Why Would This Old Page Be Penalized?
-
Here's an old page on a trustworthy domain with no apparent negative SEO activity according to OSE and ahrefs: http://www.gptours.com/Monaco-Grand-Prix
They went from page 1 to page 13 for "monaco grand prix" within about 4 weeks. Week 2 we pulled out all the duplicate content in the history section. When rank slipped further, we put it back. Yet it's still moving down, while other pages on the website are holding strong.
Next steps will be to add some schema.org/Event microformats, but beyond that, do you have any ideas?
-
Thanks Marie,
I've confirmed that the client is the content source originator. Their CMS won't accommodate canonical tags at the moment. If the URLs were the friendly URLs with dynamic params then it'd be no problem, but it's actually index.php on each one.
http://screencast.com/t/VuWv0gL7uq
I did take a look at their parameter handling in an attempt to optimize at that level. I modified the settings to this: http://screencast.com/t/hkjw258Bb5Qd and am considering blocking /command in robots.txt.
Thoughts?
TextMarketing, the page actually has quite a few authoritative links and very few "commercial terms". I thought "Penguin Penalty" at first too until I viewed the backlink profile.
Thanks you 2 - your help is beyond encouraging.
-
You have a canonical issue with the page and that could be the problem. Check out this search and click on "repeat with the omitted search results included"
The text on that page is indexed on 46 pages on your site. To solve this you'll need to implement a rel-canonical to the page to tell Google which version is supposed to be indexed. This will likely help.
I did also find that some of the text on your page is the same as on this page:
It's possible they have copied from you, but if you have taken your description from another source then you may need to rewrite it to be unique.
There's also not much on that page to entice Google to rank it well. You've got 3 paragraphs of information, some of which is duplicated elsewhere.
I think that if you clean up the canonical issues and add some substantial and helpful content then you'll do much better.
-
Your rankings not only have to do with the freshness, quality and links pointing to that page but the same for all other competing pages. I would use the open site explorer to see if the pages that are taking your page's place are getting new backlinks that are helping to drive them up.
A lot of SERP movement has to do with your competitor's pages. That's why it's extremely important that you're always building new quality links and keeping your content fresh and updated.
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
-
Page dropped after backlink
This is a bit of a odd one... I put two new pages on to my website. And built one backlink to each page (each from separate domains). The pages and backlinks have indexed quite quickly. The odd thing is that one of my pages has dropped significantly in ranking but the other has boosted significantly in ranking! The 1st page has come to page 1 of google, the other pages dropped to page 3 of google. Prior to building the links the ranks was stable. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Best practice for retiring old product pages
We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features. How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users? Our plan currently is to: Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages. When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage. Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages. Any help would be very much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
On Page vs Off Page - Which Has a Greater Effect on Rankings?
Hi Mozzers, My site will be migrating to a new domain soon, and I am not sure how to spend my time. Should I be optimizing our content for keywords, improving internal linking, and writing new content - or should I be doing link building for our current domain (or the new one)? Is there a certain ratio that determines rankings which can help me prioritize these to-dos?, such as 70:30 in favor of link-building? Thanks for any help you can offer!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Should i continue linking the old page after a redirect 301?
hi everybody, i'm trying to understand why my page http://poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it isn't ranked for the keyword poltrona frau brescia even if is indexed on google. the page gets authority and traffic from the page www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.html that is already ranked in fourth position for that keyword. should i continue linking the previous or the new page to increase the page authority? i don't know if is a good way to link a page not ranked despite a ranked one.. Please help me.... thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidoboem0 -
Pages that takes more then 1,5 second to load penalized?
Hi all I just read an article (print) about the importance of af having a fast website. The author claims that all pages that are taking longer than 1,5 second to load is getting penalized in the SERPS. Speed is of course a ranking factor. But I have never heard a statement like this before. Is 1,5 second a guideline from Google? Can anyone say, where this number is coming from? Is there maybe another guideline to be followed? Thanks in advance for your comments / answers 🙂 Best regards, Kenneth Karl Nielsen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KennethK0 -
Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors
Hi, I'm new to SeoMoz and to this forum. I've started a new campaign on my site and got back loads of error. Most of them are Duplicate page content and Duplicate page title errors. I know I have some duplicate titles but I don't have any duplicate content. I'm not a web developer and not so expert but I have the impression that the crawler is following all my internal links (Infact I have also plenty of warnings saying "Too many on-page links". Do you think this is the cause of my errors? Should I implement the nofollow on all internal links? I'm working with Joomla. Thanks a lot for your help Marco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcodublin0 -
Should we deindex duplicate pages?
I work on an education website. We offer programs that are offered up to 6 times per year. At the moment, we have a webpage for each instance of the program, but that's causing duplicate content issues. We're reworking the pages so the majority of the content will be on one page, but we'll still have to keep the application details as separate pages. 90% of the time, application details are going to be nearly identical, so I'm worried that these pages will still be seen as duplicate content. My question is, should we deindex these pages? We don't particularly want people landing on our application page without seeing the other details of the program anyway. But, is there problem with deindexing such a large chunk of your site that I'm not thinking of? Thanks, everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UWPCE0