Possible Penguin 2.1 fix - Anybody tested this?
-
Possible Penguin 2.1 fix?
This happened to client site - Stay with me - this takes some explaining…
A clients home page is set as index.html
Which in domain settings goes to the root address: http://www.domain.com/
But is a setting on a domain/hosting - you can set any page to the root-
I always link directly to the root address (the second one)
So if you set the new root page as http://www.domain.com/index.htm --- going to the root - essentially is a new page- any previous poor linking would be then broken and would have no effect
So it would be a matter of changing the domain settings to use the index.htm page (which would function exactly the same- internal link structure of site goes to the root)
thoughts?
-
Thanks- we have seen Unnatural links warnings come in as well (other domains) -ranking dropped we left it for a week- and it came back to the same place....
Undecided at this point what i will do- might start with Disavow of links....and go from there...
-
If I had to place my money of what would happen next from what I've seen int he past I would put it on one of two things assuming you are 301 redirecting to the new homepage:
1 - Nothing. Penalty passes instantly or is already assigned to the domain which was part of what the focus of Penguin 2.1 was about. Matt Cutts, discussing this update said:
"The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."
or ...
2 - Google gets tricked and passes the weight but not the penalty. In this event the rankings will likely last somewhere between 1 and 3 weeks before the penalty follows. I've seen this happen as well but mainly in cases where the penalty was an "unnatural links" warning.
Google luck and if you go for it, I'd love to hear how it turns out.
-
I see one of two things happening with that... Either your prior homepage 404s which will hurt you even more or your prior homepage will redirect to the new one and nothing will have changed.
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
-
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
Having possible problems with rankings due to development website
Hi all, I've got an interesting issue and a bit of a technical challenge for you. It's a bit complicated to explain, but please bear with me. We have a client website (http://clientwebsite.com) which we are having a hard time ranking in the past few months. Main keywords simply don't show up in Top100 searches, even though we are constantly building backlinks through Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc. Normally, we use ahrefs to look at the client's website backlinks, but just today we used Majestic to look at the backlink profile and one backlink stood out. This is a backlink from a development server (http://developmentwebsite.com) which redirects to http://clientwebsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg
The developers who were working on the redesign of the client website, put it up on their server and forgot to delete it.
Also, the content inside the development website is almost identical with the client website. We then checked to see if http://developmentwebsite.com is indexed.
It's not. Although, inside the robots file http://developmentwebsite.com/robots.txt there's:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
The funny (and weird thing) is that http://developmentwebsite.com/ and all development website inner pages are not indexed in Google. But if we go to http://developmentwebsite.com/inner-page, it doesn't redirect to the corresponding http://clientwebsite.com/inner-page, it's the same development website page URL and the pages even have links to the client website, but like I said, none of the pages of the development website are indexed, even though crawlers are allowed in the robots.txt's development website. In your opinion, could this be the reason why we are having a hard time to rank the client website? Second question is:
How do we approach in solving this issue?
Do we simply delete the whole http://developmentwebsite.com with all the inner pages?
Or should we do 301 redirrects on a per-page basis?0 -
Was my site hit by Panda or Penguin? Looking for diagnosis help
My URL is: www.westlakedermatology.com Hello Mozers, I'm looking for some help or guidance as to why my site fell off the "rankings cliff" on 9/5. In the forums I hear a lot of others with a similar issue, and some speculation it is due to a Panda refresh. However, looking at our site we have unique content with each page having over 300-400 words (so it's not light or duplicate content). We get a lot of leads that verbally tell us our content helped answer some of their questions so I'm pretty confident its good for users. Can anyone see an issue with the content on our site? In terms of Penguin, I think our backlink profile is clean, our physicians do take part in providing content to various high quality and relevant websites/blogs. But we do not buy links or do anything in violation of Google's guidelines. In terms of brand, we are the biggest dermatology and plastic surgery group in the Austin area. So any brand implications to search should be on our side. Just looking for some sort of guidance or help, any suggestions would be great! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iderma
Adam Paddock0 -
SEOmoz is only crawling 2 pages out of my website
I have checked on Google Webmaster and they are crawling around 118 pages our of my website, store.itpreneurs.com but SEOmoz is only crawling 2 pages. Can someone help me? Thanks Diogo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jslusser0 -
2-stage 301 redirects
Dear colleagues, I have quite an unusual situation with one of my client's websites, and I could use an advise from someone who experienced the same circumstances: They are currently planning on launching a new site under the same domain (by September), when several key current pages are intended to be replaced with new equivalent pages under new URLs. So far it's pretty simple, BUT - due to a merger with another company they will be migrating their entire website to a different domain within a year. My question is - what would be the optimal solution for redirects? We are considering a 301 from the current pages to the new pages under the same domain, and once the new domain is activated - aside from defining 301 redirects from the new pages under the same domain to the new domain, we will cancel the original 301 from the old pages to the new pages on the same domain, and instead define new 301 for those pages to the new domain. What do you think? Is there a better solution - like using 302 redirects for the first stage? Has anyone tried such a procedure? Your input will be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Omer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Usearch0 -
What is next from Google Panda and Google Penguin?
Does anyone know what we can expect next from Google Panda/Penguin? We did prepare for this latest update and so far so good.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jjgonza0 -
2 Year Old Keyword Focused Site Will Not Rank for Keyword
Hi All, I need your help. This site is confounding me. The site is turnstilefactory.com It's a few years old. Strong domain name and seo focused on the term 'turnstile'. In bound links are not abundant, but certainly not absent either. Considering the subject matter, content and competition in the space, I would expect this site by now to at least be in the top 10 pages for the search 'turnstile', but it's not. I've tried everything I can think of with this, but it just won't rank for anything other than it's domain name. Can anyone please take a look and let me know if they see something I'm missing? It would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomozpaul0 -
How to handle "2" homepages?
Came across an interesting problem. A site has the traditional homepage of site.com and ranks okay. Later I found that another "homepage", site.com/home.html that ranks well for several terms but actually has old branding and semi-up-to-date content. Site.com/home.html has a solid linking profile but not as strong as the current homepage (site.com). The question I have is should I try to salvage the page or 301 redirect to site.com? Thank for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 2comarketing0