Specific Page Penalty?

[notnem]

Having trouble to figure out why one of our pages is not ranking in SERPs, on-page optimisation looks decent to me.

Checked by using gInfinity extension and searched for the page URL.

Can one page be penalised from Google engines (.ie / .com ) and the rest of the website not penalised?

The (possible) penalised page is showing in Google places in SERPs. I assume this would not show if it was penalised.

Would appreciate any advice.

Thanks

[Mr.Rangen]

Is the URL no longer in Google's index at all?

[grasshopper]

Hi Ronan,

First, to your general question - yes, it is possible for one page of a domain to be penalized / filtered, while the rest of the domain is not.  However, it seems extremely unlikely that the URL in question would rank in Google Places if it was penalized.  There are a few things you want to check:

1. The first thing you want to check is whether or not the page is indexed and cached, which is a simple query [cache:mypage.com/this-page].  Does it return a result?

2. If so, in the gray banner across the top of the cached page, click on "Text-only version".  Does the machine-readable text match the true content on the page?  If you have large amounts of machine-readable text that are only visible to an engine, and not a user, that can trip an algorithmic spam filter.  Also, look for off-topic words - sometimes sites get hacked and hackers inject all kinds of spammy garbage and links, which can also trip the filter.

3. If the page is cached, and rendering the intended content, does it have sufficient link authority to rank for the terms you intend?  It's quite possible that your page is in a competitive keyword space, and doesn't have enough juice to push past the competition.

4. If you want to see if it has enough juice to rank for anything at all, pick an sentence in the first paragraph of text, and search for it enclosed in quotes, ["Some random sentence from my first paragraph here."]  Is your URL the #1 result?  It should be.  If there are other sites that you've syndicated your content to, or have scraped your content and are more authoritative than your site, it's possible that your URL isn't ranking because it's being (incorrectly) filtered out as duplicate content.

Hope that helps.

[notnem]

Hi Grasshopper,

Thanks for your input. I have checked each one and appears to be fine:

1. Yes

2. Text is true content on the page

3. The page itself does have low inbound links. It might be this?

4. Appearing first

Despite low number of inbound links, I wouldn't say this alone would cause the ranking issue as the page is well optimised and similar to competitors.

[notnem]

The page is indexed

[grasshopper]

Hi Ronan,

Since it passes tests 1,2 and 4, I would say that #3 is the culprit.  Having solid on-page optimization is great, but link authority is the name of the game for achieving ranking, especially if the keywords you're trying to rank for are competitive.

Run the Keyword Difficulty Tool against the keywords you're trying to rank for.  I would expect that the URLs on page 1 of the SERPs all have significantly significantly stronger, more trustworthy link profiles than your URL does.

If that's the case, all the standard advice applies - create a truly differentiated page that offers content / resources / tools above and beyond what your competitors offer, and market the hell out of it.

[notnem]

Hi Grasshopper,

I know the keywords I am trying to rank for are competitive.

I will take that into consideration and start working on these. How long do this take effect in Google engines?

Thanks

[Mr.Rangen]

To me, the true clue would be whether or not the URL ranked well previously.

If it has not.. you need more links. It is probably a page authority issue.

If it has.. you may have over-optimized on the anchor text, sitewide links will do this. You may rank well for awhile, then you'll find yourself on page five shaking your fist at Google.

[notnem]

It has ranked well previously, according to Rank tracker on SEOmoz - it was ranking 4th last week however I don't think that is correct.

Is it a reliable tool??

Organic traffic shows no drop for keywords for the page in 2012 nor does page views for the page. If it was over-optimised, these would be noticeble in Google Analytics..

[grasshopper]

There's no way to give an accurate time-scale answer to that question.  If you're able to get editorial links from authoritative, trusted sites, you can see substantial movement within a week or two of the links being crawled.  However, if your links are from lower-quality sites, or are weighted heavily toward devalued methods of link building (directories, reciprocal links, three-way links, etc), engines may not give those links much weight, if any, no matter how long you wait.

[Mr.Rangen]

You may get no traffic from ranking #4 these days, especially on queries with a competitive paid portion of the SERP.

What I would do is stop assessing the "what if" scenario's and start focusing all your energy towards acquiring those editorial type links grasshopper was talking about.. right now! You'll get that ranking and secure it for long-term traffic.