Site: search doesn't return homepage first
-
When searching for site:myclient.com their homepage doesn't appear first. I know some SEOs have reported this was a warning sign that there was a penalty.
Here is what I've checked/found:
- Toolbar pagerank remains strong.
- Homepage is indexed.
- SEO traffic is falling, but its been gradually falling for a year now, mainly due to the client neglecting any type of marketing campaigns or link building, I believe. There was not a specific drop that could be tied to a penalty.
- Site remains well indexed. 62,742 of 63,021 URLs in the sitemap are indexed.
- Site is a large ecommerce site, so many pages are duplicate content (product descriptions).
- Homepage does rank #1 when searching for string of text present on the homepage.
- Nothing unusual in Google Webmaster Tools
- Search for myclient.com returns homepage with 6 expanded sitelinks under it.
- Google safe browsing check shows no malware.
Anything else I should check?
-
Did you ever get anywhere with this? I'm having the same problem?
-
Here's a video from Matt Cutts about how the site: operator works and how the results are ordered. Does this help at all?
-
The homepage is not in the first 5 pages of results, but there are over 60K pages on the site.
The homepage has by far the most link juice, and there are no canonicals.
Google seems to be showing all the individual product pages first. This is unusual, as you would expect the homepage, category pages, and other pages linked sitewide to appear first.
-
Are you saying the default page isn't in the site:name.com results >at all<, or just that it's not the first result? If the latter, it may be possible that there's a canonical/no-index situation going that is pushing all the internal link structure juice onto another page. I believe Google will order site: results by relevance/strength by default, and this implies either that A)the strength of the home page is weak or B)the link structure/canonical layout is passing all the home page's link juice elsewhere. This is entirely guesswork mind you, but is my first impression.
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
-
How to handle pages I can't delete?
Hello Mozzers, I am using wordpress and I have a small problem. I have two sites, I don't want but the dev of the theme told me I can't delete them. /portfolio-items/ /faq-items/ The dev said he can't find a way to delete it because these pages just list faqs/portfolio posts. I don't have any of these posts so basically what I have are two sites with just the title "Portfolio items" and "FAQ Items". Furthermore the dev said these sites are auto-generated so he can't find a way to remove them. I mean I don't believe that it's impossible, but if it is how should I handle them? They are indexed by search engines, should I remove them from the index and block them from robots.txt? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | grobro0 -
Why can't I rank for my brand name?
We are soon to launch a new company in New Zealand called Zing. I have been tasked with the challenge of ranking as highly as possible for anything to do with Zing before launch in February. Zing is in the financial industry so my colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to make a small blog (very small with literally one post) that reviewed other financial lenders. This sight stayed online for a couple of months before it was replaced. The official website is still yet to launch, so as an in between, I asked that we make a splash page with a small competition on it (see here at zing.co.nz). I would have preferred there were more keywords on the website but this was not achieved. I am still pushing for this and am hoping to get a few pages on there in the near future. Instead of getting the keywords on the splash page, I was given permission to start a subdomain, (blog.zing.co.nz). This contains many more common search terms and although its not quite doing the job I would like, the rankings for Zing have started to increase. At the moment, we are ranking number 1 for a few brand related keywords such as zing loans. This is why I feel something is wrong, because we rank number 1 for over 10 similar terms but yet we DO NOT EVEN APPEAR on the search engines at all for Zing. Have we been penalized? Do you have any suggestions at all? Do you think we could have been penalized for the first average blog? Maybe I messed up the swap over? Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Startupfactory0 -
Using Wix and the keyword grader tool isn't working.
After reading other posts about Wix and SEO I think I need to change the web design provider to something I have more control of SEO options. Does anyone have any suggestions of something I can use?
Technical SEO | | benjacksoncook0 -
Why aren't certain links showing in SEOMOZ?
Hi, I have been trying to understand our page rank and domains that are linking to us. When I look at the list of linking domains, I see some bigger ones are missing and I don't know why. For example, we are in the Yahoo Directory with a link to trophycentral.com, but SEOMOZ is not showing the link. If SEOMOZ is not seeing it, my guess is Google is not either, which concerns me. There are several onther high page rank domains also not showing. Anyone have any idea why? Thanks! BTW, our domain is trophycentral.com
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Are these 'not found' errors a concern?
Our webmaster report is showing thousands of 'not found' errors for links that show up in javascript code. Is this something we should be concerned about? Especially since there are so many?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
What does it mean by 'blocked by Meta Robot'? How do I fix this?
When i get my crawl diagnostics, I am getting a blocked by Meta Robot, which means that my page is not being indexed in the search engines... obviously this is a major issue for organic traffic!!! What does it actually mean, and how can i fix it?
Technical SEO | | rolls1230 -
We're working on a site that is a beer company. Because it is required to have an age verification page, how should we best redirect the bots (useragents) to the actual homepage (thus skipping ahead of the age verification without allowing all browsers)?
This question is about useragents and alcohol sites that have an age verification screen upon landing on the site.
Technical SEO | | OveritMedia0 -
What is the most likely reason we aren't ranking #1 for our keyword.
So we are targeting a keyword and we are ranking 2nd for it. Another company is ranking number 1. What is the best element to target for us to improve into position number one? Page authority: them 41, us 40. mozRank: them 5.52, us 3.38. mozTrust: them 5.86, us 5.58. mT/mR: them 1.1, us 1.4. Total Links: them 6571, us 68. Internal Links: them 1138, us 1. External Links: them 5431, us 63. Followed Links: them 6569, us 64. Nofollowed Links: them 2, us 4. Linking Root Domains: them 25, us 41. Broadkeyword usage in page title: them YES, us YES. KW in domain: them no, us partial. Exact anchor test links: them 161, us 21. % of links with exact anchor text: them 2%, us 30%. Linking Root domains with exact anchor text: them 2, us 11. Domain Authority: them 41, us 40. Domain MozRank: them 3.7, us 4.5. Domain MozTrust: them 3.8, us 4.5. External links to domain: them 22574, us 217. Linking root domains: them 50, us 48. Linking C-blocks: them 46, us 42. Tweets: them 1, us 12. FB shares: them 6, us 26.
Technical SEO | | Benj250