Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
-
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
-
yes homepage penalty means site is penalized across the board
-
Yes it "could" be that your homepage has been penalized or has lost some back links. If so it would have a direct impact on the link juice flowing through to your other pages. The best thing to do is check out webmaster tools for any warnings. If you don't have any warnings then I would start digging into my link profile to see if any links have fallen off your profile recently.
-
It is possible yes, your home page is where the majority of your website authority sits so if that gets penalised then other pages can be affected. Simon is right that without more details, it is hard to give you a proper answer.
If you have been doing a lot of articles recently then this may be a reason because article websites have taken a huge hit since the update in January.
-
Have you had a look in Webmaster tools for any issues? Any unnatural links warnings? Have you lost any significant backlinks? There could be any number of reasons, be it Penguin or Panda - without more info people will struggle to give you suitable solutions.
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
-
Can a .ly domain rank in the United States?
Hello members. I have a question that I am seeking to confirm whether or not I am on the right track. I am interested in purchasing a .ly domain which is the ccTLD for Libya. The purpose of the .ly domain would be for branding purposes however at the same time I do not want to kill the websites ability to rank in Google.com (United States searches) because of this domain. Google does not consider .ly to be one of those generic ccTLDs like. io, .cc, .co, etc. that can rank and Bitly has also moved away from the .ly extension to a .com extension. Back in 2011 when there was unrest in Lybia, a few well known sites that utilized the .ly extension had their domains confiscated such as Letter.ly, Advers.ly and I think Bitly may have been on that list too however with the unrest behind us it is possible to purchase a .ly so being able to obtain one is not an issue. From what I can tell, I should be able to specify in Google Search Console that the website utilizing the .ly extension is a US based website. I can also do this with Google My Business and I will keep the Whois info public so the whois data can been seen as a US based website. Based on everything I just said do any of you think I will be OK if I were to register and use the .ly domain extension and still be able to rank in Google.com (US Searches). Confirmation would help me sleep better. Thanks in advance everyone and have a great day!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemaresca0 -
Can 301 redirects that are inaccurate cause Google suppressions on rankings?
In an interesting study by DeganSEO titled 'Negative Impact of 301 Redirects - A Case Study' a drop of rankings was observed when popular blog posts were redirected to product pages. One hypothesis is that the suppression is due to topical difference between the redirected pages (blog posts) and the target page. The topical difference issue is an interesting one when you consider it in the context of website migrations. We always recommend that 301 redirects are done at a page level and that if an equivalent page doesn't exist to just 301 anyway but to the most logical page. If you think about it Google are likely to frown on this because a) it's not a good experience for the user - 404 would be more accurate for them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QubaSEO
b) it's lazy - if you have good content that has gained authority/trust then create the same content on the new site don't trytp pass that to an entirely different page. Thoughts? Experiences?0 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Recent ranking drop followed by strange behavior in SERPS
Recently on the evening of August 5th almost all of the keywords our pages ranked highly for dropped by anywhere from 5 to 8 pages. The only activity during this time was an article that had been picked up by a major news outlet and then was apparently copied onto other sources with links to our domain and article. More puzzling though is rather than simply having the same page show up lower for a keyword, in a number of instances a different page is now shown for the result, often with less or no relevance to the keyword. In some cases, for a single keyword phrase we've seen as many as 10 different pages rotated throughout the day when performing a search. Prior to our rankings falling, we've never seen this behavior.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianQuinn0 -
Redirect or Rewrite? 2 pages ranking
We have two pages ranking for "Custom Web Design" http://www.imageworksstudio.com/custom-web-design ranks higher (consistently 9-13) and http://www.imageworksstudio.com/content/custom-web-design ranks around 35-40 the latter is actually an older version of the article that never was replaced or taken down - but it has the majority of the links to it Wondering if we should update the old content so it is not similar to the one that is ranking better or if we should redirect everything to /custom-web-design to see if it can secure better rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Can converting a site to HTTPS impact ranking?
We have a client with a very large site that would like to put a login on each page; however, that would require the entire site be put behind a secure connection (changing http:// to https:// on every page). They rank for a ton of keywords and rank well. Would the change impact their rankings at all? Could it possibly help them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dknewmedia0 -
Can you spot the reasons for our site dropping in rankings so significantly?
We've been racking our brains over this since the recent search engine changes (the notorious and non-cuddley Google Panda update) and have, within reason, corrected as many of the problems that we possibly can yet still our traffic drops further. http://www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com used to rank fairly equally with it's competitors however since the update (and a number of suggestions from another SEO company), the traffic has dropped by about 90% and it's dropped almost completely from the search results (unlike the competitors who are breaking many faux-pars yet remain well ranked). I don't think we're seeing the wood from the trees anymore so I'd be grateful if someone could take a look and see if we've missed anything glaringly obvious? Any thoughts welcome. Thanks Tim Big changes around the same time/since that might be worth noting: Setup a canonical domain name of www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com and (using IIS7) 301 redirect all other traffic over. Setup canonical URL meta tag for all results pages so they point to a single page Moved the redirect page (the one which sends users to the B&B's site) to another subdomain. Redesigned the URLs where possible to use "friendlier" and more keyword rich urls and 301 redirecting for the old urls Added XML sitemaps to the various tools (we found out they weren't there before) Added a robots.txt file Lowercased all urls Where possible removed duplicate results pages and pointed them at a single page Restructured the page titles to be more relevant Setup nofollow on the external urls
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimGaunt0 -
Pages On Subfolder Not Ranking
A subdirectory/folder on our website doesn't seem to rank for any keywords where the same type of pages on the same competition level keywords rank perfectly fine. For awhile the pages weren't getting indexed but were crawled regularly. Can't seem to figure the problem out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bprimeelitellc0
