Google seems to have penalised one section of our site? Is that possible?
-
We have a page rank 5 website and we launched a new site 6 months ago in February.
Initially we had horrible urls with a bunch of numbers and stuff and we since changed them to lovely human readable urls. This had an excellent effect across the site except on one section of the site:
http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduate-employers
Although Google has indexed these pages and several have a PR 2 they do not appear in Google when previously they were on page 1 when we had the old urls. We figured we just needed some time for Google to get used to it, but it hasn't done anything. It is also worth mentioning we changed the page titles from:
FIRM NAME | DOMAIN NAME
then...
FIRM NAME | Graduate Scheme, Jobs, Internships & Apprenticeships | DOMAIN NAME
then..
FIRM NAME | Graduate Scheme, Jobs, Internships & Apprenticeships
Do you think these are being penalised?
There are two types of page:
Example A:
http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduates/addleshaw-goddard.htm
Example B:
http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduates/accenture.htm
-
Thanks again Ryan. Yer, we can't seem to see any issues either, maybe we just need to wait and build up links to them...
-
No, that makes sense. Have you checked this section of your site for external links and the like? I went through your site's robots.txt and it appears to be ok, and it looks like you're in Google Webmaster Tools so you should see any standard warnings there. If everything seems in order, I'd breakdown the individual sections of the site by length strength and see what comes up by comparison. Also run SEOmoz' Competitive Link Research Tool (http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect) using pages that currently outrank your target keywords for this section and see if you can acquire some of those links to help boost this area of the site.
-
Thanks Ryan. We have 301's set up on these pages. However, some pages have been added since then after all of the changes and also don't perform well? I don't know if that makes a difference?
-
Have you double checked the redirection to these pages to confirm it's correct from old to new. Also, you could put the canonical tag on these pages that you want listed.
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
-
How long for google to de-index old pages on my site?
I launched my redesigned website 4 days ago. I submitted a new site map, as well as submitted it to index in search console (google webmasters). I see that when I google my site, My new open graph settings are coming up correct. Still, a lot of my old site pages are definitely still indexed within google. How long will it take for google to drop off or "de-index" my old pages? Due to the way I restructured my website, a lot of the items are no longer available on my site. This is on purpose. I'm a graphic designer, and with the new change, I removed many old portfolio items, as well as any references to web design since I will no longer offering that service. My site is the following:
Algorithm Updates | | rubennunez
http://studio35design.com0 -
Site titles / descriptions change - Google Algo Change ?
Hello, During the weekend 4 of our sites automatically changed their search titles and descriptions at the same time.
Algorithm Updates | | lordish
They are not picking up the real pages: Title, Description. Our ranks are dropping because of this. can you please tell if it happened to you as well or if you recognize a problem here? sites:
http://www.robinhoodbingo.com
http://www.gossipbingo.com
http://www.moonbingo.com in the attached examples:
for the kws searched - the results show different titles and descriptions. results for these pages:
moon bingo - http://www.moonbingo.com
mobile bingo - http://www.robinhoodbingo.com/skin/mobile.php rhMzURw.png 2tRL5dZ.png0 -
New Google Update In The Past Two Days???
Was there a new Google update in the past couple of days. Traffic on my test site has gone from ~ 1,000 per day to over 4,000 per day for no particular reason. Most of the traffic is still coming from Google and is not the result of any new major links. My keyword rankings also appear to be the same ...
Algorithm Updates | | Humanovation0 -
Stop google indexing CDN pages
Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
Large site with faceted navigation using rel=canonical, but Google still has issues
First off, I just wanted to mention I did post this on one other forum so I hope that is not completely against the rules here or anything. Just trying to get an idea from some of the pros at both sources. Hope this is received well. Now for the question..... "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:" Gotta love these messages in GWT. Anyway, I wanted to get some other opinions here so if anyone has experienced something similar or has any recommendations I would love to hear them. First off, the site is very large and utilizes faceted navigation to help visitors sift through results. I have implemented rel=canonical for many months now to have each page url that is created based on the faceted nav filters, push back to the main category page. However, I still get these damn messages from Google every month or so saying that they found too many pages on the site. My main concern obviously is wasting crawler time on all these pages that I am trying to do what they ask in these instances and tell them to ignore and find the content on page x. So at this point I am thinking about possibly using robots.txt file to handle these, but wanted to see what others around here thought before I dive into this arduous task. Plus I am a little ticked off that Google is not following a standard they helped bring to the table. Thanks for those who take the time to respond in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | PeteGregory0 -
Can AJAX implementation affect the rankings in Google Panda?
Hi there, I have the following situation with one of our job sites. We migrate the site to a new application, which is better from design point of view and also usability. For this we use a lot AJAX especially in searches. So every time a user is filtering down their search new results will be shown on the page, at the same url and with no page load. But, having this implementation. affected Bounce rate - which increased from 38% to nearly 60%, PI/visits - which are now half, at 3 and also Avg Time on Site is half that is used to be coming to 2,5 min from nearly 6 min. From Rand post, it is clearly that the content is very important in Google Panda, and all of these parameters we should consider, as it is telling the quality of the content. So, my question will be, can this site be hit by Panda updates (maybe later on) because Bounce Rate, PI/Visits and Avg Time on site, decreased in such way? At the moment we don't measure the Ajax impresion, but as I understood that we can do that though virtual pages in GA, does anyone of you have the experience how to handle this? Won't be this an artificial increase? Thanks, Irina
Algorithm Updates | | InformMedia0 -
Strange Refferral URL coming in from Google
Hi, I've been monitoring my referral URL's coming in and today noticed they had changed. Previously when I clicked one it would be the google search result page - however now they all seem to be like this: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=7&sqi=2&ved=0CHEQFjAG&url=http://www.mysite.com&rct=j&q=my%20keyword&ei=Bvc3TrbgB5G0hAfvqoSvAg&usg=AFQjCNFONDCPJDl3d2PYceYvale_cL7s4Q All these URL's immediately redirect to my website pages. Do you know what they are - they seem to be tracking URL's of some sort I am thinking?? Are they trying to analyse my site with respect to certain keywords?? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | James770
