Holiday hijack lowers Google ranking
-
A client of ours made a mistake that has dropped their Google rankings. They posted a holiday greeting on our homepage for several weeks, and now the search engines are not picking the page up at all. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to repair this?
-
As long as you replace the flash with substantive relevant content and link to the homepage from other internal pages or outside sources, there is no reason the page should not be re-ranked (based on the new content, overall authority of the site through other content and backlinking, etc.)
It was not likely that this was a penalty, just a drop in any searchable ranking as a response to a lack of content on the page and therefore, there was nothing in which to rank the page for any particular keyword or authority by Google.
-
Client
-
Was that done by client or real hijackers?
-
They replaced their standard home page with a flash holiday greeting.
-
Please explain "hijack".
I doubt that a holiday greeting in place for several weeks will cause a problem with rankings - unless that greeting deoptimized the page.
-
What was the greeting? Did the just add the holiday greeting or did the add the greeting and delete other content?
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
-
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Google is showing the Wrong Date for our Holiday.
Friday, December 16 is Free Shipping Day. However, Google says it's actually 2 days later. Does anybody know how we can get that changed? See: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=free shipping day
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lk990 -
Will two navigation components (one removed by Javascript) impact Google rankings?
We are trying to eliminate tedium when developing complexly designed responsive navigations for mobile, desktop and tablet. The changes between breakpoints in our designs are too complex to be handled with css, so we are literally grabbing individual elements with javascript and moving them around. What we'd like to do instead is have two different navigations on the page, and toggle which one is on the DOM based on breakpoint. These navigations will have the same links but different markup. Will having two navigation components on the page at page load negatively impact our Google SEO rankings or potential to rank, even if we are removing one or the other from the DOM with JavaScript?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Something is killing my rankings
Hello, I'm in the process of re-doing the following two domains: www.musillawfirm.com and www.melbourneduilawfirm.com because something absolutely plummeted my rankings. Any specific thoughts on why the sited could have gone from top 10 to being virtually deleted? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | musillawfirm0 -
Long tail rankings
Hi everybody. We've been working with http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/ for some time now. Rankings for broad terms such as 'lawn mowers' and 'lawnmowers' are superb, and we're pretty happy. Bizarrely though, rankings for products are very poor. For example this page - http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/honda-hrg465sd - is currently 17th for 'Honda HRG465SD IZY'. We've done lots of work onsite, clearing up duplicate content, improving copy and tidying up URLs. However, none of this seems to have had a major impact on the product pages. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
What is next from Google Panda and Google Penguin?
Does anyone know what we can expect next from Google Panda/Penguin? We did prepare for this latest update and so far so good.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jjgonza0 -
How to position in local Google
Hello, It's been easy for me to jump in .com - English only results. But, regional google is making me problems. How to position there? What are the top 3 key elements for ranking locally that don't matter much internationally? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DaBomb110 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610