Can a homepage have a penalty but not the rest of the pages?

[ServiceCrowd_AU]

I've got an unusual issue.

I set up a new website with new content and moved old (blog) content to the new site.

On the old site, most of the blog content wasn't ranking after the Oct update. On the new site it all started ranking again after I redirected old URLs to new URLs.

However while all the blog content ranks, the homepage doesn't rank for the new brand term.

There are multiple articles in press that refer to the new website using the branded terms as anchor text, but it's still not ranking.

Is it possible that the redirected homepage (and only the hompage) from the old site is carrying a penalty?

If so, should I not redirect the homepage of the old site but all of it's sub pages?

[evolvingSEO]

Check the homepage to see if it ranks for some other things;

• the domain name without the www
• the domain name with the www
• the title tag with the title: operator
• cut and paste a string of text (maybe 12-15 words) and search for it in quotes
• the OLD brand term (you said this was a re-brand as well?)
• the OLD domain name

What do those all return? Further;

• Does the homepage show as a landing page in webmaster tools?
• Does it show getting traffic from search in analytics?
• Does it rank for anything in Bing or Yahoo?

It sounds like more diagnostics are needed before we can conclude anything

[MarieHaynes]

I don't have the answer for you, but wanted to give you some of my thoughts.  I used to tell people that Penguin affected a site on a page level, but I was wrong.  John Mueller has said in many webmaster forums that Penguin is a sitewide issue in which Google does not trust the links to the entire site.  Similarly, Panda is a sitewide issue as well.

It is possible for a site to get a manual penalty that just affects one page or one or a few keywords.  If you have a manual penalty, you'll see it in Webmaster Tools under Search Traffic --> Links to your site.  But, in my experience this type of penalty is not common.

If just one page is not ranking I'd be looking for technical issues such as a noindex tag or the wrong canonical being used.  OR, you may want to check that you haven't abused keywords.  The keyword stuffing algorithm can certainly affect just one page.  If this is the case, then removing the keyword stuffing can sometime produce good results in even just a few days as this algorithm updates every time Google crawls your site.

Regarding the redirect question, I think no one can really answer that without knowing what the specific problem is and that's going to be hard to diagnose.

[GlobeRunner]

Daniel,

Yes, it is very possible (and that's a lot of the penalties we see lately). The penalties are only given to certain page on the site, usually because of the over-optimization of anchor text links pointing to those pages that are penalized.

So, I would do a thorough review of all the links pointing to the site and make sure that the anchor text isn't over-optimized. There should be more "brand" phrases and compound phrases rather than exact-match keyword anchor text links pointing to the page.

In Google Webmaster Tools, when sites get manual actions, they're either site-wide or partial matches when it comes to the link penalties that are applied to sites.