Specific Page Penalty?
-
Having trouble to figure out why one of our pages is not ranking in SERPs, on-page optimisation looks decent to me.
Checked by using gInfinity extension and searched for the page URL.
Can one page be penalised from Google engines (.ie / .com ) and the rest of the website not penalised?
The (possible) penalised page is showing in Google places in SERPs. I assume this would not show if it was penalised.
Would appreciate any advice.
Thanks
-
You may get no traffic from ranking #4 these days, especially on queries with a competitive paid portion of the SERP.
What I would do is stop assessing the "what if" scenario's and start focusing all your energy towards acquiring those editorial type links grasshopper was talking about.. right now! You'll get that ranking and secure it for long-term traffic.
-
There's no way to give an accurate time-scale answer to that question. If you're able to get editorial links from authoritative, trusted sites, you can see substantial movement within a week or two of the links being crawled. However, if your links are from lower-quality sites, or are weighted heavily toward devalued methods of link building (directories, reciprocal links, three-way links, etc), engines may not give those links much weight, if any, no matter how long you wait.
-
It has ranked well previously, according to Rank tracker on SEOmoz - it was ranking 4th last week however I don't think that is correct.
Is it a reliable tool??
Organic traffic shows no drop for keywords for the page in 2012 nor does page views for the page. If it was over-optimised, these would be noticeble in Google Analytics..
-
To me, the true clue would be whether or not the URL ranked well previously.
If it has not.. you need more links. It is probably a page authority issue.
If it has.. you may have over-optimized on the anchor text, sitewide links will do this. You may rank well for awhile, then you'll find yourself on page five shaking your fist at Google.
-
Hi Grasshopper,
I know the keywords I am trying to rank for are competitive.
I will take that into consideration and start working on these. How long do this take effect in Google engines?
Thanks
-
Hi Ronan,
Since it passes tests 1,2 and 4, I would say that #3 is the culprit. Having solid on-page optimization is great, but link authority is the name of the game for achieving ranking, especially if the keywords you're trying to rank for are competitive.
Run the Keyword Difficulty Tool against the keywords you're trying to rank for. I would expect that the URLs on page 1 of the SERPs all have significantly significantly stronger, more trustworthy link profiles than your URL does.
If that's the case, all the standard advice applies - create a truly differentiated page that offers content / resources / tools above and beyond what your competitors offer, and market the hell out of it.
-
The page is indexed
-
Hi Grasshopper,
Thanks for your input. I have checked each one and appears to be fine:
-
Yes
-
Text is true content on the page
-
The page itself does have low inbound links. It might be this?
-
Appearing first
Despite low number of inbound links, I wouldn't say this alone would cause the ranking issue as the page is well optimised and similar to competitors.
-
-
Hi Ronan,
First, to your general question - yes, it is possible for one page of a domain to be penalized / filtered, while the rest of the domain is not. However, it seems extremely unlikely that the URL in question would rank in Google Places if it was penalized. There are a few things you want to check:
-
The first thing you want to check is whether or not the page is indexed and cached, which is a simple query [cache:mypage.com/this-page]. Does it return a result?
-
If so, in the gray banner across the top of the cached page, click on "Text-only version". Does the machine-readable text match the true content on the page? If you have large amounts of machine-readable text that are only visible to an engine, and not a user, that can trip an algorithmic spam filter. Also, look for off-topic words - sometimes sites get hacked and hackers inject all kinds of spammy garbage and links, which can also trip the filter.
-
If the page is cached, and rendering the intended content, does it have sufficient link authority to rank for the terms you intend? It's quite possible that your page is in a competitive keyword space, and doesn't have enough juice to push past the competition.
-
If you want to see if it has enough juice to rank for anything at all, pick an sentence in the first paragraph of text, and search for it enclosed in quotes, ["Some random sentence from my first paragraph here."] Is your URL the #1 result? It should be. If there are other sites that you've syndicated your content to, or have scraped your content and are more authoritative than your site, it's possible that your URL isn't ranking because it's being (incorrectly) filtered out as duplicate content.
Hope that helps.
-
-
Is the URL no longer in Google's index at all?
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
-
Ranking impact: Traffic in website pages vs sub directory vs sub domain
Hi all, I need clarification on this. Not every time website main pages rank, some times even pages from sub directories or sub domains like blogs or guides; especially for branded keywords. I just wonder what happens when so much traffic is generating in sub directories and sub domains just because of limited landing pages in main website. Will this traffic be counted as traffic in main website as per Google? Traffic increase in main website really an ranking factor? Will the "brand + topic" related keywords' traffic is more for a website; will it ranking improves even for "topic keywords"? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Why Google changed our page-title suddenly which has been same for years
Hi all, I know Google shows a different page titles. Happens when over optimised or when we copied competitors page title. But we did neither. Suddenly Google changed our homepage page title in search results. Our page title suffix "brand name" has been moved to beginning. Our page title is still for years.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
More pages or less pages for best SEO practices?
Hi all, I would like to know the community's opinion on this. A website with more pages or less pages will rank better? Websites with more pages have an advantage of more landing pages for targeted keywords. Less pages will have advantage of holding up page rank with limited pages which might impact in better ranking of pages. I know this is highly dependent. I mean to get answers for an ideal website. Thanks,
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Delay between being indexed and ranking for new pages.
I've noticed with the last few pages i've built that there's a delay between them being indexed and them actually ranking. Anyone else finding that? And why is it like that? Not much of an issue as they tend to pop up after a week or so, but I am curious. Isaac.
Algorithm Updates | | isaac6630 -
Bing not indexing pages
We have taken all recommended steps to index our site sitegeek.com pages to Bing Bot but failed to index them. Bing bot crawled more than 5,000 pages every day but strange why pages are not getting index ? if we query site:sitegeek.com in Bing Bing Search Engine shows only 1,200 pages got indexed. but we query site:sitegeek.com in Google Google Search Engine show more 546,000 pages got indexed. For example : https://www.sitegeek.com/000webhost Above page crawled by Google but Bing. Can anyone suggest what we are missing on this page? what need to change to index such pages? Thanks! Rajiv
Algorithm Updates | | gamesecure0 -
How can I check Googles Page Cache ?
Hi I use to have a handy tool in Firefox (Google Toolbar) that was very handy for checking page ranks and what date a page had been cached. For a while with the newer versions of Firefox I cannot seem to locate this useful tool, Can anybody recommend any useful tools for checking the above. Thanks Adam
Algorithm Updates | | AMG1000 -
Google has indexed a lot of test pages/junk from the development days.
With hind site I understand that this could have been avoided if robots.txt was configured properly. My website is www.clearvisas.com, and is indexed with both the www subdomain and with out. When I run site:clearvisas.com in Google I get 1,330 - All junk from the development days. But when I run site:www.clearvisas.com in Google I get 66 - these results all post development and more in line with what I wanted to be indexed. Will 1,330 junk pages hurt my seo? Is it possible to de-index them and should I? If the answer is yes to any of the questions how should I proceed? Kind regards, Fuad
Algorithm Updates | | Fuad_YK0 -
Help on Page Load Time
I'm trying to track page load time of the visits on my site and GA only says to me that it's equal to zero and page load sample is aways zero too. I've made a research, and I found that GA is used to track page load time automatically, isn't it?
Algorithm Updates | | ivan.precisodisso0