Homepage no longer showing in Google.co.uk
-
Hi guys,
Has anyone ever had this before? My clients website was appearing 4 & 5 in Google.co.uk for the keyword 'voltage optimisation'.
Since moving up in the rankings after furiously optimising the website we have now gotten to position 3 in Google.co.uk but the homepage ranking has disappeared and now is just displaying our 'what is voltage optimisation' page. I'm guessing Google feels that this page is more useful to someone searching 'voltage optimisation' but my client wants answers?!
It's almost like Google have said, "if you want to take position 3 were only going to list one of your pages" because everytime we drop back down to position 4 our homepage appears position 5.
-
LOL. Sounds like an opportunity for an upsell to me
I'd look for some variants where the home page does rank 1 and say "well, here's something we managed to arrange for you....."
-
Thanks for your responses, I didn't think there would be a straight forward answer and it is most likely that Google feels that this is the most relevant page for that particular search query which is what I have told them. They are wanting suggestions on how to replace this page with the homepage?! They just don't understand how it use to be there along with other page and no it isn't. Interestingly if you search in https://www.google.ie the SERP's display the same as .co.uk use to display.
-
Generally I find that what happens with a new website is that I start off with several category pages that rank for a number of main keywords. As the site develops and we look to increase rankings you tend to build specialist pages that then overtake the main category pages. So here is an example of what you see in Moz
In this case we were optimising for a type of steel called S690QL1. To start with it ranked in SERPS on the page for High yield steel. As we optimised the site further we saw the page S690QL replace the high yield steel page in rankings (on june 20th). Then on August 29th S690QL1 then replace the S690QL page and it now looks to be at number 3.
So you should be able to see something similar in your "analyse a keyword" on moz pro.
-
It is normal for Google to optimise there own serps to deliver the most relevant pages, as such your "what is voltage optimisation" is clearly deemed the more relevant for users searching. From my experience the home page tends to be displayed mainly when surrounding branded search.
-
Maybe google is testing the two landing pages to see which is better for the user? I am assuming here that Google has signals that indicate whether a site/page is useful or not to the people using the query to find them. I've noticed this sort of thing happen to my sites and it always settles down in the end.
As for your client - I'm in-house now, but when I was agency-side I would have found a questioning client tricky. I think though, that honesty is the best policy - even if you have to say "I don't know why Google is behaving this way. I am looking into possible reasons why this could be happening, but I may never find the answer. I am monitoring your site and am continuing to optimise your homepage for the keyword, 'voltage optimisation'."
Sometimes clients can be difficult, but they have to understand that some of the things Google does are a complete mystery, and that's just the way it is.
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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google.
Technical SEO | | ChophelDoes anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
Google serp pagination issue
We are a local real estate company and have landing pages for different communities and cities around our area that display the most recent listings. For example: www.mysite.com/wa/tumwater is our landing page for the city of Tumwater homes for sale. Google has indexed most of our landing pages, but for whatever reason they are displaying either page 2, 3, 4 etc... instead of page 1. Our Roy, WA landing page is another example. www.mysite.com/wa/roy has recently been showing up on page 1 of Google for "Roy WA homes for sale", but now we are much further down and www.mysite.com/wa/roy?start=80 (page 5) is the only page in the serps. (coincidentally we no longer have 5 pages worth of listings for this city, so this link now redirects to www.mysite.com/wa/roy.) We haven't made any major recent changes to the site. Any help would be much appreciated! *You can see what my site is in the attached image... I just don't want this post to show up when someone google's the actual name of the business 🙂 nTTrSMx.jpg C4mhfgh.jpg
Technical SEO | | summithomes0 -
/home-2 showing in SERPS but not the homepage
I'm in the process of having a site built using WP as the cms, and keeping SEO in mind while it's being produced. Because I'm experimenting with title/meta desc I'm checking rankings each day on whatsmyserp dot com. During development I noticed one day the ranking for websitename.com had disappeared and websitename.com/home-2 was ranking. I went into pages of the wp account and deleted the 2nd homepage that had been created for some reason, and that was over half a week ago now. /home-2 is still ranking even though it's non-existent and the actual homepage url isn't ranking at all. Any suggestions on what I should do/why this is happening? Thanks for any help
Technical SEO | | xcyte0 -
Google webmaster showing 0 indexed, yet I can see them all them Google search?
