My homepage doesn't rank anymore. It's been replaced by irrelevant subpages which rank around 100-200 instead of top 5.
-
Hey guys,
I think I got some kind of penalty for my homepage. I was in top5 for my keywords. Then a few days ago, my homepage stopped ranking for anything except searching for my domain name in Google.
sitename.com/widget-reviews/ previously ranked #3 for "widget reviews"
but now....
sitename.com/widget-training-for-pet-cats/ is ranking #84 for widget reviews instead.Similarly across all my other keywords, irrelevant, wrong pages are ranking.
Did I get some kind of penalty?
-
hello Ian.
Here is my DMCA
To do this, you need to pay the Copyright office to register your choice.
My DMCA agent is a lawyer, but you can do it yourself, if you want,
as long as there is correct address information that can be served with letters or papers.
What this does is give you a small amount of protection. If you are allowing third party submissions of stories or comments or photo uploads or you outsource content creation, you need this. It gives anyone with a complaint against you, a guaranteed way to contact you - but they have to comply with the rules too, so it can't be a frivolous complaint.
-
Thank you for the suggestions - I will implement those today. One thing I don't get though is how to set up a DMCA page. Can you tell me more about that? I researched but I can only find info on how to file dmca complaints etc.
What's a DMCA page?
-
Nope I haven't bought links but I have asked people for links and written them articles in return or done other odd jobs for them. I just checked my links and I see some weird stuff that looks like scraper sites or something, linking to me. Could that cause a homepage to stop ranking at all?
-
Apart from thje usual wordpress problems that would not accoubt for a sudden loss of rankings i could not find anything wrong, I thonk youir problem may lay off page, did you ever buy links?
-
Ian,
The site looks good.
This isn't the problem, but you should redirect index.html and .htm to the home page, as you do with .php
Your home page author and description are both empty
- actually, you have two descriptions - the first one is empty, the second is OK
If you have blogs, remember to set up a DMCA page.
-
You're right Alan. The URL is www.ipage-reviews.com and I must explain that it's much higher quality content than my competitors. It's a relatively new site so it's not my favorite or highest quality of the sites I work on... So please don't just say oh your site is filtered because it's not high quality.... The competing sites make this look like wikipedia...
-
Great idea - I have checked that way, and my main page is not in the results.
I did see that someone I know personally to have done some weird shady things to me before has filed a DMCA notice to have a site removed from results. I checked it out on ChillingEffects.org and it doesn't include details about what site was removed, etc.... Also I checked in my webmaster tools and there is no message about it.
-
Really do need a url to help
-
Ian,
what happens if you search for your keyword, go to the very end of the SERPS and click the link that searches again, but this time allowing the hidden results?
Does your main page appear then, and is it about the same position it used to be?
-
Already done but good idea, thanks! No duplicate content detected by copyscape.
-
I would be checking the SERPs to see if there is duplicated content on a more powerful domain.
-
Hi Keri!
I did have a potential buyer of the site who cursed me out because I didn't accept his lowball price... Maybe something could have happened, but seems unlikely that one person could sabotage my site... I hope. 
I haven't received any notices in webmaster tools. In fact this happened to another site of mine as well after I did a redesign. All my rankings disappeared after about 2 weeks of the new design, and instead google started ranking irrelevant subpages instead of the homepage which was in top 3 or #1 for many keywords.
I can confirm that there is no wrong caninical or noindex, etc.
-
Knowing your URL would help, but I can understand if you don't want to share it here (you can create a private question and share it there if you like). Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools for any notices?
Has anyone recently done work on your site, where there might have been an unnoticed change to the code that put in the wrong canonical tag, or added a noindex tag?
