Diagnosing SEO Issues with Your Site

In SEO I often find myself trying to determine why a particular site may not be ranking as well as it could. In some cases I have seen sites which have disappeared from Google altogether.

To determine the problem there are a few tools I use that usually help to identify the issue.

The first is to use Copyscape.

To use this tool, simply enter your sites domain name and press “Go”. This tool detects plagiarism, therefore, helping to determine if the sites content is duplicated and consequently penalised by Google.

The second check I perform is to make sure that Google is seeing the same code as I can see in my Web Browser. Some hacks are very clever and well hidden. In some cases the hacked code only appears to Google and not in your web browser. A really useful way of checking what Google sees is to verify your site in Webmaster Tools. Once verified you can use the “Fetch as Googlebot” tool, which will show you exactly how a page appears in Google.

Webmaster Tools is great for diagnostics as it gives lots of useful information such as page crawl errors.

For anyone having SEO issues with their site I would recommend that Webmaster Tools be your first port of call.

Gemma Neesham
Project Manager