I can see them all the pages showing up in Google when i search for my site. But in webmaster tools under the sitemaps section in the indexed pages - the red bar is showing 0 indexed pages, even though they seem to be indexed. Any idea why is this showing like this? I don’t really think it’s that important as the pages are still indexed, but it just seems odd. Please see in the image.
Technical SEO | | Perfect0070 -
How do I get out of google bomb?
Hi all, I have a website named bijouxroom.com; and I was in the 7th page for the search term takı in google; and 2nd page for online takı. Now, I see that in one day my results seem to be on the 13th and 10th page in google respectively. I made too much anchor text for takı and online takı. What shall I do to gain my positions back? Thanks in advance. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ozererim0 -
Move established site from .co.uk to .org - good or bad idea?
I am currently considering moving our site from the current .co.uk domain to the .org version which we also own. The site is established and indexed for 7 years, ranks well and has circa 10k traffic per month which is mainly UK & US traffic. The reason for the change to the .org domain is to make the site more global facing and give us the opportunity to develop the site into multi language within directories (.org/es/ etc.) and then target those to the local search engines. For the kind of site it is (community based) it wouldn’t really work to split this into lots of separate country targeted domains. So the choice is to either stick with the .co.uk and add the other foreign language specific content in directories within the .co.uk or move to the .org and do the same (there is also a potential third option of purchasing the .com which is currently unused but that could be pricey!) We are also planning a big overhaul of the site with redesign, lots of added content and reorganisation of the site – but are thinking that it would be better to move the domain on a 1:1 basis first with the current design, content and URL structure in place and then do the other changes 2 or 3 months down the line. I have read up on SEOmoz, google guidelines etc on moving a site to a new domain and understand the theoretical approach of moving the site and the steps to take (1to1 301 redirects, sitemaps on old and new etc) and I will retain ownership of the .co.uk so the redirects can remain in place indefinitely. However having worked so hard to get the site to where it is in the search engines and traffic levels I am very worried about whether the domain change is a good move. I am more than happy to accept a temporary fluctuation in rankings & traffic for 1 – 4 weeks as reported may happen as long as I can be sure it will return after a temporary period and be as strong (or almost as strong) as the previous rankings / traffic. Looking for peoples experiences to give me the confidence / reassurance to go ahead with this or any info on why I shouldn’t Thanks in advance for your advice. Adrian.
Technical SEO | | Zilla0 -
Google Webmaster Tools: Keywords
Hi SEOmozzers! I'm the Dr./owner/in-house SEO for my eye care practice. The URL is www.ofallonfamilyeyecare.com. Our practice is in O'Fallon, MO. Since I'm an optometrist, my main keywords are "optometrist o'fallon" and "o'fallon optometrist". As I get more familiarity with SEO, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, I've discovered the Keywords that Google feels best represent my website. About a week ago I noted Google counted 21 instances of "optometrist" on the 28-30 pages of my website, which ranks as #32 in the most common keywords. #1 is "eye" with 506 instances. Even though 21 occurrences seemed low, I went though every page adding "optometrist" a couple times in the body where it would naturally be appropriate. I also added it to the address shown on the footer of every page. I changed the top navigation option of "meet Dr. Hegyi" to "our optometrist". I must have added at least 4 occurrences to every page on my site, and submitted for a re-crawl. I even tried to scale back the "eye" occurrences on a few pages. Today I see that Google has re-crawled the site and the keywords have been updated. "Optometrist has DROPPED from #32 to #33. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions why I'm not seeing increased occurrence in Googles eyes? I realize this may not be a big factor in SERPs, but every bit of on-page optimization helps. Or is this too minor of an issue to sweat? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JosephHegyi0 -
"Site Suspended" in Google Adwords + Lost all rankings in Google => is this related?
Can anyone share thoughts on this: Does the S recently (mid april) we revamped our website (same content, new layout, strong brand), but a few days later our google rep contacted us to tell that she got a "red flag" for one of our SEA campaigns (we broke the bridge page policy, not on purpose to be clear), they were completely correct on this matter. We even got some extra time to correct this, normal policy is only 10 days. But, we were a little slow, so all our Adwords Campaigns are suspended and we get the message "Site suspended". We are working to have this fixed, our Google rep even granted some more time to fix this. Now, almost simultaneously, same time frame, all our new pages, that were already ranking well tx to proper 301 rules, suddenly fell out of the google SERPS, nothing to be found anymore up till now. Our website is live since 1996, no issues, up till now. There seems to be a strong correlation to what happened in our SEA and what happened in our SEO can anyone share some info?
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0