Specific Page Penalty?
-
Having trouble to figure out why one of our pages is not ranking in SERPs, on-page optimisation looks decent to me.
Checked by using gInfinity extension and searched for the page URL.
Can one page be penalised from Google engines (.ie / .com ) and the rest of the website not penalised?
The (possible) penalised page is showing in Google places in SERPs. I assume this would not show if it was penalised.
Would appreciate any advice.
Thanks
-
You may get no traffic from ranking #4 these days, especially on queries with a competitive paid portion of the SERP.
What I would do is stop assessing the "what if" scenario's and start focusing all your energy towards acquiring those editorial type links grasshopper was talking about.. right now! You'll get that ranking and secure it for long-term traffic.
-
There's no way to give an accurate time-scale answer to that question. If you're able to get editorial links from authoritative, trusted sites, you can see substantial movement within a week or two of the links being crawled. However, if your links are from lower-quality sites, or are weighted heavily toward devalued methods of link building (directories, reciprocal links, three-way links, etc), engines may not give those links much weight, if any, no matter how long you wait.
-
It has ranked well previously, according to Rank tracker on SEOmoz - it was ranking 4th last week however I don't think that is correct.
Is it a reliable tool??
Organic traffic shows no drop for keywords for the page in 2012 nor does page views for the page. If it was over-optimised, these would be noticeble in Google Analytics..
-
To me, the true clue would be whether or not the URL ranked well previously.
If it has not.. you need more links. It is probably a page authority issue.
If it has.. you may have over-optimized on the anchor text, sitewide links will do this. You may rank well for awhile, then you'll find yourself on page five shaking your fist at Google.
-
Hi Grasshopper,
I know the keywords I am trying to rank for are competitive.
I will take that into consideration and start working on these. How long do this take effect in Google engines?
Thanks
-
Hi Ronan,
Since it passes tests 1,2 and 4, I would say that #3 is the culprit. Having solid on-page optimization is great, but link authority is the name of the game for achieving ranking, especially if the keywords you're trying to rank for are competitive.
Run the Keyword Difficulty Tool against the keywords you're trying to rank for. I would expect that the URLs on page 1 of the SERPs all have significantly significantly stronger, more trustworthy link profiles than your URL does.
If that's the case, all the standard advice applies - create a truly differentiated page that offers content / resources / tools above and beyond what your competitors offer, and market the hell out of it.
-
The page is indexed
-
Hi Grasshopper,
Thanks for your input. I have checked each one and appears to be fine:
-
Yes
-
Text is true content on the page
-
The page itself does have low inbound links. It might be this?
-
Appearing first
Despite low number of inbound links, I wouldn't say this alone would cause the ranking issue as the page is well optimised and similar to competitors.
-
-
Hi Ronan,
First, to your general question - yes, it is possible for one page of a domain to be penalized / filtered, while the rest of the domain is not. However, it seems extremely unlikely that the URL in question would rank in Google Places if it was penalized. There are a few things you want to check:
-
The first thing you want to check is whether or not the page is indexed and cached, which is a simple query [cache:mypage.com/this-page]. Does it return a result?
-
If so, in the gray banner across the top of the cached page, click on "Text-only version". Does the machine-readable text match the true content on the page? If you have large amounts of machine-readable text that are only visible to an engine, and not a user, that can trip an algorithmic spam filter. Also, look for off-topic words - sometimes sites get hacked and hackers inject all kinds of spammy garbage and links, which can also trip the filter.
-
If the page is cached, and rendering the intended content, does it have sufficient link authority to rank for the terms you intend? It's quite possible that your page is in a competitive keyword space, and doesn't have enough juice to push past the competition.
-
If you want to see if it has enough juice to rank for anything at all, pick an sentence in the first paragraph of text, and search for it enclosed in quotes, ["Some random sentence from my first paragraph here."] Is your URL the #1 result? It should be. If there are other sites that you've syndicated your content to, or have scraped your content and are more authoritative than your site, it's possible that your URL isn't ranking because it's being (incorrectly) filtered out as duplicate content.
Hope that helps.
-
-
Is the URL no longer in Google's index at all?
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
-
Which is the best way - to have all FAQ pages at one place, or splitted in different sections of the website?
