Am I Being Penalized For Having My Whole Site In A Subfolder Named With A Keyword?
-
I inherited a client. For some reason, their previous webmaster set up the site so everything is in a subfolder /law/. It's an attorney website.
All the urls have the primary domain name /law/ and then assigned url. I can't image this is helping but could the site be penalized for this by Google or Bing?
It's set up like this:
www.attorneysite.com**/law/**therestoftheurl
/law/ is included in EVERY PAGE... even the homepage.
-
I do not see any violation of Google or Bing guidelines with that URL setup. I would not necessarily recommend doing it, but if your client did it would not be a violation as stated.
Based on your question, it seems the site is penalized. There is a lot more details required to diagnose the penalty. Some initial ideas can be generated from a few basic questions:
-
on what date was the site penalized?
-
how was the site penalized? Was the entire site removed from the index? Or certain pages / keywords?
-
was there any notice received in WMT?
-
are there any known violations of the guidelines? poor content? manipulative links? other issues?
-
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 for Keyword
Hi, In the last couple months my client has dropped for several main keyword (not all but some). I suspect this has to do with algorithm updates in March. I am trying to better target the site for this keyword as I discovered it is only mentioned in the home page title on their site at this time. The homepage did not have a good H1 tag, so I added the keyword to that as well. It's in the menu and item page meta descriptions (ecommerce site) and I added it to the homepage meta description. I also suggested to the client that we place it and variants of it in various places throughout the site (where it makes sense). I have a couple questions: Is having an H1 tag at the bottom of the page a concern? It's there because there are various product banners and other information at the top and I didn't want to disrupt the flow of the site. It is above the footer of the page. Does there need to be text underneath? -Is there anything else I can do to improve my rankings for this keyword? I haven't really dealt with this before and any input is appreciated. I also suggested they should try to improve their site overall with more descriptive product descriptions and trying to get backlinks from vendors and relevant contacts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac260 -
Is this site buying backlinks?
dankstop.com Almost all of their links come from mainly the same few sites, and some of their links have a really high spam score.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tlorenzi0 -
Are links on sites that require PAD files good or bad for SEO?
I want to list our product on a number of sites that require PAD files such as Software Informer and Softpedia. Is this a good idea from an SEO perspective to have links on these pages?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SnapComms0 -
Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?
Hey Everyone, I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest. For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc). In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option. However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _JediMindBender
JMB0 -
Is it a good idea to target a similar versions of a keyword?
Salute you all, I am optimizing a site for an attorney. I have done some good research and find the keyword difficulties. Some of my keywords are very similar was wondering is this a good idea and safe (white hat) or not? e.g. page title: 1) city immigration lawyer 2) city immigration attorney My main and first reason is to target all users. Since some will search under 'attorney' and some under 'Lawyer'. Secondly one is easier than the other. I appreciate any input from more experienced seo experts. Chris 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Chris-tx0 -
Creating duplicate site for testing purpose. Can it hurt original site
Hello, We are soon going to upgrade the cms to latest version along with new functionlaities - the process may take anywhere from 4 week to 6 weeks. may suggest - we need to work on live server, what we have planned take exact replica of site and move to a test domain, but on live server Block Google, Bing, Yahoo - User-agent: Google Disallow: / , User-agent: Bing Disallow: / User-agent: Yahoo Disallow: / in robots.txt Will upgrade CMS and add functionality - will test the entire structure, check url using screaming frog or xenu and move on to configure the site on original domain The process upgradation and new tools may take 1 - 1.5 month.... Concern is that despite blocking Google, Bing & Yahoo through User agent disallow - can still the url can be crawled by the search engines - if yes - it may hurt the original site as will read on as entire duplicate or is there any alternate way around.. Many thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi1 -
Link quality warning from GWT and drop in keyword ranking.
So last December we saw our hard work pay off as our Panda penalty was lifted and our traffic shot back up to pre-Panda levels. Then in February we received this note: We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Since December we've lost position on 80% of our top 100 keywords. I've gone through our links and can't figure out what the problem may be. Maybe I'm not using OSE properly. We don't buy links so I'm not sure what the problem is. If someone can walk me through using OSE to see what the problem may be I would appreciate it. Our domain is http://bit.ly/rbkYkp
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
Dramatic fall in SERP's for all keywords at end of March 2012?? Help!
Hi, Our website www.photoworld.co.uk has been improving it's SERP's for the last 12 months or so, achieving page 1 rankings for most of our key terms. Then suddenly, around the end of March, we suffered massive drops in nearly all of our key terms (see attached image for more info). Basically I wondered if anyone had any clues on what Google has suddenly taken a huge dislike to with our site and steps we can put in place to aid with rankings recovery ASAP. Thanks n8taO.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cewe0