Home page rankings disappeared - Google Penalty?
-
Hi,
I have a clients website that I have been working on for a few months now.
On-page SEO for home page is A for all target keywords.
All Domain / subdomain / external link data etc. much stronger than all competition.
But approx 3 months ago (before Panda update) all home page rankings (except 1 keyword) dropped out sight in Google rankings. 3 months later, still can't work out why. Sometimes rankings come back onto page 9 or so then drop out again.
Deeper pages are not effected, just the Home page.
Looks like a Google penalty to me but can't work out why.
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
Website is - www.marrikashairextensions.com
Many thanks
-
Hi Daniel,
Many thanks for your response.
there are a couple of things I don't quite understand and would appreciate your guidance.
You suggest that I target a different page for the keyword 'brazilian hair extensions' but what I don't understand is why the Home Page is failing to rank for this keyword when according to seoMoz's on page keyword optimization tool it scores a Grade A and I have built hundreds of anchor text links to the page (not spam)?
My real issue here is to understand why, why, why. When all the seoMoz metrics and on-page analysis suggest that my clients website should be competing at least in the top 10 for this keyword why is it at position 198 at best. It just doesn't make sense.
www.marrikashairextensions.com vs www.princessnaturalhair.com/
Overall Score 35% 31%
Page mozRank 4.15% 4.11%
Page mozTrust 5.04% 4.90%
External mozRank 3.84% 4.20%
Subdomain mozRank 3.55% 3.62%
Domains Linking 6328% 910%
External Links 6514% 267%
The search engine that this page is targeting is google.co.uk not .com, where the competition is much weaker, so if you check there, the top 10 have Domain and Page authority of below 20, so makes all this even more difficult to comprehend.
I will certainly take you advice about targeting a different page, but still would really like to understand better why the home page has failed to compete so drastically.
Thanks for you help.
Mark
-
I had a quick look at the site and a few subpages and what I'd suggest is changing the onpage optimization on the home page since this page -> http://www.marrikashairextensions.com/brazilian-hair-extensions you can focus for the keyword 'brazilian hair extensions' . I'd also add some good content about the product on that page since at the moment it's pretty blank.
The results that come up when I search on google.com for that keyword are pages that are stronger in terms of domain strength, backlinks and on page optimization so I'd say it's not a penalty but rather a ranking adjustment. If it were a penalty I don't think it would only affect your home page and leave other sub pages rankings intact.
If you've not done anything black hat(such as buying links) then it's certainly just the algorith changes and you need to work on the site.
Hope that's of some help
-
Hi Daniel,
Keywords =
'brazilian hair extensions' & 'brazilian hair'
Still ranking ok for 'natural brazilian hair' though.
-
HI Mark
Which keywords were you ranking on the first page that you're now not being found?
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
-
Search my keyword on google
When I search my keyword on google I can see my website, but when I connect to a VPN and again search it, I'm not in the search result, what happens on my website?
Reporting & Analytics | | Pintapin0 -
Google Analytics - Dashboard Question
I'm looking to set up a dashboard widget in Google Analytics that does the following but can't : Shows traffic sources in a table as the dimension, and wanting to show goal completions to a specific product page and then only show what the average time spent (by source) on just those product pages. It looks like it's showing the whole session duration for the entire source, but I want to create a secondary filter that is only showing the time spent on those specific pages. Can anyone help - or is this possible? Thanks all!
Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Google Cookies
Without Google Analytics, how would we be able to identify visitors who are from Google Organic? What's the cookie?
Reporting & Analytics | | AMHC0 -
Google Analytics Real Time Not Working! :(
Hello Everyone, Today, the real time feature in my google analytics stopped working. I am able to see that traffic is visiting my site, but not in real time. The real time count is usually at 0. But, there are some instances where real time will come back online, but there will be only 1 unique visitor. At any given time, our website usually has 20 visitors or so..Has anyone encountered this issue? Where should i start looking for fixes? What are the possible problems? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | KarlMarxTheBear0 -
How to safely exclude search result pages from Google's index?
Hello everyone,
Reporting & Analytics | | llamb
I'm wondering what's the best way to prevent/block search result pages from being indexed by Google. The way search works on my site is that search form generates URLs like:
/index.php?blah-blah-search-results-blah I wanted to block everything of that sort, but how do I do it without blocking /index.php ? Thanks in advance and have a great day everyone!0 -
Google Webmaster. Backlinks
GWMT only shows that there are 3 domains pointing to a site of mine. I'm looking under "Links to site". But this can't be true because the site is pretty old and I know there are hundreds of domains that point to this one. What would explain this discrepancy? And is there some other free tool that will show all the backlinks? I've used Opensite explorer but that tool isn't close to comprehensive as GWMT usually is (based on other sites I've analyzed)
Reporting & Analytics | | priceseo0 -
Setting up goals in Google Analytics
Hello! This question is seems so obvious that I'm also ashamed to ask... almost. If the goal of a website is to have a visitor complete a contact form, when setting up the Goal in Google Analytics (as a "URL destination") the URL of choice would be the form's thank you page, correct? Because that's the page that proves the visitor completed the task we want them the achieve. Right? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | SmileMoreSEO
Erik0 -
SEOmoz ranking off
In my last SEOmoz rankings update one of my keywords went from 1 to not in the top 50. This keyword is my brand name. It makes no sense that SEOmoz would say that it ranks not in the top 50 when I went to check it out on Google, we're still ranked number 1. I thought that this was very odd that the ranking would be so off. Has anyone else has this issue. uALPO uALPO.png
Reporting & Analytics | | MonsterWeb280