Holiday hijack lowers Google ranking
-
A client of ours made a mistake that has dropped their Google rankings. They posted a holiday greeting on our homepage for several weeks, and now the search engines are not picking the page up at all. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to repair this?
-
As long as you replace the flash with substantive relevant content and link to the homepage from other internal pages or outside sources, there is no reason the page should not be re-ranked (based on the new content, overall authority of the site through other content and backlinking, etc.)
It was not likely that this was a penalty, just a drop in any searchable ranking as a response to a lack of content on the page and therefore, there was nothing in which to rank the page for any particular keyword or authority by Google.
-
Client
-
Was that done by client or real hijackers?
-
They replaced their standard home page with a flash holiday greeting.
-
Please explain "hijack".
I doubt that a holiday greeting in place for several weeks will cause a problem with rankings - unless that greeting deoptimized the page.
-
What was the greeting? Did the just add the holiday greeting or did the add the greeting and delete other content?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
Keywords Ranking Varies When Search changes Location/City (Not Google Places)
We have a client that are ranking well on most Australian cities for competitive keywords except Google Sydney. If you toggled the cities on the search field when you search for a keyword, their places are almost exactly the same except for Sydney on which they can't be found at all in the Top 100 results. The keywords are not city specific, they are general commonly searched keywords about health. This is not a Google Places issue. The search result shows the right landing pages of the site for their respective keywords. Any ideas or experience on this kind of situation. Much appreciated Louie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | louieramos0 -
Google snippet chosen why?
We have a page about buying property in the Megeve area of the Alps in France. We are No.2 on Google.co.uk for the term "megeve property for sale" and No.1 for "megeve property". http://www.prestigeproperty.co.uk/MegeveProperty/Properties.asp If you search for "megeve property for sale", Google serves our META description as the snippet: Ski chalets, homes and apartments for sale in this exclusive, prestigious Rhone Alpes village - 520000-16500000 EUR. However, we noticed that searching for just "megeve property" serves up a much better snippet taken from the text on the page: A crucial factor for potential property buyers is that there is a strong rental market in Megève and this remains high all year around with properties close to the ... Does anyone know why Google would serve this particular snippet instead of the META description. Is it the number of strong and descriptive words used, or some other reason?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PPGUKLTD0 -
Will changing Google Places address hurt rankings?
I have a client transferring ownership of their service business (photo booth rental). The current listed address will change, so my main concern is preserving the rankings during the transition. Should I change the Google Local listing to a new physical address, or change it to "serve a surrounding area"? It seems best to set as "serving a surrounding area", but I know Google is really weird about making local listing changes. I've seen and heard about countless listings falling completely off the map after being updated. Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Post your 3 best ways to rank well on Google
Hi, Anyone care to share what are your 3 best ways to rank well on Google? As for me i think: 1.) Link building & Social Media 2.) Onsite optimization 3.) Quality Content What about you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chanel270 -
If I had an issue with a friendly URL module and I lost all my rankings. Will they return now that issue is resolved next time I'm crawled by google?
I have 'magic seo urls' installed on my zencart site. Except for some reason no one can explain why or how the files were disabled. So my static links went back to dynamic (index.php?**********) etc. The issue was resolved with the module except in that time google must have crawled my site and I lost all my rankings. I'm nowher to be found in the top 50. Did this really cause such an extravagant SEO issue as my web developers told me? Can I expect my rankings to return next time my site is crawled by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pete790 -
Yahoo rankings anomaly?
Two days ago I went from ranking outside the top 50 to ranking #1 and #4 for two great terms on Yahoo. Now two days later I don't rank in the top 50 again. I sure wish I knew what that blip on the radar was all about. It would be great to get ranked again. Seems like a mystery. I have not heard of this happening on Yahoo before. Maybe it was a problem with the open link explorer? Anyone see this happen before? Thank you, Boodreaux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Have we suffered a Google penalty?
Hello, In January, we started a new blog to supplement our core ecommerce website. The URL of the website is www.footballshirtblog.co.uk and the idea behind it was that we would write articles related to our industry to build a community which would ultimately boost our sales. We would add several posts per day, a mix between shorter news stories of around 150 words and more detailed content pages of around 500 words. Everything was going well, we were making slow but sure progress on the main generic keywords but were receiving several thousand visitors a day, mostly finding the posts themselves on Google. The surge on traffic meant we needed to move server, which we did around 6 weeks ago. When we did this, we had a few teething problems with file permissions, etc, which meant we were tempoarily able to add new posts. As our developers were tied up with other issues, this continued for a 7-10 day period, with no new content being added. In this period, the site completely dropped from Google, losing all it's rankings and traffic, to the extent it now doesn't even rank for it's own name. This is very frustrating as we have put a huge amount of work and content into developing this site. We have added a few posts since, but not a huge amount as it is frustrating to do it with no return and the concern that the site has been banned forever. I cannot think of any logical reason why this penalty has occured as we haven't been link spamming, etc. Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions as to how we can get back on track? Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss1984
David0