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
-
How to hold a variable constant for an A/B test
For example, let's say you want to A/B test a title tag change. You are hoping to identify whether a title tag change increases CTR. But, position is always fluctuating a bit and that affects CTR, too. So, I'm interested in how you could hold position constant in order to isolate the change in CTR that is due to the title tag change. Does anyone know of resources/tools/tutorials for how to do this? It's been... a very long time since I took statistics (-: I have access to Excel, MS Access, and R studio.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
301 Redirects - 4 sites into 1
Hey all, I have an SEO conundrum that seems to have no right or wrong answer. If you have 2 minutes I’d love to hear your opinion. The Situation
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PamelaH88
Our client has 4 ecommerce sites (Sites A, B, C & D) all selling the same products.
He wishes to to merge all 4 sites into a single site (Site A) Options
In order to maintain maximum SEO authority do we: A - Choose a single site (B, C, or D) with the most SEO authority/juice/power and 301 re-direct it into Site A
Or
B – 301 re-direct all 3 sites (B, C & D) into Site A Our experience says that 301’ing from a single site works well, but from multiple sites feels spammy and risky. Really keen too hear your thoughts.1 -
Two Similar Profile Pages: One Ranks 2 in Google - The Other 150
My client's site has a directory of doctors on it's site and they are targeting weight loss surgery patients. The problem is that when searching "weight loss surgeon richmond va" one of the doctor's profiles ranks 2nd in Google organic results while the other is not even in the first 10 pages. Both have very similar link profiles and I have checked all the technical things like noindex tags, canonicals, etc to see if that might be the problem but it all checked out. The second doctor's profile IS indexed in Google, just not ranking. We have done a lot of work to push his profile page up in the rankings but all efforts seem to have fallen short. Here are the profiles: http://advancedsurgicalpartnersofva.com/physicians/profile/Gregory-L-Schroder-MD - ranks 2 in Google http://advancedsurgicalpartnersofva.com/physicians/profile/Matthew-Brengman-MD-FACS - does not rank Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisvogel0 -
I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2\. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect?
I'm going through the crawl report and it says I've got duplicate pages. For example, blog/page/2 is the same as author/admin/page/2/ Now, the author/admin/page/2 I can't even find in WordPress, but it is the same thing as blog/page/2 nonetheless. Is this something I should just ignore, or should I create the author/admin/page2 and then 301 redirect it to blog/page/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shift-inc0 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
Penguin Footer Links - Penalty or Devaluation?
One of customers provides IT Support for a municipality. The municipality's website (1000+ pages) has a footer link with the anchor text "IT Support" linking to our customer's site. The link is there for employees to get help. In mid summer, our customer's rankings tanked for "IT Support". It looks like a hit by Penguin. The question is, could removing the links bring the rankings back? Does Google's penguin algorithm penalize you for the footer links, or are they simply de-valued? Should we pull them down or no-follow them? If they aren't truly hurting their rankings, we would just leave them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill1 -
Low PA but still ranking no.1??
Can anybody shed some light on this. A competitor is ranking no.1 for the keyword "storage" which is a very competitive keyword in our industry. There url is www.publicselfstorage.com.au When using Site Explorer, l can see that they have a very low PA, low external following links etc compared to the companies ranking 2 and 3. http://www.storageking.com.au/melbourne.html http://www.kss.com.au/ How are they still managing to rank no.1?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Hot to move 3 websites into 1 SEO wise and recover from penaltys in the process?
I decided to migrate 3 EMDs and all of its content into 1 big new website. 1.) I will manually move each page/post to the new website, on new hosting. 2.) Redirect each old url to new via htaccess (how long do I have to wait before I simply change DNS records on my old domains, and just point it to the new domain - want to drop one hosting plan in the process) 3.) Tell Google via Webmaster tools, that my site has moved to the new domain. Website A suffered from Penguin update, Website B suffered from EMD update and Website C is OK. I removed most of "bad" and "exect anchor text" links from websites. Could I just move the content, change DNS records and tell Google that my website moved. Any thoughts, advices and pointers are appreciated. Tnx Marko Strbac
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkoStrbac-SlovenianSEO0