Been working on my site to rank but has not moved.

[Marie Haynes]

Thanks Linda. Those threads were quite informative.

I'm laughing at my typo above. I meant to type "I'm interested..." not "I'm interesting...". Makes me sound a little egotistical. LOL!

 

[JimFranco]

I rank number 4 in my town for the local pack kw house cleaning roswell
was number 3 till a few weeks back for years.

Today when I checked my ranking I cant even find my homepage ranked any where. Where it use to rank organically number 11 or 12 for "house cleaning Roswell" I do not see my home page in even the top 100

Same goes with "house cleaning atlanta" I have not ranked in the pack since 2012 but organically I was around 60 or 50s. I figured that was a penguin filter.

I have been cleaning up my backlink profile and fixing my citations.

But today my home page seems to be completely deranked. Though sub pages are showing up. What could be the cause ? I am so lost on this one.

My site shows up under site:mightycleanhome.com and first on serps for company name.

I feel like I got a penalty but I have no idea what it would be. I only fixed my citations and disavowed some bad links.

you think something on my home page ?

Ugghh help !

 

[CodyBaird]

Smells like a penalty to me.

I can't prove emperically if a penguin penalty does or doesn't affect the local pac today like some articles or experts suggest.

However, I do have a question. If a business is caught using manipulation by Google, should they be penalized in local rankings/pac? And if Google doesn't slap local rankings today for manipulation as in organic, should we expect to see local pac drops in the future?

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[Phil Rozek]

Jim,

Just to follow up on some of Cody?s great advice about reviews:

1. No such thing as a Bing review anymore. Most of them are sourced from Yelp.

2. There is plenty of benefit in getting reviews on the smaller sites, especially if they show up on the first page of Google for brand-name searches. Your reviews should tell a consistent story. For instance, if you?ve got a bunch of good reviews on Google and a couple crappy ones on Yelp, customers may not be sure what to make of you. But if they see good reviews on other sites, that?ll corroborate your nice Google reviews.

3. Facebook, BBB, and industry-specific sites are excellent places to get reviews, in my experience.

 

[JimFranco]

not sure what my site would be penalized for .

Only thing I have done is write longer page.

and disavow bad links

and fix my citations

no link building.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Jim,

When I go to AOL (which uses Google organic search results) and search "Mighty Clean Home Roswell, GA", your homepage isn't the first result. That is normally a bad sign. Your contact-us page is 3rd but Yelp and Facebook are outranking it. I've seen that's one of the signs of a penalty. Can you go into Google Analytics and see what your organic traffic looks like?

Run your site through this tool and see what it looks like: PANGUIN TOOL | Barracuda Digital


One thing I've found over the years is that if there is an algorithm update in the US that impacts the local pack, we dont' get it in Canada until later. So in Canada, you still rank 2nd in the pack. In the US, you're gone. This tells me something changed algorithmicly.

I know Penguin is due to refresh any day but I haven't heard anyone say it has yet.

Try changing the URL you link to in GMB to http://mightycleanhome.com/about-mighty-clean-home/. It is currently 69th organically but is the highest-ranking page you have for the keyword "house cleaning roswell".

 

[Marie Haynes]

When I do a search for site:mightycleanhome.com your home page does not come up. That's unusual. It's not blocked by robots.txt and I don't see a noindex tag anywhere.

So, I took text from your home page and enclosed it in quotes and look what I found:

Here's your homepage:

http://www.mightycleanhome.com

and this page is an exact duplicate:

http://mightycleanhome.com/about-mighty-clean-home/

That page does indeed come up on a site:search so it looks like Google has decided that your home page is a duplicate of this inner page. When Google sees duplicates it tries to figure out which one is the original and then only displays that one.

You've also got these pages in the index which are duplicates as well:

http://mightycleanhome.com/page/12/
http://mightycleanhome.com/page/3/

You can fix that by installing the Yoast SEO plugin and marking all "page" pages as noindex.

There are a couple of ways that you can fix the duplication from the about page and the home page. One would be to redirect the about page to the home page with a 301 redirect. Another would be to completely rewrite one of the pages. Once you've done that, then go to Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and do a fetch as Googlebot and then click "submit to index". That'll get Google to recrawl the pages and hopefully index the home page.

I'm not sure if these have been mentioned before so forgive me if I'm saying the same thing twice but I'd also make sure you check the manual actions viewer in Google Search Console by going to Search Traffic --> Manual Actions to make sure there is no manual penalty. Also, when you do fetch as Googlebot try a fetch and render and see if Google is able to see the whole page.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for all your help Marie!

