ahrefs premium (7-day trial is 7€) and going over your website + competitors. Look at all the data ahrefs can give you, export it, go over it.
5. Write more content. While your website is fast, the content is pretty thin (besides the products).
6. Add business info. Physical address, registration, quality control certificates, anything legitimizing your business. Google does not love tabaco, alcohol or drugs and they might push you down the SEPR thinking you are not legitimate. Take this seriously.

These are the first steps and by no means a complete guide. Feel free to get back to us with your progress, but please understand TSF is merely a tool, not a service. Same way knife is a tool — we guarantee it is sharp, but we are not going to cook the dinner for you.

We can see you put the time into website, it is by no means bad. From technical standpoint, it is way above average. But there is much more to SEO, in your case a lot or off-page optimization needs to be done to rank higher in SERP. Meanwhile, you can leverage other channels, like Facebook where you have better standing.

PS: There is an issue with loading of images, both Sybre and I encountered it. Take a look.

Good luck,
Pierre

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Pierre LeBaux. Reason: Added link to imgur

Hey Pierre,

We do not mind at all. My friend we greatly appreciate your assistance here and know that your plugin has nothing to do with this. As we are on page 9.

Unfortunately, Either would most ( not all ) of the things you mentioned. They are almost all checked off and would not likely drop a site down to the 9th page.

If you were to compare our site to the 90 pages that are ranking higher you would find that we beat most of them ( over 50% ) by any standards. 20-30 of them are barely even relevant to the term “smoking blends” others are laughable.

Google has blacklisted the site for some reason.

We thought you might be interested in this as a way to learn more about how Google works and were willing to reimburse you if you had an been interested in looking into it.

We are #1 under smoking blends and herbal smoking blends on Bing.

Thank you again for your assistance.

Jim

Hey Pierre,

Just for a laugh, have a look a this site ranked 25th by google under “smoking blends” Nice people and site but not much in the way of content or content related to smoking blends. Some of the sites do not even have ssls.

hathorsorganicsco dot com/smoking-blends

Regards
Jim

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Jim.

Hey Jim,

Google has blacklisted the site for some reason. We thought you might be interested in this as a way to learn more about how Google works and were willing to reimburse you if you had an been interested in looking into it.

This sounds like you were “sandboxed”, sadly. It seems you really tried to recover and I am sorry that we are both helpless here. Try researching how to get out of Google SERP sandbox, maybe you find something.

As last measure, I would recommend asking Google search liaison himself during Google Search Central office hours. Anyone can attend, give it a shot. If you do it, I recommend being prepared. You only get to ask 1 question, so try to summarize in 30 seconds what you tried to recover, how long you are sandboxed, how old is the site… anything you find relevant.

If you decide to attend, please let me know or link me a recorded broadcast. I hope you understand I am not trying to brush you off, your case is indeed interesting but we are flying blind here as much as you are.

I noticed that you are 1st. on DuckDuckGo too (using Bing)! It definitively feels you have been sandboxed. I would not mind if you follow up here with your progress. You can also find me on various social media as @lebaux (https://keybase.io/lebaux) if something changes later this year.

Until then, at least try to have a nice weekend.
Pierre