Home Page Keywords not Ranking and Assigned to Inside Pages

[CraigSWD]

Hi, thank you for taking the time to read this. We have a few websites with the same problem. I will use http://www.prepared-meals.com as an example:

The home page was ranking on page one for keyword "Prepared Meals". The site is about 6 months old. We use the Moz page optimizer on all pages of our websites to score an A rating.

Recently we found the home page is no longer showing up in search results and the keyword "prepared meals" now points to an inside page that is not relevant: http://www.prepared-meals.com/Senior-Meals/Moms-Meals-Reviews.html this page shows up for Prepared Meals around page 15 in Google results.

We have read keywords in the URL might be the issue, even though the page optimizer in MOZ says to do that. We are wondering if this is the issue or there is some other problem we are not aware of.

Again, thank you for you for your time.

-Craig

[kirube]

Hi Craig -

I think Google has penalized the site for over optimization or trying to trick google for the keyword 'prepared meals'.

Looking into the backlinks you have via keyword 'Prepared Meals' - sample here http://prntscr.com/1yzst1, i notice that they are from sites which are blog networks that commercially sell backlinks. If that is the case, it is not a good practice.

I'd propose that you check the backlinks and take corrective measures.

Other than this, I cannot find anything else that would be the cause for the same.

It also aligns with the recent google release of penguin 2.1 which is to fight these spammy links -- more details here http://searchengineland.com/penguin-2-1-and-5-live-173632

Regards,

K

[David-E-Carey]

Hi Craig,

To me it kinda looks like an 'Exact Match Domain' issue and that over this year's algorithm updates it may have now flagged your domain as of low quality. The fact that your site is very young as well and that this looks like an EMD for your target search query it's likely it is now going against you.  There is low historical data that the search engines can go on so it's likely to be devaluing your site to searchers.

Ref. "We have read keywords in the URL might be the issue, even though the page optimizer in MOZ says to do that. We are wondering if this is the issue or there is some other problem we are not aware of." A page's URL yes is used as an indicator of a page's relevancy but this is more about domain name address name rather than a page's URL.

This article is somewhat old but still helpful http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html

Best

David