Ranking gone for the original page and a shortened url ranks instead.
-
Hi Experts!!! Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year In Advance.
I am been facing a issue with a few of my SERP results for "Singapore Visa" and related keyword. Until last to last Saturday i.e 16th December, I ranked for Singapore visa keyword with this url https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx !!! But since 18th December I am ranking for "Singapore Visa" keyword with this url and message below it in place of description.
Singapore visa - Musafir.com
go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa
No information is available for this page.
Learn whyThe go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa redirects to https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx with some UTM parameters. The URL go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa is a shortened URL which was used for SMS marketing and all of a sudden Google has picked it in SERP instead of Singapore VIsa Landing Page.
The Singapore visa Main page is not blocked by Robots.txt file.
Please help me to resolve this.
-
For my own understanding should you or should you not disallow the google ?gclid= parameter?
Timo
-
That was quick - good job!
P.
-
Hey Thompson!!! The idea worked. And the original ranking is back. Thanks a ton.
-
Great! Happy to help. And yea, do let us know how the adjustments work out.
And thank you for the wonderful wishes - very much appreciated. Wishing you a rewarding 2018 too!
Paul
-
Thanks Thompson.
This answers my question. Will update the suggested changes and will keep you posted if this works. Have a great end to the old year and wishing you lots of success and peace in new year.
-
Your robots.txt is actually the issue in this case, Sainath. (The giveaway is that No information is available for this page text, which is the standard response on Google for a page that is blocked by robots.txt.)
The problem is that your robots.txt is blocking all URLs that contain UTM parameters . Since the shortened URL is redirecting to a site page URL which contains UTM parameters (https://in.musafir.com/Visa/Singapore-Visa.aspx?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=youtube_channel&utm_campaign=Singapore_visa_video) and is therefore blocked from crawling, Google can't properly crawl/discover the actual destination page and its real URL and meta-description via this link, so it continues to return the only info it has available - the shortened URL and the blocked-description warning.
Your site is already protected from issues with UTM parameter URLs because it has properly implemented self-referential canonical tags, which is the correct way to deal with them. You should remove the robots.txt blocks for all those parameters (especially including the gclid - I suspect that's causing issues with our Adwords Quality Score). This way, the search engine will be able to properly understand each stage of the redirect you've created and index the proper URL and meta-description
In short - those parameter blocks in your robots.txt file are causing multiple issues for your site, without doing anything beneficial.
Does that make sense?
Paul
-
What at first seems to be inexplicable, appear possible causes.
First a pop up, which Google penalizes since last February.
Secondly, despite the chain of redirects, the second page has better PA and mR.
Hope this helps. Good luck!Mª Verónica
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
-
Should we include URLs with parameters in the sitemap?
Hi, I wanted to know whether we can include URLs with search parameters in the sitemap. Currently, we are trying to append structured data for our job listing page. There happens to be a large number of job listings around 1000 pages with unique job-id and location. Should we add these pages in the sitemap or is there any other solution to this? Regards, Tejas
Algorithm Updates | | tejasbansode0 -
Increase of non-relevant back-links drop page ranking?
Hi community, Let's say there is a page with 50 back-links where 40 are non-relevant back-links and only 10 are relevant in-terms of content around the link, etc....Will these non-relevant back-links impact the ranking of the page by diluting the back-link profile? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Keyword ranking fluctuations
Hi For last month my website was ranking to 5 positions for this keyword (Magento Development Company). But recently (28-nov) it's out of 100, some time it's showing on 25 position but not showing in top 5 position. Here is my url (for analysis): https://magnetoitsolutions.com/services/magento-development/ Please explain why my keyword rankings are often not showing in the search listings. Note: There are some other keywords of different pages start getting ranking drop. please let me know is there anything i need to change. Thank
Algorithm Updates | | harrysamson0 -
Does Google push down for not ranking top for branded keywords?
Hi all, Usually websites rank for their branded keywords. Some times third party websites takeover the websites for branded keywords. If there are more number of such queries where website is not ranking (top) for branded keywords, Google push down website in overall rankings? Any correlation? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Dates appear before home page description in the SERPs- HUGE drop in rankings
We have been on the first page of Google for a number of years for search terms including 'SEO Agency', 'SEO Agency London' etc. A few months ago we made some changes to the design of the home page (added a blog feed), and made changes to the website sitemap. Two days ago (two months after last site changes were made) we dropped subsantially in the SERPs for all home page keywords. Where we are found, a date appears before the description in the SERPs, dating February 2012 (which is when we launched the original website). The site has been through a revamp since then, yet it still shows 2012. This has been followed by a few additional strange things, including the sitelinks that Google is choosing to show (which including author bio pages showing in homepage site links), and googling our brand name no longer brings up sitelinks in the SERPs. The problem only affects the home page. All other pages are performing as standard. When Penguin 4.0 came out we saw a noted improvement in our SERP performance, and our backlinks are good and quality, largely from PR efforts. Of course, I would be interested in additional pairs of eyes on the back links to see if anyone thinks that I have missed anything! We have 3 of our senior SEOs working on trying to figure out what is going on and how to resolve it, but I would be very interested if anyone has any thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | GoUp3 -
Trying to recover from a ranking crash
My site was well established and I'd built up some good rankings in Google using link building and onsite optimization. Then last year it completely fell out of the rankings except for a few keywords. There were some suspicious links but nothing that seemed too toxic, no warnings from Webmaster Tools. 9 months later I still haven't recovered. The site is well optimized. Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | Infogenix0 -
Dramatic ranking shifts
I’m starting to notice some interesting behavior in Google rankings. It seems like most days, rankings move around but movements are relatively small. Then, maybe once or twice a month, there are days (like today) where everything seems to shift around in more dramatic fashion. I don’t know if it’s algorithm updates, or maybe they do light crawls every day and heavy crawls a few times a month..?? anybody have any idea what is behind these big waves of ranking changes?
Algorithm Updates | | znotes0 -
Rankings changing based on location within a country... normal?
I recently had a satellite office across the country come to me and say that they couldn't find us on Google, based on a number of keywords they were searching on. I thought that isn't right... I know we rank for those terms. So, I did a search here, and there we were for those very terms, and ranking quite nicely. Sooo, what's going on there? I know there are variations from Google.com to Google.ca in terms of ranking. But within Google.ca I've not seen this before. Can anyone shed some light on that?
Algorithm Updates | | atcosl0