Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
-
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
-
yes homepage penalty means site is penalized across the board
-
Yes it "could" be that your homepage has been penalized or has lost some back links. If so it would have a direct impact on the link juice flowing through to your other pages. The best thing to do is check out webmaster tools for any warnings. If you don't have any warnings then I would start digging into my link profile to see if any links have fallen off your profile recently.
-
It is possible yes, your home page is where the majority of your website authority sits so if that gets penalised then other pages can be affected. Simon is right that without more details, it is hard to give you a proper answer.
If you have been doing a lot of articles recently then this may be a reason because article websites have taken a huge hit since the update in January.
-
Have you had a look in Webmaster tools for any issues? Any unnatural links warnings? Have you lost any significant backlinks? There could be any number of reasons, be it Penguin or Panda - without more info people will struggle to give you suitable solutions.
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
-
Redirect Issue - Drop in ranking after CMS change
Hi Website - https://www.aasprint.com.au/ After we moved the site from wordpress to codeIgniter + angular there has been a huge drop in traffic and ranking. One of the thing we recently realized is the redirection - COULD THAT BE THE ISSUE? On the browser and sitemap the URL doesn't have "/" at the end When checked on redirection tool the URL seems to be redirecting to one with "/" at the end Attached are the screenshots. Also moz bar shows no redirection. However, the issue seems to be flagged by the site audit tool as 301 redirection. Not sure if it's the cause for the drop. What action to take? Any advice would be much appreciated. V7CNtqt j3dJ4TW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun0 -
How i can increase my page authority?
Hi, I have website and i want to increase my page authority. My website is latestdatabase.com I have making more backlinks but not good page authority so far. Please give me suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LatestMailingDatabase1 -
Can have FAQ schema code in home page?
Hi, can we have FAQ schema code in Home page ? we wrote some question and answer in drop down box on home page, and also add the schema code script to the head tag of page, but it does not work !,( other pages of our site show the FAQ in the SERP correctly) I want to know this problem is because its on Home Page ? or because its in Drop down style ? its the url of our site: http://payamgostar.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | allenwebmaster0 -
Ranking dropped off massively: 25 August
HI have been working on the site http://www.schoolguide.co.uk/ we had something odd happen around the 25 of August our ranking just tanked. Now there was no warning in webmaster tools. Moz weather forecast didn't show anything crazy. We didn't do anything major to site. The site lost pretty much all it's long tail ranking and about 5% of the indexed pages. What could cause this? The only thing of prominence we did was get a link from huffington post article. Thanks again everyone Ed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdBen0 -
Cannot find reason for drop in ranking
One of our clients is a lingerie retailer, that also sells swimwear and nightwear. They have a webshop, with landing pages such as /lingerie, /swimwear and /nightwear (only in Dutch). The nightwear page is doing ok (#5 in Google NL), but for the swimwear and lingerie pages, something strange has happened and I have no clue what it is. On May 7, the /swimwear page ranked 24 for swimwear in Google NL. In that period, the homepage was ranking at #40-50. One week later, on May 14, the homepage was ranked 24 for swimwear, and the /swimwear page was nowhere to be found. The homepage is currently ranking 17/18 for swimwear. Something similar seems to have happened for lingerie. The homepage was ranking at around 11-13 for a few weeks in April/May, the /lingerie page was ranking at 8 in May, and then after the 4th of June, both the homepage and the /lingerie page no longer seem to have any decent rank for lingerie. So, trying to find the problem: I checked the Moz On-Page Grader for all three pages/keywords. All pages get an A. Robots.txt hardly contains anything, and there's no robots meta tag to block the page. Checked Google Webmaster Tools just in case, nothing out of the ordinary. The page contains 342 URL's which is a lot, but that shouldn't be too problematic, I thought? I used the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to analyze the current top 10 for lingerie, and compared it to our client's stats. Page Authority in the top 10 is 37-68, our clients is 33. Domain Authority in the top 10 is 27-100 (wiki page), our clients is 43. MozRank for the top 10 is 6,6-8,0, our clients is 6,7. MozTrust for the top 10 is 7,0-7,1, our clients is 7,0. The basics all look fine! Now, the page could use some link building, the number of links is a little low compared to the top 10 entries. We're also in the process of redesigning the page, adding more products but also more content (text and images) to inspire visitors a little more. But being low on links doesn't seem a good explanation for such a relatively sudden change in ranking. As far as we can tell, looking back at commits by our developers, nothing changed around that time that could have this impact. Of course it's possible that we missed something, we're still looking. Also, it's strange that these sudden changes took place for swimwear and especially lingerie, but not for nightwear. I'd really appreciate any tips, hints etc. to find out what's going on here. Thanks in advance! Michel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DocdataCommerce0 -
Home page deindexed by goole, How to determine why and how to fix
On Wednesday I noticed our domain was no longer ranking for our key word and our product Isolator Fitness, http://isolatorfitness.com, I have been researching and not finding answers to why it happened and what to do to fix it. We have about 800 other pages still listed. I am new to all this seo stuff, can anyone guide me in the right direction.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | David75
History about 10 days a go I went google web master tools and noticed that there were a large number of errors due to the fact the robots could not crawl our site. Looked at the site and found that Privacy button on WP was turned to block robots. I turned it on and had google re crawl the site, looked like google was not able to crawl the site for about 3 months, on Monday I did a 301 redirect to on of our other sites for another product we sell, to http://isolatorfitness.com/6-pack-bags. This site had a good bit of back links would doing all this at one time cause this How do I determine if we did anything wrong Thanks0 -
404 Redirecting to the home page
One of my clients that is managing their own server and website recently moved servers. Which then broke their custom 404 page. Instead of fixing this or putting the site back to the old server they redirected the 404 to the home page. I've been working on getting their 404's appropriately redirected, or old urls redirection using a 301 for a month or two. I read the HTTP Status Codes best practices. It just discusses usability. What technical seo back lash can happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | triveraseo0 -
Will swear words present on my pages affect my rankings?
Hi There, I am in the process of formulating a listing policy for my site and I'm not sure whether I should add something in there for swear words. My site is an adult site and swear words come with the territory, unfortunately. Will user generated content with swear words affect my ranking? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0