Homepage keeps disappearing and reappearing for important keywords every few days
-
My homepage keeps disappearing from the SERPS for my most important keywords. My home page has been in number 2 position for years. When the home page disappears it will not even show in a Google search for my business name although it is still indexed. When the home page is not showing an internal page shows instead but in position 6. When the home page is back the internal page does not show. There are no issues being reported in Google Webmaster. When I realise that it's down I do a fetch as Google and request reindexing. No idea if this is bringing it back or not? We are so worried about this and totally at a loss. As are the three SEO companies I've called. Would really appreciate it if someone could give some advice.
-
If your site has a penalty, fixing it will require determining why the penalty was given.
Most likely it has something to do with breaking the webmaster guidelines. That is best assessed by the webmaster himself, and if the webmaster can't do it then an expert at identifying Google penalties is the best bet. People who are not experts at penalty identification will be guessing and you don't want to guess, do the recommended work, wait to see if the site recovers, then see no recovery, guess again,work, wait, find nothing happens, etc.
-
It definitely does look like we have a penalty as the home pge appears for the keyword on page 8 whereas if used to be in number 2 position. Ive had a look again at back links and one seems particularly dodgy from a few weeks back. In fact the site has now been removed but unbeknownst to us had a link to our website. Other than that I am stumped. Would you recommend re-writing the home page content or could that do more damage than good.
-
Its possible that you have a single-page penalty, though those are rare.
For another site with duplicate content to displace a page of your site from the SERPs, it usually has to be about the same strength as your site or superior to your site.
Some of our pages will swap in and out of the SERPs when the same content is on other websites of similar strength. If we can't get the content removed by contacting them, and their use of the content is infringment, a DMCA complaint to google will usually fix the problem within a few days.
-
Thanks for the reply. I tried what you said and I found two people in our network were directly using the text from our home page on their fb business page. Not sure if this makes any difference but asked then to change. Also found a directory that we hadn't requested list our business with the exact same home page text. I've asked for that to be taken down. We have literally tried everything we know how. And even the SEO company we are using doesn't seem to know what else to try. Our website home page will not even appear when searching for the business name.
-
Try copy/pasting a couple random sentences from your content between quotes in a Google search. This will show if someone has grabbed your content and has a verbatim duplicate indexed. If another site with reasonable power has grabbed your content, they can displace you in the SERPs. Also, do a screen capture of the SERPs when your site is present, and another when your site is missing. If a different site is on the first page of the SERPs, check it out to see if they have grabbed some of your content and pasted it on the page that replaces yours.
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
-
Keyword rank drop, any advice?
Screen Shot 2021-08-26 at 19.02.18.png My search visibility dropped from around 13% a few weeks ago to 8.29%. I know that Google launched a bunch of updates in this past few weeks to ignore spam links, and I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the drop - some of the links to my site date back over 10 years and those links were garbage. Confusingly, at the same time, my Domain Authority went up by 1 to 32, then back down a week later. How can I restore my previous rank in the short term? We're designing a new site at the moment with vastly improved page speed, but I'm not sure what effect that will have yet (thespacecollective.com).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Homepage with and without language subfolder
Hi all, We are checking to optimize a website that has four language versions in subfolders. When setting the self referencing canonicals and the hreflang tags, we came across a particular problem. Both the URL's example.com and example.com/nl are being indexed and have the same content in the same language. For the other language versions, it is quite straightforward, but what to do with these two URL's? Currently, there is a canonical tag from example.com to example.com/nl. Is a simple 301 redirect to the URL with the language subfolder the best solution? Something to consider: if a backlink points to example.com (without specifying the language subfolder), all the link juice will go to the /nl version and not to other versions (with a canonical as well as with a 301 of course). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Only homepage is ranking after site re-launch
