When the homepage of my blog vanishes from the serps but the other pages still show (they are so low I didn't even notice them before but I suppose they were always there) I am assuming the homepage is getting penalized? It will go from the first page to 50th page or worse, sometimes it doesn't show up at all for what was previously its best term. It always shows up when i search the the exact URL so it isn't getting blacklisted. What do you suppose this smaller penalty is? I know i havent given you much to go on but the other interior pages not getting penalized seems weird to me. I'm hoping it means something to you.
They are all wordpress blogs and I didn't noindex anything so it could be cuplicate dontent but I think it is not for two reasons: 1. it is only happening to 10% of my wordpress blogs and most of them are very very similar. 2. the homepage was the highest in the serps for the targeted keyword at some time in the past on all them except 2. It is probably true of those 2 as well I just can't say for sure. If the homepage and a category page are determined to have the same content the duplicate content penalty would likely lower the category page, right? I have seen the duplicate content penalty behave in a few different ways but it seems to me that if the offending duplicate is all on one domain Google determines it is an innocent mistake, penalizes all of the content except 1, and gives that 1 a chance to compete with no penalty at all. It seems like if that were the case the 1 would be the homepage when it was indexed first, already ranked higher in the serps, and has the inbound links coming directly at it. Also, there are multiple interior pages in the results for many of these domains. That would also seem to rule out the theory of 1.
Check ur first page position by Rank checker (seobook.com).. Also if inner page is in SERP means the site is not penalized may be some SEO problem...
Yep Rena are true you won't always rank top on google you will have competitor check it with some free tool on the internet usually it helped
Could be over-optimization of your anchor. If you have thousands of links to your homepage with only one text and no variations.
This issue happened with me last month. Just make sure you have no hidden text on your homepage, make sure your homepage is not over optimized and has unique content. It will appear back on Google SERPS within a week or two.
Your homepage doesn't drop from #4 to #600 in 1 move because of a sudden increase in competition. The inbound links to this site probably have 98% the exact same anchor text. You think I should go back and tweak the anchor text on a few of the link? Would the low quality links be ok for this (pr1 not highly relevant)? I have no hidden text but it might be over-optimized. I have titled links and images in posts. Most of the alt text is the exact same. Would you remove that or just change it?
I had some issues with duplicate content, make sure that all relevant same content pages are nofollow'ed.
It's a tough call. If you leave it in the current state you will most likely see no improvement, because they've mostly been devalued. If you change the anchor around a bit you might get a better position. In essence, you could get better serps or not, nothing is certain.
Actually this usually handles itself in 3 or 4 months. I just dont like it. Does anyone know why I have such a hard time logging into the forum?
You could most likely fix the situation in a few weeks time with a few quality high pr links. Or in-content article links (different articles and anchors with some buffer are advised) on a few quality blogs (50?). A DP member nicknamed "sellhousefast" is offering something like that. I used his service and would recommend it.
When I noindexed pages with duplicate content it got better 12 hours later but then 3 days later it got even worse. I think the initial boost was from the "nofollow" I added and keeping the link juice flowing in a better way but then when I got spidered Google saw my site had shrunk so they devalued me. Does anyone agree? These sites are pretty small, noindexing author archives, date based archives, and category archives reduces the total number of pages somewhat significantly.
Yes, reducing the pages could potentially harm your rankings because you lose internal links to the pages that ranked before. Did you use the service above I recommended?