Hi all, We have a lot of FAQ sections on our website, splitted in different places, depending on products, technologies, etc. If we want to optimize our content for Google's Featured Snippets, Voice Search and etc. - what is the best option: to combine them all in one FAQ section? or it doesn't matter for Google that this type of content is not in one place? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | lgrozeva0 -
Google Adding / Manipulating Page Meta Titles?
We have a client who is experiencing some heavy google modification to the title tags being displayed on the search engine. It is adding "- 0 Reviews" to an ecommerce site. Obviously a bad start. There were no instances of these keywords anywhere on any of these pages, header tag or otherwise (on only a handful of the affected pages there was a single commented out image with an alt tag 0 reviews - but it was commented out and since removed) We have attempted to rewrite the title multiple times and it will modify the title but still include the non-relevant addition. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this?
Algorithm Updates | | Spindle0 -
Reasons for a sharp decline in pages crawled
Hello! I have a site I've been tracking using Moz since July. The site is mainly stagnant with some on page content updates. Starting the first week of December, Moz crawler diagnostics showed that the number of pages crawled decreased from 300 to 100 in a week. So did the number of errors through. So crawler issues went from 275 to 50 and total pages crawled went from 190 to 125 in a week and this number has stayed the same for the last 5 weeks. Are the drops a red flag? Or is it ok since errors decreased also? Has anyone else experienced this and found an issue? FYI: sitemap exists and is submitted via webmaster tools. GWT shows no crawler errors nor blocked URLs.
Algorithm Updates | | Symmetri0 -
Drop in Page Indexing, Small rise in Search Queries
Hello, I have a news based website so i am creating multiple new posts daily. I changed a lot of the site and got rid of old potentially duplicate content back in feb and had a sharp drop in pages indexed. I know this was because I removed a lot of pages though. However I still have a good 20,000 + pages on my site and my indexing has dropped a further three times since then. From 9,000 to 2,000 a coupe of months ago and then slowly down since April to just 133. It doesn't seem to have affected my search queries yet but surely will if it continues. I am really confused as to how this might happen & how to turn it around. We dont use any dodgy SEO tricks either.
Algorithm Updates | | luwhosjack0 -
Do scraped or borrowed articles with my links still pass page rank?
I wrote some articles for Ezine Articles a few years back and i still see links in the ose to my site that are from these articles that were borrowed from the Ezine Articles bank. Do the links in these articles still count toward my site including link juice and anchor text or does google discount them as duplicate content? I was told that Google counts these links for about 3 weeks and then discounts them as duplicate content so it's like they don't exist. Any truth to this or should i make the articles on my site available for people to copy and paste into their blogs as long as they keep my links intact? Thanks, Ron
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
When was the last algorithm update? One of my pages has dropped significantly this week
One of my pages dropped 22 places last week and I'm not sure why - can any body give me some suggestions to why this might have happened?
Algorithm Updates | | lindsayjhopkins0 -
When Google crawls and indexes a new page does it show up immediately in Google search - "site;"?
We made changes to a site, including the addition of a new page and corresponding link/text changes to existing pages. The changes are not yet showing up in the Google index (“site:”/cache), but, approximately 24 hours after making the changes, The SERP's for this site jumped up. We obtained a new back link about a couple of weeks ago, but it is not yet showing up in OSE, Webmaster Tools, or other tools. Just wondering if you think the Google SERP changes run ahead of what they actually show us in site: or cache updates. Has Google made a significant SERP “adjustment” recently? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | richpalpine0 -
Home page replaced by subpage in google SERP (good or bad)
SInce Panda, We have seen our home page drop from #2 in google.ie serp to page 3 but it has been replaced in the same position @#2 by our relevent sub page for the keyword that we ranked#2 for. Is this a good or bad thing from and seo point of view and is it better to have deep pages show in serp rather than the homepage of a site and what is the best line of action from here in relation to seo. Is it best to work on subpage or home page for that keyword and should link building for that phrase be directed towards the subpage or the homepage as the subpage is obviously more relevent in googles eyes for the search term. It is clear that all areas of the site should be looked at in relation to link building and deep links etc but now that google is obviously looking at relevancy very closely should all campaigns be sectioned into relevent content managed sections and the site likewise and treated on an individual basis. Any help that you may have would be very welcome. Paul
Algorithm Updates | | mcintyr0