Home page penalty?
-
What does it mean when your home page has a penalty? I have a site that has good rankings for many pages, but my home page seems to be penalized by Google. I tried searching for my home page URL in Google, www.xxxxxx.com and my page doesn't show up, but sub pages do show up? What would cause this penalty and how do you correct this issue.
-
I didn't get into anything moral about it. I'm going from Google's eyes -- if I am the search engine and I have xx sites with the same content to display, is there a reason I should display this site above any of those other xx identical sites? And is there a site out there that is better than those xx number of identical sites that offers more information? Google's out to make money too. If they don't satisfy their users with their results, their users will go elsewhere.
To go specifically to your home page question, do you know what is putting the hop parameter in there? That's likely not helping things.
I'm looking at Open Site Explorer, and this doesn't appear to be too strong of a site. It has 55 total links, from only 10 domains. The top link is from "Free For All Link Page", and there are several link pages (rather than editorial content) in your inlinks. These aren't sending the highest quality signals to your site, either.
-
I appreciate your advice, but I'm not looking for your moral justification for my websites. I'm a paying member of Seomoz. Most sites online(commercial) sites wouldn't meet your exceedingly high standards. Why can't you offer advice to help me fix my issue without the offhand comments about if my site should exist or not? Most commercial sites aren't up to your standards. There are thousands of commercial sites that have less content than my sites and have been highly ranked for years in Google.
-
There are a bunch of other affiliate sites out there that have the same copy for the home page. Take a random sentence from your home page and put it in a search engine and you'll see what I mean. That's one issue.
Another is that you seem to have some parameters indexed. In Google, I searched [site:officialunclaimedfunds.com "uncle sam" and www.officialunclaimedfunds.com/?hop=jokes&&What was indexed.
IMHO, this is just another thin affiliate site. In my few minutes of looking, there's nothing here that you can't find on a large number of other clickbank affiliate sites all selling me the exact same thing. The only advantage I see is that there aren't the ton of ads that I see on some of the other sites. Put another way, is there a reason why this page SHOULD be ranked?
-
This sitee is not the same one I discussed earlier. I don't have a noindex tag and it's not blocked in robots.txt. I'm not getting a 404 error and my site is verified in Google Webmaster Tools. My site is www.officialunclaimedfunds.com.
-
Also, is this the same site you brought up in other posts, or is it a different site?
-
Have you taken a look to make sure that there's not a noindex tag on the home page, or that it's blocked in robots.txt? Is your home page in Yahoo or Bing? If you search the title tag text to see if that shows up? Does your home page return a 404 in the server header?
It's a bit harder to figure out without knowing your URL, but my first thought is to see if it's something technical where Google is behaving like it should, or if there really is some type of penalty.
EDIT: Have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools and looked for any messages there about your site?
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
-
Page content not being recognised?
I moved my website from Wix to Wordpress in May 2018. Since then, it's disappeared from Google searches. The site and pages are indexed, but no longer ranking. I've just started a Moz campaign, and most pages are being flagged as having "thin content" (50 words or less), when I know that there are 300+ words on most of the pages. Looking at the page source I find this bit of code: page contents Does this mean that Google is finding this and thinks that I have only two words (page contents) on the page? Or is this code to grab the page contents from somewhere else in the code? I'm completely lost with this and would appreciate any insight.
Technical SEO | | Photowife1 -
Should I deindex my pages?
I recently changed the URLs on a website to make them tidier and easier to follow. I put 301s in place to direct all the previous page names to the new ones. However, I didn't read moz's guide which says I should leave the old sitemap online for a few weeks afterwards. As I result, webmaster tools is showing duplicate page titles (which means duplicate pages) for the old versions of the pages I have renamed. Since the old versions are no longer on the sitemap, google can no longer access them to find the 301s I have put in place. Is this a problem that will fix itself over time or is there a way to quicken up the process? I could use webmaster tools to remove these old urls, but I'm not sure if this is recommended. Alternatively, I could try and recreate the old sitemap, but this would take a lot of time.
Technical SEO | | maxweb0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
My website pages are not crawled, what to do?
Hi all. I have made some changes on the website so i like to crawled them by the search engines Google especially. I have made these changes around 2 weeks ago. I have submitted my website on good bookmarking websites. Also i used a tool available in Google webmasters "Fetch as Google", Resubmitted a sitemap.xml. Still my pages are not crawled your opinion please. Thanks
Technical SEO | | lucidsoftech0 -
Testimonial pages
Is it better to have one long testimonial page on your site, or break it down into several smaller pages with testimonials? First time I've posted on the forum. But I'm excited! Ron
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Help with Places Pages
How can we get our Google Place page to rank higher, and how can we then keep it there instead of seeing it bounce around? We seem to have trouble getting a decent ranking for our places page even though out website ranks well on Google for geographical phrases?
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
How to set Home page for the best effect
My head is spinning with all the confusing possibilities. Does anybody have an easy answer for setting up the home page and its canonical-ishness ie Which gives the best SEO Mojo ? \ \default.aspx \keyword\ \keyword\default.aspx Thanking you in advance for reducing the number of business migranes around the globe.
Technical SEO | | blinkybill0 -
On-Page Question
Im trying to increase value to specific pages by putting history, and additional images. Will copying snippets from other sites negatively affect me? Should the content be re-written completely?
Technical SEO | | Anest0