We've been moving all our sites over to a new platform (Demandware) this year. In the process, they've all gotten updated designs (from the same template), on-page optimizations, etc. Since they're all on the same platform and are essentially copies from one template, any technical issues found have been fixed across all sites. The problem I'm seeing is there are a few sites that haven't really seen much/any recovery from the site launch, and these are sites that were done 4-5 months ago. There's one in particular that's especially concerning, since it's showing issues that none of the other sites seem to have. In my Moz reports, it looks like of all the keywords that are ranking, they're only ranking the https version of the homepage (and from what I'm seeing, the https version wasn't picked up and ranked until the beginning of October, which was also the time that WMT shows a huge drop in clicks and impressions). I've crawled the site (ScreamingFrog), done a site search in Google (all pages look to be indexed), etc. and I haven't come across any specific problems there that would suggest a technical issue. We're wondering if it might be a link authority problem, since this site had the most dramatic change in navigation. The navigation used to be product based (Boots, Shoes, etc.) and is now broken up by gender. I've noticed that a few other pages that are ranking are dual gender pages that also existed on the old site, whereas all of these new categories aren't ranking at all and I'm not seeing this happen with any of our other sites. I've gone down a bunch of different paths trying to figure this out, but I haven't come up with any concrete answers as to why this is happening and how to fix it. Any thoughts as to what else I can look into or try for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WWWSEO0 -
Importance of minimal markup on a page
Moz.com's 2013 SEO study gave some value to "Total # of Characters in the HTML Code" (https://mza.seotoolninja.com/search-ranking-factors/2013). Is having minimal HTML on a page still a ranking factor, even if not a huge one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A2890 -
One word Keywords
Hey as you know that as a seo we are, we always optimize keywords which are at least 2 words, and lets say I'm trying to optimize a page for terms like "man clothing, man london clothing, man great collection, man stylus collection" and as you can guess I optimize this pages for this keywords by inputting them into title heading tags and body.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atakala
So my question is , what if google takes "man" phrase from my 2 words keywords, and pretend as a my keyword. (I mean what if google thinks my keywords is man because as you can see in all of the keywords "man" is in all of them.)
And what if Google thinks the density of "man" probably would be %20 which is astronomic number.? Sorry for my bad english.0 -
Optimising a page for multiple keywords
I remember reading a question a while back about seo for a page targetting multiple keywords but I'm blowed if I can find it now.... I have a page which is optimised for one phrase and want to add 5-6 phrases/keywords... obviously I can't stuff the all the keywords in the page title or the header 1 tag. So I have written the content to mention the other keywords trouble is not wanting to compromise the quality of the page so of the keywords/phrases I have only been able to use once in the content. I assumed as the phrases are all on the same topic/area that this should not really matter. Apart from link building with the correct anchor text is there anything else I should be doing? The other option is to create custom pages for the keyword but again I am not keen on this idea.... Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
How Important is Domain Authority in Back-Link Audit
First off I just want to say thanks Penguin! Now I get to start the joyous experience doing a back-link audit, and removing all the negative links. Also I now have to be on constant alert for Black SEO tactics targeted at my domain due to the cut throat business I am in. I think it can only be a matter of time before Google says all backlinks do not matter. Unfortunately, I need rank now!! So I have a couple of questions: First how important is domain rank in a back-link audit? Should I remove myself from indexes with low domain rank, and leave ones with high? Should I remove myself from as many indexes as possible? What about obvious paid blog posts that have high domain rank? Do you leave those? What is considered a low Domain Rank for back-links, under 35 - 40? Second, what is a good success rate for a back link audit. How can you measure improvement, other than waiting for your PR or SERP to go up? Third, in some situations it looks like back-links are legitimate, but they all point to my home page. Is it worth pursuing for example asking these people to link to the specific product they are referring to for example children picnic tables instead of just our home page? And, lastly what legal rights do I have to get back-links removed? Is it only on sites that copy my content that I have copy written? Is it possible to prevent Google from counting these back-links through an .htaccess file? Thanks in advance for all of the help. I hope to take what I learn and put it into a guide of some capacity as I am sure many people are going through this same situation at the moment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fifthroommarkets0 -
Why does google keep shortening my title?
IRS Problems, Tax Problems <cite>www.taxproblem.org/</cite> We are a Local Houston CPA Firm in Harris County Texas, dedicated to helping taxpayers resolve their tax problems. We mean, “actually resolve their IRS ... Checking the source code doesn't reveal any reason I can see why they would do that. It happens most often, if not all the time, and only Google results So if anyone would check the source code of my main page and can see why and what needs to be done, I can fix it. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemas990