Drastic Difference between Ranking in Seomoz Keyword Ranking and non-personalized Google US Search
-
Hi everybody,
for some of our keywords we saw a huge drop in ranking in the Seomoz Dashboard, yet when performing a non-personalized Google US search we still hold our old positions. Now, I am worried whether this is an upcoming Google penalty or just some bug in the latest crawl.
Did anybody ever experience something similar and how could we find out if we were indeed penalized by Google (as we did some major linkbuilding campaign for these keywords recently)?
Cheers and a major thanks for your suggestions,
Tobias
-
Hi Nick,
major thanks! That sounds like a great way forward and I'll file a reconsideration request!
Luckily, the drop only showed for some internal landing pages and not the domain in general.
Cheers from Germany and another thanks,
Tobias
-
A 30 or more place drop does seem like a penalty might be in place. If you are only seeing the drop for some keywords and not everything, a 30 or 50 position drop could be an "over promotion" penalty. I have to admit I haven't done thorough research on the so called 30 or 50 penalties, but the belief is that if you have too many of the same anchor texts in your inbound links as is often the case with bulk directory submissions, you will lose 30 places with this penalty. In extreme cases it can be 50. I guess that could happen if your page is keyword stuffed too.
Again, I have no proof other than some anecdotal evidence - I had a client who prior to working with me hired a "1000s of back links" scammer who did indeed submit to about 1000 junky directories with the exact same keyword anchor text for each. Once those links started showing up, the site's position for that keyword went off a cliff.
If that sounds like your situation, you could try sending a Reconsideration Request through Google's Webmaster Central. They will usually get back to you within a few weeks with a message that either no manual penalty has been imposed, or if there is one, hopefully they will tell you why.
-
Hi Nick,
thanks for your thoughts! The localization is definitly something to consider, yet the drop we experienced was more than 30 places for a few keywords while others remained unchanged. Therefore I fear that there are some "worse" reasons behind this drop. The thing about information distribution to 3rd party tools might be another good lead particularly as we did not see the drop when performing a non-personalized Google search.
Do you happen to have suggestions on how to find out about Google penalties?
Best,
Tobias
-
I have been seeing a lot of that kind of thing too, but not just with SEOMoz tools. I think something is up with Google in some way. My theories so far are - some kind of algorithm adjustment that has only partially rolled out, a change in how Google releases info to 3rd party tools, or the conspiracy theory: a change in how personalization is handled so that no search isn't at least a little personalized.
Considering Google's recent announcement about limiting search query and referrer data to Adwords tracking only, I am thinking it is an overall shuffling around of things at Google.
Here's a link to a question I asked about a similar problem where my non-personalized local searches were not looking as good as the various keyword position tools I use. Kind of the reverse of your issue, but I think it may have a similar cause, whatever that may be: http://www.seomoz.org/q/local-searches-done-from-outside-of-local-area-better-than-searches-from-within-local-area
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Ranking not collecting keywords
Hi, we recently migrated our blog to be on the same domain as our main website. It's been about a month. I have continued adding more keywords we'd like to track to our Ranking list on Moz. But it's been a week and the keywords are still not collecting. Is this something we need to fix on our end, or is there something going on with Moz? keyword ranking issues.png
Moz Pro | | CoveoSEO0 -
Does SEOmoz tool provide me the option to track rankings for other search engines like google.co.uk?
I need to track rankings on search engines across different geographies. Does your tool provide the option to track rankings for search engines other than the ones used in US
Moz Pro | | zycus0 -
Keyword report
What's the purpose of the keyword difficulty report? I've typed in some of my keywords and discoverd their "highly competetive." As if I didn't already know this. 😉 The question is, what do I do about it?
Moz Pro | | sakeith0 -
Keywords for Whatafy.com
Hi guys, I own whatafy.com, we translate the articles from my romanian website dli.ro. I'm working on a script for subdomain ask.whatafy.com Whatafy = We Have All The Answers For You Now i'm stuck in seomoz, because as you can see we have articles from over 40 domains, and is a general online magazine with articles. What keywords should i use for main domain ? What competitors to enter in those 3 options so i can track and beat them. Should i make another campaign for ask.whatafy.com when is ready ? or the main campaign have some options to track subdomain to ? I have same situation with dli.ro where in subfolders i have different scripts like, web directory, companies listing, dreams interpretations, illustrated jokes, text jokes, driving licens test, online test for fun, postcodes, wheater, big forum, maps, ecards etc. Is a big portal with everything, and for each subfolder i targeted severel keywords, i need to make a campaign for each folder ?
Moz Pro | | whatafy0 -
Can I prevent some pages from being crawled from SEOMoz spider and still not affect Google Spider?
Well, basically that's the question 😄 Can I prevent some pages from being crawled from SEOMoz spider and still not affect Google Spider? This is, I have more than 10.000 pages on the website, and I am not interested in having reports for many of them, but I still wanna get SEO visits on them, so I want Google to crawl it easily... Thanks!
Moz Pro | | MattDG0 -
Seomoz and site explorer completely different
seomoz and site explorer completely different results on own site and competitors on moz i am ahead in all aspects in site explorer i am way off par...why
Moz Pro | | lordmoose85450 -
Www. part of url not showing on google search results.
When typing in fun translator into google UK, my website www.funtranslator.com is the 18th result on the 2nd page, however, there is an issue, it only shows funtranslator.com, without the www part, which is not what I want because the whole address to show up, because my campaign on seomoz pro and webmaster tools account is www.funtranslator.com not funtranslator.com. How can I resolve this. For not, I have a redirect that goes from funtranslator to www.funtranslator.com I want to know how to get the full www.url into the results instead of just url.com without the www part of the url. Also, will this affect my stats gathered in my campaign on my seomoz pro account?
Moz Pro | | RyanSMurphy1 -
How is SeoMoz different?
In the past I heard that other SEO type crawling software like WP Gold could seriously harm your rankings in the search engines - especially Google. How is SeoMoz different ?
Moz Pro | | NeilTompkins0