My homepage doesn't rank anymore. It's been replaced by irrelevant subpages which rank around 100-200 instead of top 5.
-
Hey guys,
I think I got some kind of penalty for my homepage. I was in top5 for my keywords. Then a few days ago, my homepage stopped ranking for anything except searching for my domain name in Google.
sitename.com/widget-reviews/ previously ranked #3 for "widget reviews"
but now....
sitename.com/widget-training-for-pet-cats/ is ranking #84 for widget reviews instead.Similarly across all my other keywords, irrelevant, wrong pages are ranking.
Did I get some kind of penalty?
-
hello Ian.
Here is my DMCA
To do this, you need to pay the Copyright office to register your choice.
My DMCA agent is a lawyer, but you can do it yourself, if you want,
as long as there is correct address information that can be served with letters or papers.
What this does is give you a small amount of protection. If you are allowing third party submissions of stories or comments or photo uploads or you outsource content creation, you need this. It gives anyone with a complaint against you, a guaranteed way to contact you - but they have to comply with the rules too, so it can't be a frivolous complaint.
-
Thank you for the suggestions - I will implement those today. One thing I don't get though is how to set up a DMCA page. Can you tell me more about that? I researched but I can only find info on how to file dmca complaints etc.
What's a DMCA page?
-
Nope I haven't bought links but I have asked people for links and written them articles in return or done other odd jobs for them. I just checked my links and I see some weird stuff that looks like scraper sites or something, linking to me. Could that cause a homepage to stop ranking at all?
-
Apart from thje usual wordpress problems that would not accoubt for a sudden loss of rankings i could not find anything wrong, I thonk youir problem may lay off page, did you ever buy links?
-
Ian,
The site looks good.
This isn't the problem, but you should redirect index.html and .htm to the home page, as you do with .php
Your home page author and description are both empty
- actually, you have two descriptions - the first one is empty, the second is OK
If you have blogs, remember to set up a DMCA page.
-
You're right Alan. The URL is www.ipage-reviews.com and I must explain that it's much higher quality content than my competitors. It's a relatively new site so it's not my favorite or highest quality of the sites I work on... So please don't just say oh your site is filtered because it's not high quality.... The competing sites make this look like wikipedia...
-
Great idea - I have checked that way, and my main page is not in the results.
I did see that someone I know personally to have done some weird shady things to me before has filed a DMCA notice to have a site removed from results. I checked it out on ChillingEffects.org and it doesn't include details about what site was removed, etc.... Also I checked in my webmaster tools and there is no message about it.
-
Really do need a url to help
-
Ian,
what happens if you search for your keyword, go to the very end of the SERPS and click the link that searches again, but this time allowing the hidden results?
Does your main page appear then, and is it about the same position it used to be?
-
Already done but good idea, thanks! No duplicate content detected by copyscape.
-
I would be checking the SERPs to see if there is duplicated content on a more powerful domain.
-
Hi Keri! I did have a potential buyer of the site who cursed me out because I didn't accept his lowball price... Maybe something could have happened, but seems unlikely that one person could sabotage my site... I hope.
I haven't received any notices in webmaster tools. In fact this happened to another site of mine as well after I did a redesign. All my rankings disappeared after about 2 weeks of the new design, and instead google started ranking irrelevant subpages instead of the homepage which was in top 3 or #1 for many keywords.
I can confirm that there is no wrong caninical or noindex, etc.
-
Knowing your URL would help, but I can understand if you don't want to share it here (you can create a private question and share it there if you like). Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools for any notices?
Has anyone recently done work on your site, where there might have been an unnoticed change to the code that put in the wrong canonical tag, or added a noindex tag?
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
-
Does product environment have impact on main website's SEO
We have two environments - product, where login is necessary and where the customers are working. We also have there our help desk, Q&A and knowledge base. Pretty sophisticated page regarding information on a specific topic. We also have our main page where we promote our products, company and events, etc. Main page is www.example.com, where product environment is login.example.com . Does this product environment have an impact on my main page's SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeringaA0 -
Incorrect Spelling Indexed In Meta Info - Can't Change It
Hi,It would be great if a member of the community could help me to resolve this issue.Google is indexing an incorrect spelling on of our key pages and we can't identify the reason why.- The page in question: https://newbridgesilverware.com/jewelleryAs you can see from the attached image, the Meta Title is rendered to contain the keyword "jewelry" (the American spelling.) We want this to read as "jewellery" - the British-English spelling. Yet in the page source the word is given in the meta title as "jewellery". Nowhere in the page source or on the page itself does the American spelling appear - yet Google still renders it in the Meta Title.Can anyone identify why this is happening and offer any possible solutions?Much appreciatedDhqJp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed1 -
ECommerce Replatforming URL's
We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same. Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half - /stainless-steel-hardware.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BoatOutfitters
&
/stainless-steel-hardware We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html) Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL. It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix. Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!2 -
Complicated Duplicate Content Question...but it's fun, so please help.
Quick background: I have a page that is absolutely terrible, but it has links and it's a category page so it ranks. I have a landing page which is significantly - a bizillion times - better, but it is omitted in the search results for the most important query we need. I'm considering switching the content of the two pages, but I have no idea what they will do. I'm not sure if it will cause duplicate content issues or what will happen. Here are the two urls: Terrible page that ranks (not well but it's what comes up eventually) https://kemprugegreen.com/personal-injury/ Far better page that keeps getting omitted: https://kemprugegreen.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-attorney/ Any suggestions (other than just wait on google to stop omitting the page, because that's just not going to happen) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Why is /home used in this company's home URL?
Just working with a company that has chosen a home URL with /home latched on - very strange indeed - has anybody else comes across this kind of homepage URL "decision" in the past? I can't see why on earth anybody would do this! Perhaps simply a logic-defying decision?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How do you find old linking url's that contain uppercase letters?
We have recently moved our back office systems, on the old system we had the ability to use upper and lower case letters int he url's. On the new system we can only use lower case, which we are happy with. However any old url's being used from external sites to link into us that still have uppercase letterign now hit the 404 error page. So, how do we find them and any solutions? Example: http://www.christopherward.co.uk/men.html - works http://www.christopherward.co.uk/Men.html - Fails Kind regards Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Duncan_Moss0 -
301 Redirect All Url's - WWW -> HTTP
Hi guys, This is part 2 of a question I asked before which got partially answered; I clicked question answered before I realized it only fixed part of the problem so I think I have to post a new question now. I have an apache server I believe on Host Gator. What I want to do is redirect every URL to it's corresponding alternative (www redirects to http). So for example if someone typed in www.mysite.com/page1 it would take them to http://mysite.com/page1 Here is a code that has made all of my site's links go from WWW to HTTP which is great, but the problem is still if you try to access the WWW version by typing it, it still works and I need it to redirect. It's important because Google has been indexing SOME of the URL's as http and some as WWW and my site was just HTTP for a long time until I made the mistake of switching it now I'm having a problem with duplicate content and such. Updated it in Webmaster Tools but I need to do this regardless for other SE's. Thanks a ton! RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DustinX0