Damn that was scary I lost about 95% of my traffic for about 3 weeks....... here's what happened: 1) I was ranking 1st page for about 10 keywords for about 6 months 2) One day, I decided to put a bunch of links to internal pages of the site onto the homepage..... this is when the trouble started 3) My homepage disappeared from rankings, however my subpages were ranking...... however ranking around the 10th page, and my homepage was ranking around the 100th page. My homepage was still ranking 1st page for 1 keyword, which was very strange.... and I now know why which I will explain next 4) Ok... to explain.... say I wanted to rank for "Red Widgets". Say my strong homepage was 1st page for 6 months for "Red Widgets". Now, say I have a page called MY SITE - RED WIDGETS. That "MY SITE - RED WIDGETS" page started ranking ahead of my homepage.... but around the 10th page.... and my homepage got knocked down to the 100th page. So basically, what happened is by putting all those internal links onto the homepage.... passed the power to the subpages..... but the subpages were weak. Here's what I did to fix it: 1) I removed all of the internal links on the homepage 2) The subpages that were ranking for my coveted keywords.... had the name of the keyword in the Title Tag.... I changed the title of those...... and made sure that the homepage is the only page with that keyword Yayyy Im back!!! Wooohooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That was so scary!!!! I worked so hard on this site every single day for a year!!!!! Im back Im back!!!! Wooooohooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
Mate, I think that these are temporary affects, as you says the same at the end too. well I guess putting the links or inner pages on the home page will never down your rankings.
I think the lost in SERPS was temporary since I had also lost SERPS for 2 of my sites last month but they are back in the first page now although I didn't change anything
Well i have a site right now that is doing well in the serps and doesnt offer any direct navigation to the categories on the home page and have been thinking of adding the categories in footer for better navigation. Will definitely be watching to see if our homepage rankings fall due to the update we will be performing soon and will watch to make sure it dont screw up serps.... thx for the advice thx malcolm
You don't lose ranking for linking to your internal pages. After all, that's what homepages do. What kind of a bunch is that? 200+?
There was no need of that thing. Infact your inner pages must ve a link from your home page for proper PR flow
I had about 100+ links on the homepage I think it passed "link juice" to my subpages...... as they were all ranking and my homepage stopped ranking.... I was ranking for 1 keyword.... and it was the 1 keyword that wasnt on a subpage Title Tag.... The other 10 coveted keywords..... I had in subpage title tags.... and it was now those pages that were ranking, not my homepage........ the problem with that was they were weaker than the homepage, and would rank on the 10th page or worse.......... and the homepage was 1st page
3 weeks ago i had the same problem, my page perished from the page one ranking and as i tried to fix this i made some mistakes and screwed the ranking even further Then i decided to wait and see what happens next, and the page came back but now ranks on page 2. Learned my lession. Moving on, Must get the site to page one again !
Linkmasterflash, You were trying to manipulate your rankings by adding over 100 keyword stuffed links to your own pages. G is smart enough to know what you were attempting to do, so you were penalized. You then removed the links, and soon thereafter your rank came back. G has given you the benefit of the doubt. But, if you do something foolish like that again, G may not be so forgiving. /*tom*/
One way Google protects the algo is by remaining unpredictable. You can make changes to your site and suppose SERP affects are directly related to what you did, but because Google is constantly tweaking and dancing around, you may not know for certain.