Google Rankings Drop - home page falls below internal page

[davidcorman]

I manage a site that has been ranking decently for a competitive keyword (around #16, 2nd page) for an internal page. Just yesterday, I noticed that the site dropped to #33, 4th page. In addition, another internal page on the site now ranks ahead of it at #24, 3rd page. The specific page in question has also seen a Page Rank increase from 0 to 4 recently and I have built a decent number of relevant links (some directory, some social media and category related websites). No paid links, link exchanges, or any other hacks.

Do you think this is a Google penalty? Something similar happened in the past and after submitting a reconsideration request the page started to rank well again. I am not sure why this is happening again and I am hesitant to submit another reconsideration request.

Thanks for your help.

[tedster]

This kind of thing can be a filter or penalty, but it's quite rare for the home page to get nailed and not an internal page that ranks on the same keyword. More of the time it seems to be a data bug at Google. I'd watch it for a week or so, and if it doesn't straighten out, a reconsideration request might be in order - or even a post on the Google Webmaster Help forums.

[skweb]

Agree with Tedster. It is a bug that affects websites sometimes and eventually gets fixed automatically.

[sanveer]

Our home page does show up in rankings for 2 kws but does for some 3 kws on page 1 but not all of them. Our internal pages show up on page one for lot of kws. site:www.domain.com home page comes up.

On google sandbox home page shows up on first page.

Should we submit a reinclusion request?

Any help will be appreciated.

[Robert Charlton]

Relevance, optimization, and rankings are all page specific, and it's perfectly natural for internal pages to rank for queries that the home page doesn't rank on at all.

On the other hand, the site: operator, without additional search terms, is not query specific, and, because the home page usually has the most inbound links, it generally appears first in an umodified site: search. The pages are probably listed in order of descending PageRank.

As soon as you start adding keywords, relevance factors start coming into play. There's no reason you should automatically expect the home page to rank first on every keyword search of your site, with or without the site: operator.

I've also seen a home page that's close to relevant come and go on some searches because of sitewide factors, even though it's primarily an internal page that's being targeting.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:11 am (utc) on Nov. 6, 2009]

[sanveer]

Thanks. Home page has for 5-6 years has always ranked higher than internal pages on most of kws i'm referring too and still does on [www2.sandbox.google.com...] Before this problem home page has always been very strong on most of the kws.

[Robert Charlton]

sanveer - I was adding my last sentence just as you posted.

Before this problem home page has always been very strong on most of the kws.

I agree with tedster that you should wait for a while.

[sanveer]

This problem started in july this year and also happened last year and then came back.