Sub-pages have no pa
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I took over a website a few months ago which is not performing well at all for chosen keywords. When I first inspected it, I found a rel canonical tag pointing to the homepage on every page. This was quickly deleted and all the pages were fetched in webmaster tools.
3 months later and the website is still performing badly. When I use the mozbar, it shows that all of the sub-pages have a pa of 1. It is only a small site and all of the pages are linked to on the navbar in a simple way. The links are not made using javascript and all the pages are on the sitemap which is submitted to wmt. I have checked that all of the changes that have been made have been indexed as well.
Could it be possible that google still sees the canonical tag even though its not there? I can't think of any other reason why the pages have no pa or why it is so far behind the competitors despite having better content and links.
Also, the site is appropriate for adults, but I found (among the mess left for me) a meta ratings tag set to "general". This has now been deleted, could it negatively affect rankings?
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Unfortunately, there's no quick fix for reversing canonicals. If Google is indexing the pages, it's probably fine - I'd double check them with a "site:" operator and see if they're showing up correct (titles, snippets, ranking for exact-match terms, etc.). In some cases, I recommend adding self-referencing rel-canonicals (to counteract the old ones) and it never hurts to have a good XML sitemap in place in GWT. Again, though, you said you're getting indexed, so it may be nothing.
If you want to Private Message me or contact support, we can try to sort out why we're still not crawling the other pages.
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Thanks Tim, Google has been able to access the pages fine, as the all the pages are showing as indexed in WMT. I just think its odd as after 3 months, the site should have been crawled by moz (as with all other websites I've worked on). There is nothing wrong with the linking structure as all the pages are in the nav bar in simple html. As I said, when I took over the website, they messed up big time with the rel canonical tags all pointing to the homepage. After reading this article by moz (http://moz.com/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization), I'm a little bit worried. What is the correct procedure for fixing incorrect rel canonicals? I thought it was simply a case of removing them, but I might be wrong. Thanks again
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Hi Mark,
A PA of 1 usually just means that Moz hasn't crawled the page yet. This usually happens when pages are brand new, the site has very few links or the site has a poor internal linking structure.
However, it doesn't mean that Google hasn't crawled the site. Moz crawls far fewer pages than Google does. I would recommend looking through your Webmaster Tools account to see if Google is having any issues indexing the page. Within WMT, you can fetch a page as Google Bot to see if Google is able to access the page.
Without more information, it's hard to say why your pages aren't ranking, but I think Webmaster Tools is a good place to start your investigation.
Tim
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