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I checked this morning and our sub-cat page is back in the SERPs for appropriate keywords and our home page is gone.  The SEO world is "normal" again.

I have attached 2 screenshots...1 shows the SERPs this morning and 1 shows that the organic traffic we are getting has already returned.  We already have more visitors as of 745am ET then the past 2 days.

I understand a little volatility around a particular page while Google does "something" (for lack of a better word this early morning).   Maybe pushing the page down while it "rechecks" things?  But, to show the home page on Page 1 for these sets of keywords is strange.  While I love our home page (smile) it really does not belong Page 1 for these keywords.  Plus, to see this happen 2x in the last 2 weeks each time lasting 1-2 days.  Never seen anything like this before.

Anyone else experience this?

serps-we-are-back.png traffic-returns.png

Today I noticed a really weird problem. Our LED Step Lights page (https://www.pegasuslighting.com/led-step-lights.html) has been replaced in the search results with our home page.  See screenshot below.

As I started to research what was going on, I noticed that this same thing must have happened on January 26 and 27 because in my Analytics I can see that our LED Step Lights sub-cat page had a sudden drop in traffic on those two days only to bounce back again on the 28th.  See screenshot below.

Our LED Step Lights page has had no changes in content, meta information, or anything in months.  We have done no recent link building to this page in years.

I don't understand what is going on.  This is a popular page for us generating decent traffic.  I really don't understand what is going on or even how to try and resolve this problem.

I checked our Search Console.  No messages.  No manual web spam actions.  Nothing to suggest that anything is going on except for the weird drops in traffic.

Has anyone ever seen this happen before? Does anyone have any ideas as to what may be going on?

serp-led-step-lights.png organic-traffic-drops.png search-console-led-step-lights.png

I work for an e-commerce website and we have written a super helpful eBook about one of the kinds of products we sell. The original idea was to offer it on the main page that we direct people to when they're shopping for this product, but it occurred to me that it might be better for link building and less cluttered if it has its own page. But we are concerned that link building to a separate page will not help with SEO for the main product page, which was the original goal. What should we do? Pros/cons?

Lynn:

A public service type thing letting you know about a bad URL and if someone copy and paste the URL it won't 404 anymore by setting up a 301 is possible.

I check my WMT about every month for 404s and this is the first time that I noticed these kinds of "links".

I just checked my latest backlinks report in WMT and these non-links don't show up in this report.

Perhaps there is some co-occurrence SEO benefit though?  Even if there is no SEO benefit it is nice "fixing" these for the potential website visitor to my site and I like seeing people mentioning us.

AndieF:

Sure.  Here is a link to one...

http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/lighting/msg112233371417.html

The link that shows up in my Webmaster Tools is in the 2nd post from davidtay - http://www.pegasuslighting.com/4inch-12v-recessed-lighting-housing-rem odel-75w.html.

Here is another one...

http://www.opensourcescript.net/answers/question.php?qid=20130425170248AACa3M1

The link that shows up in my Webmaster Tools is in the 3rd Answer - http://www.pegasuslighting.com/under-cab

Thanks for sharing that video! I can definitely see Matt's point about potential abuse.  However, from my Webmaster Tools it definitely looks like they are following these reference links and not completely ignoring them.

Today I was going through my Google Webmaster URL Errors (404s) info.  I came across two links in my URL Errors report that are NOT actually hyperlinks on the source page.

Both of these links are from two different forum-type websites.  In both cases,  the post references a URL on my website (incorrectly, hence the 404 error) in the text of the post but did NOT actually link to my site.  I looked at the source code...no href.

Both forum posts simply had a

tag or

tag around the incorrect URL text referencing my site.

I have never seen this before or heard that Google will follow a URL that is not actually a hyperlink.  Anyone else?