Google Gone Mad or Its Some kind of BlackHat ?
-
I was browsing google.co.in and searched for "Mussoorie Hotels" without quote and came across the attached result! the website sitting on #9 is sitting with a wrong page .. i.e a Hotel Page of other place .. i.e nainital
can someone tell me is there something wrong with google or the guy is using some blackhat technique for his/her website ??
M trying to rank for the keyword "mussoorie hotels" from past 4-5 months Still no luck even in top 5 pages :()
-
But if someone can tell me the exact reason why nainital page is ranking instead of mussoorie will be greatful as it might help me to get my rank back!
I am not sure what other words can be shared to help you better understand the situation.
The travelmasti website has legitimately earned a first page spot for their website. For an unknown reason, the wrong URL is presently showing. You are correct right now there is not a 301 in place. The current page does not show a canonical tag either. It is possible there was a 301 or canonical and it has been removed. It is more likely there is some other issue causing this confusion.
My expectation is Google will resolve the issue soon replace the currently result once they index the /mussoorie.htm page.
The recommended approach for improving your site's rankings is always to focus on your site. Even if you were to get this result removed from Google's index, the improvement to your site is insignificant.
-
@Ryan Kent - I've already checked it twice but neither the page is 301 nor its is using canonical, All results were fine till friday I guess and travelmasti.com/mussoorie.htm was ranking instead of travelmasti.com/nainital.htm for the term mussoorie hotels,
Also, I'll be great full if you can remove the live link from your post
My website with a different URL was thrown on 3rd page last month which was ranking in Top #3 from past 2 years m still not sure whats going on, m sure that my website is safe and is not affected with panda or penguine!
But if someone can tell me the exact reason why nainital page is ranking instead of mussoorie will be greatful as it might help me to get my rank back!
-
I never went that far to check that but I believe you.
-
This seems like a simple case of the wrong page appearing in search results. The correct page is likely: http://www.travelmasti.com/mussoorie.htm
The site has a DA of 60 and at a glance seems legitimate. If you perform a Google.co.in search for "http://www.travelmasti.com/mussoorie.htm" then the URL http://www.travelmasti.com/nainital.htm appears as the first result.
There are several ways this issue can occur and it seems unlikely the site intentionally caused this to happen. The page could have been 301 redirected. The page could have had a canonical tag which was removed. The site is very poorly coded with hundreds of coding errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.travelmasti.com%2Fnainital.htm&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)
One of the coding errors could be the problem.
This is a case of a legitimate site ranking for a term it should rank for, but the wrong page is being offered.
-
Hi Jack,
All though I do agree with you in general, I think this case is slightly different:
- According to opensiteexplorer.org there are no backlinks to this page containing the word mussoorie.
- The linkprofile of this page looks very unnatural (almost no branded/url anchors and all are very nice search queries). It is thus very likely that they purchased these links (i.e.use black hat SEO).
Greets,
Sven Witteveen
Expand Online -
Hi wildhawk,
All websites on the first page for this query have quite a high PA and DA. They have thousands of backlinks (probably payed for them considering the anchor texts) and are also ´quite relevant´ for the search query.
The basis is this:
You rank based on your on-page optimization (relevance) and off-page optimization (importance). You may have a page that is far more optimized for a specific keyword and thus are also more relevant. That doesn't mean you outperform the 1-10 results on the combined result of relevance + importance.
Long story short: My guess is that you need to work on your linkprofile.
I wish you all the best and keep in mind that you are trying to compete in an extremely competitive market.
Sven Witteveen
Expand Online -
m seeing this page since today morning till last night it was all fine! and this page was not even in top 50 for this keyword!
-
I love how everyone thinks people use blackhat to get ranked above other people. Anyways he probably just has backlinks for your phrase, thus Google have ranked him there.
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 are these blackhat sites so successful?
Here's an interesting conundrum. Here are three sites with their respective ranking for "dental implants [city]:" http://dentalimplantsvaughan.ca - 9 (on google.ca) http://dentalimplantsinhonoluluhi.com - 2 (on google.com) http://dentalimplantssurreybc.ca - 7 (on google.ca) These markets are not particularly competitive, however, all of these sites suffer from: Duplicate content, both internally and across sites (all of this company's implant sites have the same exact content, minus the bio pages and the local modifier). Average speed score. No structured data No links And these sites are ranking relatively quickly. The Vaughan site went live 3 months ago. But, what's boggling my mind is that they rank on the first page at all. It seems they're doing the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do, yet they rank relatively well.
Technical SEO | | nowmedia10 -
Vanity URLs are being indexed in Google
We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like: www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to? If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seogirl221 -
Google Sitemap - How Long Does it Take Google To Index?
We have changed our sitemap about 1 month ago and Google is yet to index it. We have run a site: search and we still have many pages indexed but we are wondering how long does it take for google to index our sitemap? The last sitemap we put up had thousands of pages indexed within a fortnight, but for some reason this version is taking way longer. We are also confident that there are no errors in this version. Help!
Technical SEO | | JamesDFA0 -
Google Webmaster Tools: MESSAGE
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/,
Technical SEO | | iskq
Some of your site's pages may be using techniques that do not comply with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
On your site, in particular, does not provide an adequate level of innovation in low-quality unique content or set of pages. Examples of this type of thin affiliate pages, pages, bridge pages, it will automatically be created or copied content. For more information about the unique and interesting content, visit http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361.
We recommend you to make the necessary changes to your site to fit your site's quality guidelines. After making these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you have questions about how to resolve this problem, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team **After this massege ve find our low quality pages and we added this urls on Robots.txt. Other than that, what can we do? ** **Our site is a home to home moving listing portal. Consumers who wants to move his home fills a form so that moving companies can cote prices. We were generating listing page URL’s by using the title submitted by customer. **0 -
Google Sitelinks
Hello, Good afternoon. I am having a site issue with Sitelinks. For some reason when I search Google for the brand I represent "California Olive Ranch" Sitelinks are not being generated. When I search for "Cal Olive Ranch" our site links are being generated. Our domain is Californiaoliveranch.com. Is there a way to tell Google to to change the site links to match our domain and brand name? Is this something that can be done in Google Webmasters? Thank you very much for your help. Adam P
Technical SEO | | apost40 -
How to optimize for different google seach center (google.de, google.ch) ?
We all use Deutsch language and (.com) domains for the sites. I ranked well in google.com ,but not so well in google.de , google.ch , my competitors ranked much better in google.de,google.ch. I checked most of their outbound-links, but get few information. Links from (.DE) domains or links from sites located in German help the rank for special google seach center ? (google.de, google.ch) . Or some other factors i missed? please help.
Technical SEO | | sunvary0 -
Closed Address Google Local
While there are some older conversations pertaining to Google Local/Plus, I am not sure if issue is a bit different. The company I work for at one time had two locations. Both are brick & mortar, physical locations. The factory closed several years ago. To my surprise, the old location is coming up in a few Google searches as a Google Plus page (actually just located it toward the end of last week.) It is currently unclaimed. There are a handful of citations out on the web as well. To remove the factory listing (the one we don't want, which I am pretty sure is confusing Google), what is the best approach? Remove/update citations for the old listing? And then claim it and suspend it using our Google Places account? It took a while to claim the listing we actually want and I just want to be sure we handle removing the old one correctly. Any insight or advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
Google cached https rather than http
Google is using a secure version of a page (https) that is meant to be displayed using only http. I don't know of any links to the page using https, but want to verify that. I only have 1 secure page on the site and it does not link to the page in question. What is the easiest way to nail down why Google is using the https version?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0