Home page mysteriously not ranking at all
-
Hey everyone, I'm baffled by a situation. I started working on www.hushabyephotography.com almost 3 months ago. The first thing I did was changed the address (was previously blog.hushabyephotography.com) and updated all of the links pointing from the old name to the new "www" and used 301 redirects for canonicalization. Have also built some additional links, added content to the site, and performed on-page optimization to rank for the primary key phrase "san diego newborn photography".
But ranking is no where to be found, I searched for the key phrase, and at rank 190 is a random subpage, not even the home page. The listing had also disappeared from Google Places a few weeks ago after the client updated their listing (which I believe was the result of the known Places bug (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap).
I'm at a loss here for ideas, as I've never failed to at least have a site on the radar. There aren't any spam links so I don't think any penalties are the result.
One last thing, it ranks on page 2 in both Bing and Yahoo...
Please help me out Mozzers!!!
-
I think you are over emphasizing the keyword – “San Diego Newborn Photographer”. Titles of almost all the individual blog posts start with one or two general words describing the photograph and then followed by the key phrase – “San Diego Newborn Photographer”. Would be great if you can add some varieties here.
And add alt tags against the images [do not focus on keywords solely here; rather you should add descriptive alt tags here]. And create an image sitemap if you do not have one.
-
get these out of the index - noindex,follow these pages
http://www.hushabyephotography.com/waiting-for-sissy-san-diego-pregnancy-photographer/img_7876/
Also technical issue here with Gallery code:
A plugin and or robots.txt and Google WMT URL removal requests will help you remove all of these pages you don't want Google to index.
-
awesome answer!
I'm actually working on a new home page with much more content to describe the service and pitch. And am trying to get the owner to write articles that provide value to clients/potentials.
Good point on the outbounds... I didn't realize they could be that detrimental.
-
You rank for your company name so the site is not penalized at least
Pages with no content is probably the biggest issue - this site needs content big time, sites like this won't rank well in a post panda world. Adding one sentence per page isn't enough
Site needs better targeting/optimization as well
Kill the blogroll links or at least nofollow them, recommend removing them, leaks PR, puts you at risk and takes users off of your site
Lose the footer links makes it look like you're selling links for PR
-
I only see 1 link to your site using ahref and opensiteexlorer.com - It looks like you need to get more links
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
-
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf0 -
Why has my home page replaced my sub-category page for set of keywords? Happened 2x in last 2 weeks for day or so only to fix itself. What is going on?
Today I noticed a really weird problem. Our LED Step Lights page (https://www.pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html) has been replaced in the search results with our home page. See screenshot below. As I started to research what was going on, I noticed that this same thing must have happened on January 26 and 27 because in my Analytics I can see that our LED Step Lights sub-cat page had a sudden drop in traffic on those two days only to bounce back again on the 28th. See screenshot below. Our LED Step Lights page has had no changes in content, meta information, or anything in months. We have done no recent link building to this page in years. I don't understand what is going on. This is a popular page for us generating decent traffic. I really don't understand what is going on or even how to try and resolve this problem. I checked our Search Console. No messages. No manual web spam actions. Nothing to suggest that anything is going on except for the weird drops in traffic. Has anyone ever seen this happen before? Does anyone have any ideas as to what may be going on? serp-led-step-lights.png organic-traffic-drops.png search-console-led-step-lights.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cajohnson0 -
Checking Rankings Again & Again Can Drop Rankings
Is it possible that if i check my google rankings again & again it can drop ranking?Like checking where do my keywords rank every hours rank drop the rankings? Because this indirectly affects the CTR. Might be because of it? No one has faced such an weird thing before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Home Page Link Juice Dilution
I have worked to build out a keyword targeted library of over 700 Guides of approx. 800 word each. They are specifically targeted at actionable verticals and contain 3x strategically placed CTAs in each article. So far, I have only managed to get a low level of uniques per day to this section of the website. This website's external backlinks are largely pointed at the home page. Furthermore, the home page has a footer link to 10,000 SEO crawl-able user generated profiles. These profiles have little potential for conversion and offer little value. Given the above information, I was hoping that someone could help me with the following questions: Is it possible that home page link juice is becoming diluted as result 10,000 user profiles being live on the site? If so, can a "no follow" on the home page footer link to the user profiles prevent the juice from transferring? Overall, I would like to redirect this PR5 domain's link juice to these guides where they will have a much higher conversion rate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TQContent0 -
Pricing Page vs. No Pricing Page
There are many SEO sites out there that have an SEO Pricing page, IMO this is BS. A SEO company cannot give every person the same quote for diffirent keywords. However, this is something we are currently debating. I don't want a pricing page, because it's a page full of lies. My coworker thinks it is a good idea, and that users look for a pricing page. Suggestions? If I had to build one (which I am debating against) is it better to just explain why pricing can be tricky? or to BS them like most sites do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs. Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanperea1000 -
Google replacing subpages in index with home page?
Hi! I run a backlink building company. Recently, we had a customer who had us build targeted backlinks to certain subpages on his site. Then something really bizarre happened...all of a sudden, their subpages that were indexed in Google (the ones we were building links to) disappeared from the index, to be replaced with their home page. They haven't lost their rank, per se--it's just now their home page instead of their subpages. At this point, we are tracking literally thousands of keywords for our link building customers, and we've never run into this issue before. Have you ever run into it? If so, what's the best way to handle it from an SEO company perspective? They have a sitemap.xml and their GWT account reports no crawl errors, so it doesn't seem to be a site issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ownlocal0