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
-
Is putting a manufacturer's product manual on my site in PDF duplicate content
I add the product manuals to our product pages to provide additional product information to our customers. Is this considered duplicate content? Is there a best way to do this so that I can offer the information to my customers without getting penalized for it? Should they be indexable? If not how do I control?
Technical SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
My Home Page meta title on Google isn't what it should be
Hey guys My website is http://www.oxfordmeetsfifth.com According to SEOcentro, my website should appear to Google as Fashion Tips for Women | Oxford Meets Fifth. I have used the Yoast plugin and force rewrote titles to ensure that is the home page meta title. It also appears correctly in browser. Could anyone advise why this is the case? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | OxfordMeetsFifth0 -
Link removal from search rank checking sites
I'm going through the link removal process for unnatural links to a site. While I'm able to identify the obvious link profile and seo-article links that Google wants removed, what should we do about the links that are generated by the various seo link investigation and ranking services? Example: http://www.seoprofiler.com/analyze/allamericanfencing.com This site (seoprofiler) automatically creates these links to web sites when it generates its reports. Are those links that need to be removed or disavowed, or will Google not care? I want to err on the side of caution, but don't know how to treat these types of pages. The site didn't ask for or lobby for those links, so it's "natural" in that sense, but they're not editorially earned either (except for happen to be ranking for a similar term). Does anyone have experience on this aspect of the unnatural link grooming process?
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
My blog page isn't ranking in Google
Hi, I noticed that my blog page on my site isn't in Google when i search for full URL link http://www.asggutter.com/blog/ instead i see page that isn't even working asggutter.com/sitemap.xml screen shot http://screencast.com/t/6OVFLwL8nTL How i can i fix that. Thanks
Technical SEO | | tonyklu0 -
If you are organizing the site structure for an ecommerce site, how would you do it?
Should you use not use slashes and use all dashes or use just a few slashes and the rest with dashes? For example, domain.com/category/brand/product-color-etc OR domain.com/anythinghere-color-dimensions-etc Which structure would you rather go for and why?
Technical SEO | | Zookeeper0 -
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 -
Grr . . . Just can't seem to get there
mrswitch.com.au is one site that we are consistantly struggling with . . . It has a page rank of 3 which beats most of the competitors, but when it comes to Google AU searches such as Sydney Electrician and Electrician Sydney etc, we just can't seem to get there and the rankings keep dropping. We backlink and update the pages on a regular basis Any ideas? - Could it be the custom CMS system?
Technical SEO | | kayweb0 -
Why won't google rank my homepage
I have a site that ranks high on the first page for it's main keyword at both Bing and Yahoo but horribly at Google. It's a domain I recently acquired and am in the process of optimizing. My goal is to improve the relevancy for the site in Google so that the site shows up better for it's main keyword. With that said I've been working on building valuable links to the page and I would like some opinions on why the homepage is not ranking for the main keyword. Instead I have a junky content page that is ranking for the term. So in the event that you have a exact match domain showing up very high in Bing and Yahoo but not in Google for the homepage, what factors would you look at? Add in the complexity that a page other than the homepage is making grounds on the exact match keyword having moved up from "not in the top 100" to the 50's, what's my best solution to ranking the homepage? The site is optimized well and most inbound links predominantly point to the homepage.
Technical SEO | | DotCar0