Home page rankings disappeared - Google Penalty?
-
Hi,
I have a clients website that I have been working on for a few months now.
On-page SEO for home page is A for all target keywords.
All Domain / subdomain / external link data etc. much stronger than all competition.
But approx 3 months ago (before Panda update) all home page rankings (except 1 keyword) dropped out sight in Google rankings. 3 months later, still can't work out why. Sometimes rankings come back onto page 9 or so then drop out again.
Deeper pages are not effected, just the Home page.
Looks like a Google penalty to me but can't work out why.
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
Website is - www.marrikashairextensions.com
Many thanks
-
Hi Daniel,
Many thanks for your response.
there are a couple of things I don't quite understand and would appreciate your guidance.
You suggest that I target a different page for the keyword 'brazilian hair extensions' but what I don't understand is why the Home Page is failing to rank for this keyword when according to seoMoz's on page keyword optimization tool it scores a Grade A and I have built hundreds of anchor text links to the page (not spam)?
My real issue here is to understand why, why, why. When all the seoMoz metrics and on-page analysis suggest that my clients website should be competing at least in the top 10 for this keyword why is it at position 198 at best. It just doesn't make sense.
www.marrikashairextensions.com vs www.princessnaturalhair.com/
Overall Score 35% 31%
Page mozRank 4.15% 4.11%
Page mozTrust 5.04% 4.90%
External mozRank 3.84% 4.20%
Subdomain mozRank 3.55% 3.62%
Domains Linking 6328% 910%
External Links 6514% 267%
The search engine that this page is targeting is google.co.uk not .com, where the competition is much weaker, so if you check there, the top 10 have Domain and Page authority of below 20, so makes all this even more difficult to comprehend.
I will certainly take you advice about targeting a different page, but still would really like to understand better why the home page has failed to compete so drastically.
Thanks for you help.
Mark
-
I had a quick look at the site and a few subpages and what I'd suggest is changing the onpage optimization on the home page since this page -> http://www.marrikashairextensions.com/brazilian-hair-extensions you can focus for the keyword 'brazilian hair extensions' . I'd also add some good content about the product on that page since at the moment it's pretty blank.
The results that come up when I search on google.com for that keyword are pages that are stronger in terms of domain strength, backlinks and on page optimization so I'd say it's not a penalty but rather a ranking adjustment. If it were a penalty I don't think it would only affect your home page and leave other sub pages rankings intact.
If you've not done anything black hat(such as buying links) then it's certainly just the algorith changes and you need to work on the site.
Hope that's of some help
-
Hi Daniel,
Keywords =
'brazilian hair extensions' & 'brazilian hair'
Still ranking ok for 'natural brazilian hair' though.
-
HI Mark
Which keywords were you ranking on the first page that you're now not being found?
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
-
Google Ad referral
I was wondering if someone could decode the jumble of a referral - this is supposedly the referal that led to a click through to my site via a product listing ad. I am trying to figure out how www.nextag.com comes in to the picture as we do not have refurbexperts even listed there? Thanks to anyone who tries/does work it out. http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CGXud6DmDU_qeL5THygHpuICwCaTZwMYD_Nvvv0bEwMS50wEIBhAEIOn5-gEoBVCl7P7f-v____8BYMnu8omYpPQSoAHAhIv9A8gBB8gDG6oEJ0_QwcNc5zNun_d7S5KNcMT6uPjjH_mMDkKFFgBCQ6aKICRPJVVa7MAFBYgGAaAGJoAHqPv0ApAHAeASupqdo-ypit0m&ohost=www.google.com&cid=5GhZEzUCSC6x9n2wxOdz3-mrAfSUkvHKPN3wD5yLInnlNil_&sig=AOD64_1D1z1JPYbFP0UnUglJVOfvd25RfA&adurl=http://refurbexperts.com/product/527/HP-LaserJet-P2015-Laser-Printer-RECONDITIONED%3Futm_source%3Dproductlistingads%26utm_medium%3Dadwords%26utm_campaign%3Dadwords&ctype=5&nb=0&res_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fhp-p2015-laserjet%2Fproducts-html%3Fnxtg%3D116d0a1c0504-9FFEB16DE52A7E2A&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextag.com%2Fgoto.jsp%3Fp%3D3652%26search%3Dhp%2520p2015%2520laserjet%26t%3Dag%253D1384181795%26crid%3D48271786%26gg_aid%3D20169721025%26gg_site%3D%26gclid%3DCjgKEAjwzIucBRDzjIz9qMOB3TASJABBIwL1LHK7GcAPS6yHGpd9Kq3wsZrcPORAWD8QCWivr4W75PD_BwE&nm=11&nx=43&ny=12&is=700x181&clkt=187
Reporting & Analytics | | henya0 -
Google Analytics - Sessions vs Views?
