Home page penalty?
-
What does it mean when your home page has a penalty? I have a site that has good rankings for many pages, but my home page seems to be penalized by Google. I tried searching for my home page URL in Google, www.xxxxxx.com and my page doesn't show up, but sub pages do show up? What would cause this penalty and how do you correct this issue.
-
I didn't get into anything moral about it. I'm going from Google's eyes -- if I am the search engine and I have xx sites with the same content to display, is there a reason I should display this site above any of those other xx identical sites? And is there a site out there that is better than those xx number of identical sites that offers more information? Google's out to make money too. If they don't satisfy their users with their results, their users will go elsewhere.
To go specifically to your home page question, do you know what is putting the hop parameter in there? That's likely not helping things.
I'm looking at Open Site Explorer, and this doesn't appear to be too strong of a site. It has 55 total links, from only 10 domains. The top link is from "Free For All Link Page", and there are several link pages (rather than editorial content) in your inlinks. These aren't sending the highest quality signals to your site, either.
-
I appreciate your advice, but I'm not looking for your moral justification for my websites. I'm a paying member of Seomoz. Most sites online(commercial) sites wouldn't meet your exceedingly high standards. Why can't you offer advice to help me fix my issue without the offhand comments about if my site should exist or not? Most commercial sites aren't up to your standards. There are thousands of commercial sites that have less content than my sites and have been highly ranked for years in Google.
-
There are a bunch of other affiliate sites out there that have the same copy for the home page. Take a random sentence from your home page and put it in a search engine and you'll see what I mean. That's one issue.
Another is that you seem to have some parameters indexed. In Google, I searched [site:officialunclaimedfunds.com "uncle sam" and www.officialunclaimedfunds.com/?hop=jokes&&What was indexed.
IMHO, this is just another thin affiliate site. In my few minutes of looking, there's nothing here that you can't find on a large number of other clickbank affiliate sites all selling me the exact same thing. The only advantage I see is that there aren't the ton of ads that I see on some of the other sites. Put another way, is there a reason why this page SHOULD be ranked?
-
This sitee is not the same one I discussed earlier. I don't have a noindex tag and it's not blocked in robots.txt. I'm not getting a 404 error and my site is verified in Google Webmaster Tools. My site is www.officialunclaimedfunds.com.
-
Also, is this the same site you brought up in other posts, or is it a different site?
-
Have you taken a look to make sure that there's not a noindex tag on the home page, or that it's blocked in robots.txt? Is your home page in Yahoo or Bing? If you search the title tag text to see if that shows up? Does your home page return a 404 in the server header?
It's a bit harder to figure out without knowing your URL, but my first thought is to see if it's something technical where Google is behaving like it should, or if there really is some type of penalty.
EDIT: Have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools and looked for any messages there about your site?
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
-
Why google does not remove my page?
Hi everyone, last week i add "Noindex" tag into my page, but that site still appear in the organic search. what other things i can do for remove from google?
Technical SEO | | Jorge_HDI0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Google sees 2 home pages while I only have 1
How to solve the problem of google seeing both domain.com and domain.com/index.htm when I only have one file? Will the cannonical work? If so which? Or any other solutions for a novice? I learned from previous blogs that it needs to be done by hosting service, but Yahoo has no solution.
Technical SEO | | Kurtyj0 -
Different URLS for our multi language pages caused penalty?
Hi all, We have a website www.phoneboxlanguage.com with 4 different language versions (Spanish, French, Italian, German). We have all the different versions on totally different URLS. E.G the French URL is www.cours-telephone-anglais.com. Recently this month we saw a huge drop in SERPS for all the 'foreign' language pages. This had happened before for the Spanish and French, which we put down to keyword density issues, so created new URLS for those pages. However now all 4 foreign pages have dropped. Could this be due instead to a penalty for duplicate sites? The content is obviously different due to different languages, but the coding and templates for the sites are the same. How can we find out this is the case and what should we do? I was thinking after some research on the forum to create subfolders in the original (phoneboxlanguage.com) and then create 301 redirects, from the old dropped sites, or would their penalties be bad for our original site, if this were the case? We are obviously very keen to not further damage the site and the original site which remains o.k. Many thanks for your kind help. Quime.
Technical SEO | | Quime0 -
Duplicate Home Page Fix Doesnt Work :-(
Good Afternoon from 16 degrees C 85% Humidity Wetherby UK... Having ran a screaming from report for www.davidclick.com the tool diagnosed there was two versions of the home page and here are the 2 urls for the home page: www.davidclick.com
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
www.davidclick.com/index.htm I leaped into action and added this line of code into the head section of www.davidclick.com/index.htm and hers it is:http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/canonical-code.jpg But why when i run a screaming frog report its still telling me there are two versions of thye home page. Any insights welcome 🙂0 -
Dealing with manual penalty...
I'm in the back-and-forth with Google's Quality Search team at the moment. We discovered a manual penalty on our website and have been trying to get it removed as of late. Problem is, tons of spammy incoming links. We did not ask for or purchase any of these links, it just so happens that spammy websites are linking to our site. Regardless, I've done my best to remove quite a few links in the past week or so, responding to the Quality Search team with a spreadsheet of the links in question and the action taken on each link. No luck so far. I've heard that if I send an email to a website asking for a link removal, I should share that with Google as well. I may try that. Some of the links are posted on websites with no contact info. A WhoIs search brings up a hidden registrant. Removing these links is far from easy. My question is, what are some techniques that are proven to be effective when working your way through the removal of a manual penalty? I know Google isn't going to tell me all of the offending links (they've offered a few examples, we've had those removed - still penalized) so what's the best way for me to find them myself? And, when I have a link removed, it may stay in Webmaster Tools as an active link for a while even though it no longer exists. Does the Quality Search team use Webmaster Tools to check or do they use something else? It's an open-ended question, really. Any help dealing with a manual penalty and what you have done to get that penalty removed is of great help to me. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ccorlando0 -
Should I delete a page or remove links on a penalized page?
Hello All, If I have a internal page that has low quality links point to it or a penality. Can I just remove the page, and start over versus trying to remove the links? Over time wouldn't this page disapear along with the penalty on that page? Kinda like pruning a tree? Cutting off the junk limbs so other could grow stronger, or to start new fresh ones. Example: www.domain.com Penalized Internal Page: (Say this page is penalized due to keyword stuffing, and has low quality links pointing to it like blog comments, or profiles) www.domain.com/penalized-internal-page.com Would it be effective to just delete this page (www.domain.com/penalized-internal-page.com) and start over with a new page. New Internal Page: www.domain.com/new-internal-page.com I would of course lose any good links point to that page, but it might be easier then trying to remove old back links. Thoughts? Thanks! Pete
Technical SEO | | Juratovic0 -
How do I know which page a link is from
I've got an interesting situation. I hope you can help. I have a list of links but I'm not sure which pages of my site they are from. How do I know which page a specific link is from? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | VinceWicks0