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
-
Paypal instead of Merchant's account and will the site still move up?
Hello, Will an Ecommerce site still move up in a niche if it only accepts PayPal and doesn't have a merchant's account on it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Any SEO-wizards out there who can tell me why Google isn't following the canonicals on some pages?
Hi, I am banging my head against the wall regarding the website of a costumer: In "duplicate title tags" in GSC I can see that Google is indexing a whole bunch parametres of many of the url's on the page. When I check the rel=canonical tag, everything seems correct. My costumer is the biggest sports retailer in Norway. Their webshop has approximately 20 000 products. Yet they have more than 400 000 pages indexed by Google. So why is Google indexing pages like this? What is missing in this canonical?https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=descWhy isn't Google just cutting off the ?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=desc part of the url?Can it be the canonical-tag itself, or could the problem be somewhere in the CMS? Looking forward to your answers Sigurd
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Finding websites that don't have meta descriptions
Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian
Technical SEO | | agencepicnic0 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Mobile site content and main site content
Help, pls! I have one main site and a mobile version of that site (m.domain.com). The main site has more pages, more content, different named urls. The main site has consistently done well in Google. The mobile site has not: the mobile site is buried. I am working on adding more content to the mobile site, but am concerned about duplicate content. Could someone pls tell me the best way to deal with these two versions of our site? I can't use rel=canonical because the urls do not correspond to the same names on the main site, or can I? Does this mean I need to change the url names, offer different content (abridged), etc? I really am at a loss as to how to interpret Google's rules for this. Could someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any help or tips would GREATLY appreciated!!!!! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer0 -
The word 'shop' in a page title
I'm reworking most of the page titles on our site and I'm considering the use of the word 'Shop' before a product category. ex. Shop 'keyword' | Brand Name As opposed to just using the keyword sans 'Shop.' Some of the keywords are very generic, especially for a top level category page. Question: Is the word 'Shop' damaging my SEO efforts in any way?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Issue with 'Crawl Errors' in Webmaster Tools
Have an issue with a large number of 'Not Found' webpages being listed in Webmaster Tools. In the 'Detected' column, the dates are recent (May 1st - 15th). However, looking clicking into the 'Linked From' column, all of the link sources are old, many from 2009-10. Furthermore, I have checked a large number of the source pages to double check that the links don't still exist, and they don't as I expected. Firstly, I am concerned that Google thinks there is a vast number of broken links on this site when in fact there is not. Secondly, why if the errors do not actually exist (and never actually have) do they remain listed in Webmaster Tools, which claims they were found again this month?! Thirdly, what's the best and quickest way of getting rid of these errors? Google advises that using the 'URL Removal Tool' will only remove the pages from the Google index, NOT from the crawl errors. The info is that if they keep getting 404 returns, it will automatically get removed. Well I don't know how many times they need to get that 404 in order to get rid of a URL and link that haven't existed for 18-24 months?!! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0
