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
-
Subpages have Page Authority of 1 behind Home with DA 50
How come that our subpages all have a PA 1 if the home got DA 50? technical specialities: Megamenue opens on click only Category pages dont exist (home/i-do-not-exist-as-page-category/PA-1-subpage) All subpages have a high amount of links to ressources (over 200) what would be the most obvious cause for the low PA? would the external link profile be the main reason? thanks in advance. I would be happy to answer your questions Kind regards
Technical SEO | | brainfruit0 -
Home page not indexed by any search engines
We are currently having an issue with our homepage not being indexed by any search engines. We recently transferred our domain to Godaddy and there was an issue with the DNS. When we typed our url into Google like this "https://www.mysite.com" nothing from the site came up in the search results, only our social media profiles. When we typed our url into Google like this "mysite.com" we were sent to a GoDaddy parked page. We've been able to fix the issue over at Godaddy and the url "mysite.com" is not being redirected to "https://mysite.com" but, Google and the other search engines have yet to respond. I would say our fix has been in place for at least 72 hours. Do I need to give this more time? I would think that at lease one search engine would have picked up on the change by now and would start indexing the site properly.
Technical SEO | | bcglf1 -
Unavoidable duplicate page
Hi, I have an issue where I need to duplicate content on a new site that I am launching. Visitors to the site need to think that product x is part of two different services. e.g. domain.com/service1/product-x domain.com/service2/product-x Re-writing content for product x for each service section is not an option but possibly I could get over that only one product-x page is indexed by search engines. What's the best way to do this? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, Stuart
Technical SEO | | Stuart260 -
Help! Pages not being indexed
Hi Mozzers, I need your help.
Technical SEO | | bshanahan
Our website (www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com) stopped being indexed in search engines following a round of major changes to URLs and content. There were a number of dead links for a few days before 301 redirects were properly put in place. And now, only 3 pages show up in bing when I do the search "site:barnettcapitaladvisors.com". A bunch of pages show up in Google for that search, but they're not any of the pages we want to show up. Our home page and most important services pages are nowhere in search results. What's going on here?
Our sitemap is at http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/sites/default/files/users/AndrewCarrillo/sitemap/sitemap.xml
Robots.txt is at: http://www.barnettcapitaladvisors.com/robots.txt Thanks!0 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Why is my office page not being indexed?
Good Morning from 24 degrees C partly cloudy wetherby UK 🙂 This page is not being indexed by Google:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/office-to-let-leeds/ 1st Question Ive checked robots txt file no problems, i'm in the midst of updating the xml sitemap (it had the old one in place). It only has one link from this page http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/Site-Map/ So is the reason oits not being indexed just a simple case of lack if SEO juice from inbound links so the remedy lies in routing more inbound links to the offending page? 2nd question Is the quickest way to diagnose if a web address is not being indexed to cut and paste the url in the Google search box and if it doesnt return the page theres a problem? Thanks in advance, David0 -
Google Penalty?
Hi, I have recently been asked to help www.mycanvas.ie I have a feeling they have a google penalty. All their Google Keywords have literally dropped out of the Google SERP but they are still shown on Yahoo SERP. I recently did a site:www.mycanvas.ie and the pages are still in google index. The only thing that comes to mind is that the site owner submitted to 380 web directories over a period of 2 months with http://www.directorymaximizer.com/ do you think this could be causing the problem with google? Advise and suggestions are welcomed, thank you.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
301 redirecting some pages directly, and the rest to a single page
I've read through the Redirect guide here already but can't get this down in my .htaccess I want to redirect some pages specifically (/contactinfo.html to the new /contact.php) And I want all other pages (not all have equivalent pages on the new site) to redirect to my new (index.php) homepage. How can I set it up so that some specific pages redirect directly, and all others go to one page? I already have the specific oldpage.html -> newpage.php redirects in place, just need to figure out the broad one for everything else.
Technical SEO | | RyanWhitney150