Site: search doesn't return homepage first
-
When searching for site:myclient.com their homepage doesn't appear first. I know some SEOs have reported this was a warning sign that there was a penalty.
Here is what I've checked/found:
- Toolbar pagerank remains strong.
- Homepage is indexed.
- SEO traffic is falling, but its been gradually falling for a year now, mainly due to the client neglecting any type of marketing campaigns or link building, I believe. There was not a specific drop that could be tied to a penalty.
- Site remains well indexed. 62,742 of 63,021 URLs in the sitemap are indexed.
- Site is a large ecommerce site, so many pages are duplicate content (product descriptions).
- Homepage does rank #1 when searching for string of text present on the homepage.
- Nothing unusual in Google Webmaster Tools
- Search for myclient.com returns homepage with 6 expanded sitelinks under it.
- Google safe browsing check shows no malware.
Anything else I should check?
-
Did you ever get anywhere with this? I'm having the same problem?
-
Here's a video from Matt Cutts about how the site: operator works and how the results are ordered. Does this help at all?
-
The homepage is not in the first 5 pages of results, but there are over 60K pages on the site.
The homepage has by far the most link juice, and there are no canonicals.
Google seems to be showing all the individual product pages first. This is unusual, as you would expect the homepage, category pages, and other pages linked sitewide to appear first.
-
Are you saying the default page isn't in the site:name.com results >at all<, or just that it's not the first result? If the latter, it may be possible that there's a canonical/no-index situation going that is pushing all the internal link structure juice onto another page. I believe Google will order site: results by relevance/strength by default, and this implies either that A)the strength of the home page is weak or B)the link structure/canonical layout is passing all the home page's link juice elsewhere. This is entirely guesswork mind you, but is my first impression.
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
-
Is there an easy way to hide one of your URL's on google search?, rather than redirecting?
We don't want to redirect to a different page, as some people still use it, we just don't want it to appear in search
Technical SEO | | TheIDCo0 -
Sitelink search in google search for Brand name redirect me to 404, how?
Hi All, When I search my brand name in google and in google search result my site appears with sitelink and in site link there is option of search when I search any keyword in that search then that search redirect me to 404 page of my site. I found I have implemented wrong schema at category page for search action and then I fixed the bug but 5 days passed away still google showing 404 of my search action. I have not implemented schema for search action at homepage. Now please let me know what is the issue?
Technical SEO | | amu1230 -
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
How do I direct users to site page when they search vanity URL?
My company runs a contest via a landing page on our website. The full URL to the landing page is rather long so we have a vanity URL that we use for advertising purposes. I have a 301 on the vanity URL to the landing page URL so people visiting it directly end up where they should just fine. But if a user goes to Google and types the vanity URL into the search bar, the landing page is nowhere to be found in the results. What do I need to do to get the landing page to show in results when people search the vanity URL?
Technical SEO | | jarjarjarvis0 -
Can I use high ranking sites to push my competitors out of the first page of search results?
I'm looking at a bunch of long tail low traffic keywords that aren't difficult to rank for. As I was idly doing a boring task my mind wandered and I thought.... Why don't I ask lots of questions about these keywords on sites such as Moz, Quora, Reddit etc where the high DA will get them to rank for the search term? The results on a SEO site or Q&A site won't be relevant and so I'd starve my competitors of some of their leads. Of course I'm not sure the effort would be worth it but would it work? (and no, none of my long tail keywords are included in this post)
Technical SEO | | Zippy-Bungle3 -
After entire site is noindex'd, how long to recover?
A programmers 'accidentally' put "name="robots" content="noindex" />" into every single page of one of my sites (articles, landing pages, home page etc). This happened on Monday, and we just noticed today. Ugh... We've fixed the issue; how long will it take to get reindexed? Will we instantly retain our same positions for keywords? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | EricPacifico0 -
How long does it take for customized Google Site Search to show results from pdf files?
The site in question is http://www.ejmh.eu I am pretty unsatisfied with the results I am getting from the Site Search provided by Google. We have over 160 pdf files in this subfolder: http://www.ejmh.eu/mellekletek The files are the digital versions of articles. When I search for content in those pdf files, Google does not show results. It does show results from older pages, dating back 1-2 years but it is certainly not showing anything from pdf files that I have just put up 3 weeks ago. My questions: If I place a Google Search on a site, does it not automatically display results from ALL the content in the root domain? Is there any correlation between how the Site Search is indexing the files and how Google is indexing the urls in general? Should I just wait and see whether site search performance improves or should I switch to another Search software like Zoom Search? It is vital to have a proper, high-quality search functioning on that site in the very near future. What are your experiences? Any tips are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Lauroca0