In Google Analytics under Audience Overview I want to visit total visits during any given period of time but instead it shows me sessions. Am I missing something? How do I switch from sessions to page visits?
Reporting & Analytics | | gohawks77902 -
800,000 pages blocked by robots...
We made some mods to our robots.txt file. Added in many php and html pages that should not have been indexed. Well, not sure what happened or if there was some type of dynamic conflict with our CMS and one of these pages, but in a few weeks we checked webmaster tools and to our great surprise and dismay, the number of blocked pages we had by robots.txt was up to about 800,000 pages out of the 900,000 or so we have indexed. 1. So, first question is, has anyone experienced this before? I removed the files from robots.txt and the number of blocked files has still been climbing. Changed the robots.txt file on the 27th. It is the 29th and the new robots.txt file has been downloaded, but the blocked pages count has been rising in spite of it. 2. I understand that even if a page is blocked by robots.txt, it still shows up in the index, but does anyone know how the blocked page affects the ranking? i.e. while it might still show up even though it has been blocked will google show it at a lower rank because it was blocked by robots.txt? Our current robots.txt just says: User-agent: *
Reporting & Analytics | | TheCraig
Disallow: Sitemap: oursitemap Any thoughts? Thanks! Craig0 -
Google Analytics
Good Morning, I am trying to understand 2 issues in Google Analytics. 1. When look at : Traffic Source --> SEO --> Quesrios - i see the impressions column and its always a whole number 1550, 500, 5500, etc.. I never saw (for example) 702, 313, etc... impressions Can anyone explain why and how does it work? 2. In the same report i see my AVG. position for each query, the question is how come i have AVG, position of (290, 230, 190) for some of the queries and still i get clicks on these queries. My guess is that from time to time these queries have better position and the clicks are from these time. Do you familiar with a way to the the distribution of a specific query over time? for example: 1.3.2013 avg position = 4 2.3.2013 avg position = 7 3.3.2013 avg position = 2 4.3.2013 avg position = 8 etc... 3. This report say its for: "Top 1,000 daily queries" - What does it mean? Thank you and sorry for this long question SEOwiseUs
Reporting & Analytics | | iivgi0 -
What's the difference between landing pages and entrance pages on Google Analytics?
I'm confused about the difference between entrance pages and landing pages on Google Analytics. If I compare our search traffic to entrance pages with search traffic to landing pages it seems very similar -- but not identical. But this is probably because all of our GA analytics is sampled (we're a huge site). Can anyone help?
Reporting & Analytics | | CecilyP0 -
I have two campaigns that are only crawling one page, why is this?
I have a total of three campaigns running right now, and two of them are only crawling one page. I set the campaigns up the same, what is the problem?
Reporting & Analytics | | SiteVamp0 -
Google Analytics
Hello In Google analytics you can obtain the number of visits as a result of non-paid search. You can also set up custom reports to find the number of organic searches. The numbers are different, so what is the obvious difference between these two metrics that I'm missing. Thanks in advance for any assistance. Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | mccormackmorrison0 -
Ideas Why Our Google News Traffic Disappearing?
The traffic to our major market newspaper website from Google News has dropped nearly 100% in the past ten days. Any ideas why might be happening?
Reporting & Analytics | | wlis990