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
-
Google is indexing our old domain
We changed our primary domain from vivitecsolutions.com to vivitec.net. Google is indexing our new domain, but still has our old domain indexed too. The problem is that the old site is timing out because of the https: Thought on how to make the old indexing go away or properly forward the https?
Technical SEO | | AdsposureDev0 -
Google Tag Manager - Debug Mode
Hi I am in the process of implementing Tag Manager across one of the sites that I manage. But it is a very large site so we have taken the decision to implement it on a number of important pages first and then update the rest of the site incrementally. The pages that we have chosen to implement GTM on are confirmation pages as we use double click floodlight tags to track a lot of our conversions. However when I go into debug mode on tag manager I can not seem to get the screen that lets you know if the tag is firing or not. Has anyone else had this problem? Could this be because I don't have GTM code on the homepage of the site? When I implemented Tag manager on other sites that I managed I had no such problems. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Google Site Search
I'm considering to implement google site search bar into my site.
Technical SEO | | JonsonSwartz
I think I probably choose the version without the ads (I'll pay for it). does anyone use Google Site Search and can tell if it's a good thing? does it affects in any way on seo? thank you0 -
Google Analytics Annotation
Is there a way to add annotations to the GA visitors graph? There is a YouTube tutorial on how to do this but the comments suggest is has not be rolled out yet in the US and I can't get it to work. Best,
Technical SEO | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Google Page speed
I get the following advice from Google page speed: Suggestions for this page The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 request(s) and 77.1KiB. http://www.irishnews.com/ http://www.irishnews.com/index.aspx I'm not sure how to fix this the default page is http://www.irishnews.com/index.aspx, anybody know what need to be done please advise. thanks
Technical SEO | | Liammcmullen0 -
Server crashed - What should I do regarding Google SERP´s?
We have several travel websites in Uruguay since 2003. These sites have a very high PR and Trust. The server where all our sites are hosted has crashed and we have been for 2 days now trying to fix all this mess. We hope this problem will be fixed today. Please I really need to know what should I do regarding Google. I mean one of our sites has been ranking in top 1 positions for more than 150 keywords. Will we loose all that? What can we do about it? It´s the first time this has happened to our sites.
Technical SEO | | ceci27100 -
Google places page where is my additional information
Hi When creating Google places you can add additional information but where does this information go? its not showing up on the page when you place page? Whats the best practice when creating pages in relation to optimising them ? thanks
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Is google all over the place tonight?
Is it me or is google all over the place tonight? Whilst checking my rankings I came across a site with a page authority of 29 and 23 links from 5 domains ranking at number 6 for a competitive keyword! This site came from nowhere and I'm getting different results every time I search! Weird....
Technical SEO | | SamCUK0