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
-
How ot optimise a website for competitive keywords?
Hi guys, I hope to find some good answers to my questions, because here are some of the best SEO's in the world. I'm doing SEO as a hobby for a few years and had some very good results before the latest Google updates. Now I'm not able to rank any website for competitive keywords. The last project I started is this website (man and van hire company targeting London market).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nasi_bg
The problem is that I can't rank even in Top 100 in Google UK for the main keywords like: "man and van london" , "man and van service london" ,"london man & van"...
The site has over 1k good backlinks (according to Ahrefs), unique content, titles and descriptions but still can't rank well. Am i missing something? Few years back that was more than enough to rank well in Google.
I will be very grateful to hear your suggestions and opinions.0 -
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 -
Use a language extension or a keyword as an extension?
If it's technically necessary to add an extension to a domain URL... Should I use brand.nl/nl or should I use brand.nl/keyword as the homepage? In my opinion it's better to use the language extension as it is much easier for other websites to link to. The client could make a separate page with content about the keyword. I also think it's much more difficult for direct traffic to access the website with this long URL. Any other thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
Breadcrumbs showing up in every snippet in search
Ok I created breadcrumbs on my site long ago. They popup every time which what i'm concerned about. I wanted them to pop up for searches that lead to my homepage, but the breadcrumbs pop up for every product and every page on my site. My question is does this hurt searches for the link part of it. As you know search engines check title link and descriptions. Will my link not be counted in or is the breadcrumb purely cosmetic. Just want to know if i'm limiting my rank. Here's a product that should show its own breadcrumb type "Bia Brazil BT3341 BKS-Sexy" in google to see example. I should be number one under ads My code that creates breadcrumbs is as follows: Tops Shorts Best Fit By Brazil Capris Bia Brazil Sexy Leggings Sexy Workout Clothes 15% OFF I REMOVED CODE FROM WEBSITE FOR NOW UNTIL I FIGURE OUT. HOPEFULLY SOMEONE ANSWERS BEFORE search results change thx.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | realmccoy1010 -
How many back links a day?
I am the owner of a very small business who can not afford a decent SEO company. So I am doing my SEO myself. I am producing good amount of content. But at the same time I am way behind my competition in back linking. Can you please let me know as a rule of thumb, how many external do-follow links a day I should make to be on the safe side? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Can I swap a website yet keep it's high ranking for a competitive keyword?
Couldn't fit the entire question in the main bit so the explanation is here: Working on a client's website which is hosted by volusion and also been doing SEO for them for about a year. Now we've finally got them ranking at the lower end of page 1 (around 10+) for their main keyword. They now want to move from volusion over to Amazon Web Store 😢 which seems to be an SEO nightmare from even my basic understanding of SEO. From looking at the coding and the way Amazon Web store is built on top of how restricted you are from doing anything with it, I am almost certain the shop will be extremely difficult to optimise and we will have to completely change nearly all of the content. Finally! the actual question; I was thinking I could get them to delay their move to Amazon webstore until they are ranking in the top 5 for this top keyword. Once they switch over, i assume they'll keep this ranking for at least a short while? This keyword attracts a high volume of traffic and if this traffic is clicking on the result for their website, and google sees that people are finding this website valuable (not clicking back onto google results). Will they be able hold onto this high ranking? Basically what I'm asking is, this will be a terrible outdated badly SEO'd shop, but if a high volume of people are clicking on it and staying on it from their lingering ranking will Google just let it stay at the top? A massive amount of gratitude in advance for anyone who tries to help with this! 😄
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | acecream0 -
Why google does not show my site on my branding keyword?
Hi, I am the site owner of http://www.lankahq.net. It is a youtube video hosted website. 95% of the video contents are daily telecasting TV shows and categorized to make easy to find the specific video of the day of preferred program of the viewer. About 1 year ago suddenly disappeared my site from the google. Before happened that it was performing very well in search. Google showed my site contents within few minutes after I update in their search results when someone search for that. At the moment it does not show even some one search for "lankahq". It showing only if search for "lankahq.net", "lankahq.com" or "www.lankahq.net" something like a search keyword related to my domain name. Some other websites have added my branding keyword LankaHQ as a user of their site and they showing on top of Google. But not mine. It is much appreciated if someone can have a look on this matter. I can not find where is the problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cprasad0 -
Thought provoking discussion on perfect synonym keywords
This is just a general theoretical discussion to provoke some thought. Suppose I have a 2 synonym keywords - which mean identical things. EG - "Golf Holiday" "Golf Break" - probably you can think of better ones, but you get the idea. On the following assumptions: Google knows these synonyms have identical meaning. Google want to provide the searcher with the "best possible result set". By definition there can only be 1 "best possible results set" If the above is true, then Google should produce identical result sets for either of these terms - **So why don't they? **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770