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
-
Does product environment have impact on main website's SEO
We have two environments - product, where login is necessary and where the customers are working. We also have there our help desk, Q&A and knowledge base. Pretty sophisticated page regarding information on a specific topic. We also have our main page where we promote our products, company and events, etc. Main page is www.example.com, where product environment is login.example.com . Does this product environment have an impact on my main page's SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeringaA0 -
Avoiding duplicate content in manufacturer's [of single product] website
Hello, So I have read a lot of articles about duplicate content/ keyword canibalism/ competing with yourself, and so on. But none of these articles really fit to manufacturer website who produces one product. For example, lets say I make ceramic tiles, this means: Homepage: "Our tiles are the best tiles, we have numerous designs of tiles. We make them only from natural ceramic" Product list: "Here is a list of our tiles: Poesia tile, white tile, textured tile, etc" Page for each tile: Gallery: a bunch of images trying to prove that these tiles look best 🙂 Where to buy page: a map From what I understand this page is already doomed - it will not go well against larger retailers who don't focus only on tiles but they sell everything. This page is set to have a lot of duplicate content. But I hope I am wrong, can someone please make some suggestions how to do SEO on such a website where all pages are about the same thing? Any help would be much appreciated! Juris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JurisBBB0 -
Why isn't the canonical tag on my client's Magento site working?
The reason for this mights be obvious to the right observer, but somehow I'm not able to spot the reason why. The situation:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
I'm doing an SEO-audit for a client. When I'm checking if the rel=canonical tag is in place correctly, it seems like it: view-source:http://quickplay.no/fotball-mal.html?limit=15) (line nr 15) Anyone seing something wrong with this canonical? When I perform a site:http://quickplay.no/ search, I find that there's many url's indexed that ought to have been picked up by the canonical-tag: (see picture) ..this for example view-source:http://quickplay.no/fotball-mal.html?limit=15 I really can't see why this page is getting indexed, when the canonical-tag is in place. Anybody who can? Sincerely 🙂 GMdWg0K0 -
Should you allow an auto dealer's inventory to be indexed?
Due to the way most auto dealership website populate inventory pages, should you allow inventory to be indexed at all? The main benefit us more content. The problem is it creates duplicate, or near duplicate content. It also creates a ton of crawl errors since the turnover is so short and fast. I would love some help on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gauge1230 -
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
SEO Tools You Can't Live Without?
Hi Guys, I'm currently in the middle of creating a comprehensive blog post covering SEO Tools that I wouldn't be able to work without. So far I've got the following down, as I use these on a day to day basis and they make my job infinitely easier. SEOMoz / OSE AHrefs BuzzStream Scrapebox Xenu / Screaming Frog Excel GWT / Analytics / Adwords Keyword Tool What tools or subscriptions do you use on a daily basis and couldn't be without?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SebastianCowie2 -
SEO and marketing for a company that doesn't want to promote their primary website
Hi All! One of my new clients is in a semi-grey-hat industry, and is in perpetual danger of having their real websites (of which they have several), blocked by the Chinese firewall (which is where their target market is). So their idea is to use neutral sites to write information (Squidoo, article site, maybe a stand-alone WP site with a few pages) and promote those pages. The idea being that China is less likely to block those sites, and then the link to the actual website from those pages could always be changed if China blocks the website listed. I'm a little dubious as to how feasible this is - how do you promote a Squidoo page? Or an article on an article site for semi-competitive keywords? Besides on-page SEO (which may not be enough), is there anything you can really do post-Penguin? If anyone has any ideas as to the above - or as to how else to effectively market sites when you can't market the site and brand directly, I'd be very happy to hear. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
How do I increase rankings when the indexed page is the homepage?
Hi Forum, This is a two-part question. The first is: "what may be the cause of some rank declines?" and the second is "how do I bring them back up when the indexed page is the homepage?" Over the last week I noticed some declines in several of my top keywords, many of which point to the site's homepage. The site itself is an eCommerce site, which had less visits last week than normal (holidays it seems, since the data jibes with key dates). Can a decline in traffic cause ranking declines? Any other ideas of where to look? Secondly, for those keywords that link to the homepage, how do we bring these back up since a homepage can't be optimized for every single keyword? We sell yoga products and can't have a homepage that is optimized for keywords like "yoga mat," "yoga blocks," "yoga pilates clothing," and several others, as these are our category pages' keywords. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0