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
-
What does Google PageSpeed measure?
What does the PageSpeed tool actually measure? Does it say that a webserver is fast or slow? Thanks in advanced!
Technical SEO | | DanielMulderNL0 -
Title in google organic display
The title (top link) in my organic result in google search has my page title then a dash and another keyword. This keyword is not related to the search result. It may discourage clicks. Where does google get that and how can i change it? For example: Page Title - unrelated keyword
Technical SEO | | bhsiao
url
link description0 -
Why has my site cached date gone backwards
hi, something very unusual is happening with my site. a few months ago before we updated our site, i mean upgraded it, we would be indexed every day, now it seems we are getting indexed every four days, and now today i have noticed something very strange, this morning when i checked my site www.in2town.co.uk it was cached 31st july, but this afternoon it is showing 25th july. can anyone please let me know why this has happened many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Auto Generated Title by Google in SERP
Is there a way to tell Goolge to use my title instead of one generated by Google I have unique meta tags for each page, no duplicates, why Google is doing that? Thanks
Technical SEO | | KentR0 -
Google Search Results and Trailing Slash
I noticed that when I search a page; Google is returning my search results without a trailing slashing. I have my site setup to adding a trailing slash and redirect to one if it is not. So http://www.oxygenconcentratorstore.com/inogen-one-g3 redirects to site:http://www.oxygenconcentratorstore.com/inogen-one-g3/ I just did a search for site:http://www.oxygenconcentratorstore.com/inogen-one-g3/ and the only result is the non-trailing version. See attached. All internal links and sitemap include a trailing slash. Should I be concerned about this?? I am concerned that it could be hurting my search results. Any help or feedback would be awesome. trailingslash.jpg
Technical SEO | | chuck-layton0 -
How to block google robots from a subdomain
I have a subdomain that lets me preview the changes I put on my site. The live site URL is www.site.com, working preview version is www.site.edit.com The contents on both are almost identical I want to block the preview version (www.site.edit.com) from Google Robots, so that they don't penalize me for duplicated content. Is it the right way to do it: User-Agent: * Disallow: .edit.com/*
Technical SEO | | Alexey_mindvalley0 -
Duplicate Homepage In Google
Hi Just found through my SEO dashboard, Google has two versions of the same homepage, the root page, plus the index.html page, causing duplicate content from both the pages. what is the best option to ensure google only have 1 version of the homepage listed?
Technical SEO | | rfksolutionsltd0 -
Google SERPs and NoIndex directives.
We have pages that have been added to robots.txt as url patterns in DisAllow. Also, we have the meta noindex tags on the pages themselves. But we are finding the pages in index. I don't think they are higher up in the rankings and they don't have any descriptions, any previews or any cached pages. Why does Google show these pages? Could it be due to internal or external linking?
Technical SEO | | gaganc0