Homepage keeps disappearing and reappearing for important keywords every few days
-
My homepage keeps disappearing from the SERPS for my most important keywords. My home page has been in number 2 position for years. When the home page disappears it will not even show in a Google search for my business name although it is still indexed. When the home page is not showing an internal page shows instead but in position 6. When the home page is back the internal page does not show. There are no issues being reported in Google Webmaster. When I realise that it's down I do a fetch as Google and request reindexing. No idea if this is bringing it back or not? We are so worried about this and totally at a loss. As are the three SEO companies I've called. Would really appreciate it if someone could give some advice.
-
If your site has a penalty, fixing it will require determining why the penalty was given.
Most likely it has something to do with breaking the webmaster guidelines. That is best assessed by the webmaster himself, and if the webmaster can't do it then an expert at identifying Google penalties is the best bet. People who are not experts at penalty identification will be guessing and you don't want to guess, do the recommended work, wait to see if the site recovers, then see no recovery, guess again,work, wait, find nothing happens, etc.
-
It definitely does look like we have a penalty as the home pge appears for the keyword on page 8 whereas if used to be in number 2 position. Ive had a look again at back links and one seems particularly dodgy from a few weeks back. In fact the site has now been removed but unbeknownst to us had a link to our website. Other than that I am stumped. Would you recommend re-writing the home page content or could that do more damage than good.
-
Its possible that you have a single-page penalty, though those are rare.
For another site with duplicate content to displace a page of your site from the SERPs, it usually has to be about the same strength as your site or superior to your site.
Some of our pages will swap in and out of the SERPs when the same content is on other websites of similar strength. If we can't get the content removed by contacting them, and their use of the content is infringment, a DMCA complaint to google will usually fix the problem within a few days.
-
Thanks for the reply. I tried what you said and I found two people in our network were directly using the text from our home page on their fb business page. Not sure if this makes any difference but asked then to change. Also found a directory that we hadn't requested list our business with the exact same home page text. I've asked for that to be taken down. We have literally tried everything we know how. And even the SEO company we are using doesn't seem to know what else to try. Our website home page will not even appear when searching for the business name.
-
Try copy/pasting a couple random sentences from your content between quotes in a Google search. This will show if someone has grabbed your content and has a verbatim duplicate indexed. If another site with reasonable power has grabbed your content, they can displace you in the SERPs. Also, do a screen capture of the SERPs when your site is present, and another when your site is missing. If a different site is on the first page of the SERPs, check it out to see if they have grabbed some of your content and pasted it on the page that replaces yours.
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
-
Optimize homepage for brand-name or local keyword query for franchisees?
We are launching quasi "microsites" for our franchisees within our main company website. My question is wether to optimize the homepage for the franchisee's business name OR a local keyword query? I know standard practice is to optimize the homepage for your company's brand-name, but in this case, brand awareness isn't strong for these new local businesses. Also, apart from the homepage and service page, there is not much room to create optimize content- other pages are simply reviews, projects and a contact us page. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimberleymeloserpa0 -
Too many redirects Homepage Problem
During a site move, a sub domain of website a redirected all pages to the homepage of website b. resulting a homepage algorithmic penalty for website b. The sub domain was deleted - and the sitemove for the main domain went through ok. However website b has 80,000 incoming links from the sub domain of website a. is there anything else that needs to be done to "inform" google that the mistake was fixed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FusionMediaLimited1 -
Ranking for homepage & category page?
