Why Would This Old Page Be Penalized?
-
Here's an old page on a trustworthy domain with no apparent negative SEO activity according to OSE and ahrefs: http://www.gptours.com/Monaco-Grand-Prix
They went from page 1 to page 13 for "monaco grand prix" within about 4 weeks. Week 2 we pulled out all the duplicate content in the history section. When rank slipped further, we put it back. Yet it's still moving down, while other pages on the website are holding strong.
Next steps will be to add some schema.org/Event microformats, but beyond that, do you have any ideas?
-
Thanks Marie,
I've confirmed that the client is the content source originator. Their CMS won't accommodate canonical tags at the moment. If the URLs were the friendly URLs with dynamic params then it'd be no problem, but it's actually index.php on each one.
http://screencast.com/t/VuWv0gL7uq
I did take a look at their parameter handling in an attempt to optimize at that level. I modified the settings to this: http://screencast.com/t/hkjw258Bb5Qd and am considering blocking /command in robots.txt.
Thoughts?
TextMarketing, the page actually has quite a few authoritative links and very few "commercial terms". I thought "Penguin Penalty" at first too until I viewed the backlink profile.
Thanks you 2 - your help is beyond encouraging.
-
You have a canonical issue with the page and that could be the problem. Check out this search and click on "repeat with the omitted search results included"
The text on that page is indexed on 46 pages on your site. To solve this you'll need to implement a rel-canonical to the page to tell Google which version is supposed to be indexed. This will likely help.
I did also find that some of the text on your page is the same as on this page:
It's possible they have copied from you, but if you have taken your description from another source then you may need to rewrite it to be unique.
There's also not much on that page to entice Google to rank it well. You've got 3 paragraphs of information, some of which is duplicated elsewhere.
I think that if you clean up the canonical issues and add some substantial and helpful content then you'll do much better.
-
Your rankings not only have to do with the freshness, quality and links pointing to that page but the same for all other competing pages. I would use the open site explorer to see if the pages that are taking your page's place are getting new backlinks that are helping to drive them up.
A lot of SERP movement has to do with your competitor's pages. That's why it's extremely important that you're always building new quality links and keeping your content fresh and updated.
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
-
Few pages without SSL
Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
Tom1 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Help with duplicate pages
Hi there, I have a client who's site I am currently reviewing prior to a SEO campaign. They still work with the development team who built the site (not my company). I have discovered 311 instances of duplicate content within the crawl report. The duplicate content appears to either be 1, 2, or 3 versions of the same pages but with differing URL's. Example: http://www.sitename.com http://sitename.com http://sitename.com/index.php And other pages follow a similar or same pattern. I suppose my question is mainly what could be causing this and how can I fix it? Or, is it something that will have to be fixed by the website developers? Thanks in advance Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODarren0 -
Changing old style WP menu built with child pages or not?
Hi Mozzers, the very old theme of my client's site doesn't support the new WP menus, so the menu structure is built in the old way, with parent and child pages. For example the page whose url is www.site.com/rent/ is top level and the sub pages are like www.site.com/rent/cars/ or www.site.com/rent/trucks/ Also there are third generation pages like www.site.com/rent/cars/fiat500/ Since I am changing the theme, I am going to use the new WP menu system and I'd like to know if this parent/child url structure may hurt link equity propagation. My question is: should I detach the child pages from the parents and, according to that, change the urls of the child pages from:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoMiSoL
www.site.com/rent/cars/ to www.site.com/rent-cars/ (and of course 301 redirect them) ? Or is it ok to leave the pages' url in the old parenting way? What is the best practice? Thank you very much! DoMiSoL Rossini0 -
Create different pages with keyword variations VS. Add keyword variations in 1 page
For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant. What do you recommend? option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content or option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
On Page vs Off Page - Which Has a Greater Effect on Rankings?
Hi Mozzers, My site will be migrating to a new domain soon, and I am not sure how to spend my time. Should I be optimizing our content for keywords, improving internal linking, and writing new content - or should I be doing link building for our current domain (or the new one)? Is there a certain ratio that determines rankings which can help me prioritize these to-dos?, such as 70:30 in favor of link-building? Thanks for any help you can offer!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Are links to on-page content crawled / have any effect on page rank?
Lets say I have a really long article that begins with links to <a name="something">anchors on the same page.</a> <a name="something"></a> <a name="something">E.g.,</a> Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc, allowing the user to scroll down to different content. There are also other links on this page that link to other pages. A few questions: Googlebot arrives on the page. Does it crawl links that point to anchors on the same page? When link juice is divided among all the links on the page, do these links count and page rank is then lost? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0