Why Would This Old Page Be Penalized?

[stevewiideman]

Here's an old page on a trustworthy domain with no apparent negative SEO activity according to OSE and ahrefs: http://www.gptours.com/Monaco-Grand-Prix

They went from page 1 to page 13 for "monaco grand prix" within about 4 weeks. Week 2 we pulled out all the duplicate content in the history section. When rank slipped further, we put it back. Yet it's still moving down, while other pages on the website are holding strong.

Next steps will be to add some schema.org/Event microformats, but beyond that, do you have any ideas?

[TextMarketing]

Your rankings not only have to do with the freshness, quality and links pointing to that page but the same for all other competing pages. I would use the open site explorer to see if the pages that are taking your page's place are getting new backlinks that are helping to drive them up.

A lot of SERP movement has to do with your competitor's pages. That's why it's extremely important that you're always building new quality links and keeping your content fresh and updated.

[MarieHaynes]

You have a canonical issue with the page and that could be the problem.  Check out this search and click on "repeat with the omitted search results included"

Search for text in quotes

The text on that page is indexed on 46 pages on your site.  To solve this you'll need to implement a rel-canonical to the page to tell Google which version is supposed to be indexed.  This will likely help.

I did also find that some of the text on your page is the same as on this page:

http://www.luxurytravelmagazine.com/news-articles/grand-prix-tours-introduces-exclusive-monaco-grand-prix-onboard-windstar-16628.php

It's possible they have copied from you, but if you have taken your description from another source then you may need to rewrite it to be unique.

There's also not much on that page to entice Google to rank it well.  You've got 3 paragraphs of information, some of which is duplicated elsewhere.

I think that if you clean up the canonical issues and add some substantial and helpful content then you'll do much better.

[stevewiideman]

Thanks Marie,

I've confirmed that the client is the content source originator. Their CMS won't accommodate canonical tags at the moment. If the URLs were the friendly URLs with dynamic params then it'd be no problem, but it's actually index.php on each one.

http://screencast.com/t/VuWv0gL7uq

I did take a look at their parameter handling in an attempt to optimize at that level. I modified the settings to this: http://screencast.com/t/hkjw258Bb5Qd and am considering blocking /command in robots.txt.

Thoughts?

TextMarketing, the page actually has quite a few authoritative links and very few "commercial terms". I thought "Penguin Penalty" at first too until I viewed the backlink profile.

Thanks you 2 - your help is beyond encouraging.