We lost our Google organic ranking (position 1 - 3) for our highest converting key phrase (cotton tees) in February. The ranking was for our homepage (brandname.com) which is very image heavy and doesn't have much readable content. We noticed that all of our competitors are ranking above us for their category page, not their homepage. The difference between us and our competitors is that we specialize in this key phrase and they just offer one category of the key phrase. For example, we only sell cotton tee's and they sell cotton tees, handbags and shoes. When we dropped we noticed that Google began showing our homepage AND category page in the results, so we pointed our brandname.com to brandname.com/cotton-tees canonically. The idea was that this would assure that the homepage and category page were not competing with each other. The homepage was not really optimized for cotton tees so we thought this might help. 1. Is there any harm in removing the canonical and allowing both pages to rank? (We're also working on redesigning the homepage to add more readable text & optimize for cotton tees.) 2. Our homepage URL used to be "brandname.com/cotton-tees" and we consistenly ranked between 1 and 3 for cotton tees during that time. We modified the homepage URL because it seemed spammy and are now just "brandname.com". Does it make sense to go back to the URL with the key phrase in it if that is our main product and we want to rank for it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
How to increase the traffic and keywords ranking
Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Rankings disappeared on main 2 keywords - are links the issue?
Hi, I asked a question around 6 months ago about our rankings steadily declining since April of 2013. I did originally reply to that topic a few days ago, but as it's so old I don't think it's been noticed. I'm posting again here, if that's an issue I'm happy to delete. Here it is for reference: http://moz.com/community/q/site-rankings-steadily-decreasing-do-i-need-to-remove-links Since the original post, I have done nothing linkbuilding-wise except posting blog posts and sharing them on Facebook, G+ and Twitter. There are some links in there which don't look great (ie spammy seo directories, which I'm sending removal requests to) although quite a lot of others are relevant. Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've tried to make the site more accessible - we now have a simple, responsive design and I've tried to make the content clear and concise. In short, written for humans rather than search engines. As of the end of November, 'nuts and bolts' has now disappeared completely, and 'bolts and nuts' is page 8. There are many pages much higher which are not as relevant and have no links. We still rank highly for more specialised terms - ie 'bsw bolts' and 'imperial bolts' are still page 1, but not as high as before. We get an 'A' grade on the on-page grader for 'nuts and bolts, and most above us get F. I was cautious about removing links as our profile doesn't seem too bad but it does seem as if it's that. There are a fair few questionable directories in there, no doubt about that, but our overall practice in recent years has been natural building and link earning. So - I've created a spreadsheet and identified the bad links - ie directories with any SEO connotations. I am about to submit removal requests, I thought two polite requests a couple of weeks apart prior to disavowing with Google. But am I safe to disavow straight away? I say this as I don't think I'll get too many responses from those directories. I am also gradually beefing up the content on the shop pages in case of any 'thin content' issues after advice on the previous post. I noticed 100s of broken links in webmaster tools last week due to 2 broken links on our blog that repeated on every page and have fixed those. I have also been fixing errors W3C compliance-wise. Am I right to do all this? Can anyone offer any suggestions? I'm still not 100% sure if this is Panda, Penguin or something else. My guess is Penguin, but the decline started in March 2013, which correlates with Panda. Best Regards and thanks for any help, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
Ranking drop for a particular page on a particular keyword
Take a look at centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction. For months we were ranking in the top 3 spots with this URL for "sex addiction los angeles", even reaching #1 for a while. Late last year we redesigned and developed the site to clean up the code and redirects. We also cleaned up the internal linking structure. For years we had been ranking on "sex addiction los angeles" for the home page ... bumping around the top 5 spots, but we wanted organic traffic to go to /sex-addiction. In the Fall, we saw overall site traffic rise steadily. We made few changes to the site and none to this page or links flowing back to the page once we had achieved strong ranking -- we didn't want to mess with a good thing. Then November 27th we started losing ranking on this term and a couple others. The good news is that we gained ranking on some high volume traffic terms so overall organic traffic is reasonably strong, BUT we're not ranking on the terms where we want to rank. Centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction is now nowhere to be found on the target search term despite fairly strong page rank. I tried redoing and resubmitting the site map, cleaning out some potentially duplicative content but to no avail. I see no issues, errors or warnings in Webmaster Tools. We have a few medium priority fixer-uppers in SEO Moz, but we've taken care of the majority of the big stuff. What am I not seeing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshuakrafchin0 -
How important is the number of indexed pages?
I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site. If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's). It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us. I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels. For customer usability this is smart. From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation. My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages). We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-). Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do? Thanks, -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cre80 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1