FYI #1 You should set up a sig with link to site so folks can find out more...

FYI #2 Joy started a new thread for a dedicated penalty/pack discussion:
<a href="http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/38256-can-you-rank-3-pack-manual-penguin-penalty.html">Can You Rank in the 3-Pack with a Manual or Penguin Penalty?</a>

 

[Marie Haynes]

Thanks Linda! I hadn't realized I didn't have a signature.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Ooh, I didn't know you had a newsletter. Just signed up!

 

[CodyBaird]

Nice find @mariehaynes. Duped home page makes sense. @jimfranco you could fix that first and see if homepage returns to index.

Then worry about penalty if it doesnt.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[JimFranco]

Those pages are not duplicates. They no longer exist so its going to a 301 redirect to my homepage.

When I do a search for site:mightycleanhome.com your home page does not come up. That's unusual. It's not blocked by robots.txt and I don't see a noindex tag anywhere.

So, I took text from your home page and enclosed it in quotes and look what I found:

Here's your homepage:

http://www.mightycleanhome.com

and this page is an exact duplicate:

http://mightycleanhome.com/about-mighty-clean-home/

That page does indeed come up on a site:search so it looks like Google has decided that your home page is a duplicate of this inner page. When Google sees duplicates it tries to figure out which one is the original and then only displays that one.

You've also got these pages in the index which are duplicates as well:

Mighty Clean Home House Cleaning Service Roswell Atlanta - Part 12
Mighty Clean Home House Cleaning Service Roswell Atlanta - Part 3

You can fix that by installing the Yoast SEO plugin and marking all "page" pages as noindex.

There are a couple of ways that you can fix the duplication from the about page and the home page. One would be to redirect the about page to the home page with a 301 redirect. Another would be to completely rewrite one of the pages. Once you've done that, then go to Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and do a fetch as Googlebot and then click "submit to index". That'll get Google to recrawl the pages and hopefully index the home page.

I'm not sure if these have been mentioned before so forgive me if I'm saying the same thing twice but I'd also make sure you check the manual actions viewer in Google Search Console by going to Search Traffic --> Manual Actions to make sure there is no manual penalty. Also, when you do fetch as Googlebot try a fetch and render and see if Google is able to see the whole page.

 

[Marie Haynes]

They were duplicates as of a couple of hours ago.

I had each of these pages open in my browser and copied and pasted the url from the top of my browser.

 

[JimFranco]

Thanks everyone. I think I found the issue.

It appears one of my plugins on my site using wordpress was blocking Google.

I have disabled them all and will go through them one by one.

Here is what was showing on Google Crawl

<input type="text" tabindex="-1" role="presentation" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; opacity: 0; height: 1px; width: 1px; z-index: -1; overflow: hidden; position: absolute;">Error details ​ <input type="text" tabindex="-1" role="presentation" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; opacity: 0; height: 1px; width: 1px; z-index: -1; overflow: hidden; position: absolute;">In sitemaps ​ <input type="text" tabindex="-1" role="presentation" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; opacity: 0; height: 1px; width: 1px; z-index: -1; overflow: hidden; position: absolute;">Linked from ​ <tbody style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;"> </tbody>

Last crawled: 11/5/15 First detected: 11/2/15 Googlebot couldn't crawl your URL because your server either requires authentication to access the page, or it is blocking Googlebot from accessing your site. Learn more

<tbody style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;">
</tbody>

 

[JimFranco]

I just wanted to update again. My site has coming back pretty much to the levels before. The issue was W3 Cache was blocking google from crawling my site. I tried everything to fix it but at the end I had to switch to another Cache plugin.

In case anyone else has this issue ever.

thanks everyone for all the help I do appreciate it.

---------- Post Merged at 02:26 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 02:23 AM ----------

There is one issue I am having if anyone knows what it might be that Marie pointed out to me

These pages are duplicate content

Mighty Clean Home House Cleaning Service Roswell Atlanta - Part 12
Mighty Clean Home House Cleaning Service Roswell Atlanta - Part 3

To my home page. Yet when I click on wordpress to edit them it only shows up as being my home page and no way to delete it other than to delete my homepage.

Anyone every experience anything like this ?

 

[Marie Haynes]

There are a couple of solutions for this. If you don't already have an SEO plugin installed, I'd consider adding the Yoast plugin and then changing the settings so that /page/ pages, category and tag pages are not indexed.

Another solution which is a little more complicated would be to use your .htaccess file to 301 redirect these pages to the appropriate page.