Why Carphone Warehouse no longer ranks for “mobile phones”

by Patrick Altoft on July 24, 2007 / 2 responses

Carphone Warehouse, Europe’s largest mobile phone retailer, used to rank number 1 for the search term “mobile phones” on Google. In my opinion they should be number one as they are the biggest brand and have a good website.

Today their ranking has slipped to number 16, lets try and figure out why.

The best place to start is by checking the cache of the page. What do you notice at the top?

These search terms have been highlighted: phones

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: mobile

With all the quality backlinks in the world a site still won’t rank for mobile phones without having the phrase somewhere in the content.

Lets hope the agency that handles the SEO is reading this, otherwise the £10,000 per day that this mistake is costing might end up costing them a contract.

Another interesting site in the mobile phone search results is threestore.three.co.uk which has over 3.6 million backlinks from websites that seem to run the Digital Point Coop. Despite this they have ranked number 1 or 2 for at least 6 months.

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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.