Drop in rankings, next step
-
So based on a question asked yesterday, I am wondering what my next step is.
Yesterday's question was, I have made updates to Title and Meta Descriptions for my client's site and suddenly they are not showing up in the top 50 for numerous keywords that they used to. The only words in the page source that were edited were "fluff" words that were replaced with relevant keywords reflected in much of the on-page copy yet now the client is not showing up. Ideas?
From responses and research, it seems there's a lag time in Google to pick up the updated titles/info and these changes can cause a drop in rankings for a short time - however, I can't very well turn to my client and say sorry your website isn't showing up for a few weeks...wondering what my next step should be, or is there a greater issue I'm missing.
-
What do you mean by over-optimized?
-
There are many possible reasons. Try resubmitting a new xml sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and that should speed up the process.
-
That is frustrating for sure, seeing as no other changes have been made. There's usually a reason or two as to why such drops in rankings would occur. It's worth starting with an on-page analysis (SEOmoz's tool is great) to see if any serious errors or such like are identified. Perhaps the site is now over-optimized which can happen.
Perhaps something has happened that you don't know about, such as your client purchasing links without you knowing, or some issues with the hosting provider. Is good to rule out as many possible reasons as you can.
-
Great ideas, thank you. I actually did the term targeter for Organic T Shirts for http://greenpromotionalitems.com/organic-t-shirts.htm and got an A so that's good. I do notice that when the site does show up in searches, it is all the old meta descriptions and titles (changes were made 2-3 weeks ago). Any clue on why that may be happening?
-
The short answer for your question, yes it normally takes a week to two weeks to get sites fully re-indexed in Google. Of course there are special occasions when it turns around faster, but generally speaking 1-2 weeks. The easiest way to check if they have been reindexed, is to search for branded keywords and see your new titles/meta descriptions are in the SERPs or if it is still the older ones.
As for optimizing your pages, shoot for an A in the term target tool (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new).
-
Thank you for the suggestions and we will definitely be focusing in on those. I think my confusion is that for certain terms that the site used to appear for, it no longer is, even though we now have more targeted SEO for those very same terms.
-
Hi there
It could be that the new relevant keywords that you have replaced the 'fluff' words with within the Titles and Descriptions are more competitive than those previous words, resulting in a drop in rankings.
If you're now fully targeting the site towards more competitive keywords than before, it's justifiable to expect a drop in rankings.
Additional supportive content (still unique, relevant, valuable content) plus some good distribution and PR should attract some new inbound links, hopefully on relevant anchor text.
So you may well have a justifiable reason there, plus an action plan to remedy the situation, which a client will likely be appreciative of.
Regards
Simon
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
-
A single page from site not ranking
Hello, We have a new site launched in March, that is ranking well in search for all of the pages, except one and we don't know why. This page it is optimised exactly the same way like the others, but still doesn't rank in Google. We have verified robots.txt for noffollow, noindex tags, we have verified if it was penalized by Google, but still didn't find nothing. Initially we had another site and was on the topic of this page, but we have redirected it to the new one. In case this old site was anytime in the past penalized by Google, could it be possible that the new page be influenced by this? Also, we have another site that ranks on the first position, that targets the same keywords like the page that does not rank. It was the first site we launched, so it is pretty much old, but we do not have duplicate content on them. Maybe Google doesn't like the fact that both target the same keywords and chooses to display only the old site? Please help us if you have any ideas or have been through such thing. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniela.pirlogea0 -
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
New pages not ranking
I published some new landing pages about a month a go which are much better quality than previous pages and on an optimised URL. The old pages never ranked and the new pages aren't ranking either although they are much better. The old pages 301 redirect to the new pages. Any quick ways I can at least get them ranking? Not expecting Page 1 overnight but to at least see the new pages on Page 5 would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Rank Without any back linking ?
Hello, I am thinking , I will rank my site without SEO . I will add quality content on my site . Will not do any backlinking ! Can anyone suggest me if it is really possible. I know some guys or some websites those are ranked without any SEO attempts. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | businessowner0 -
Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for. We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user. Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pasware0 -
Tagged URL ranking organically
I've noticed that one of our GA tagged urls are ranking organically & therefore is skewing the referral data. The campaign that we were tracking is no longer active but the link still works, but it's going to an old landing page. I asked our developers if we could redirect it but they said that it didn't work. Does anyone have some advise or a solution for this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elihn0 -
Rankings Drop since Humingbird - Could it be my link ratio between .co.uk / .com ?
Hi All, I have an UK tool hire eccomerce muliti location website with different locations pages for each category. My stratedgy has been to specialise on local search for each location as oppose to try and compete with highly competitive keywords on a national level. I do have some duplicate/ thin content issues on these location pages but I've been actively writting additional unique content on these pages to address this issue which also making sure my title tags, h1 , h2 tags etc are unique for each location along with having individual google local + pages etc etc. I have never previously been affected by any duplicate contents issues and always ranked first page (mainly top 5) for most of my local keywords). However, when google humingbird update came out , I suffered approx 25% drop in traffic and rankings. rom what I read , local search sites have suffered somewhat in this update and I did a link detox report to try and asterain toxic links etc. I found a few which I disavowled but I have had no manul penalty message in my GWT so I can only assume I was affected by an google algorithmic penalty. From looking at opensite explorer , I can see my link ratio for my .co.uk site shows 43% .com 37% .co.uk I am wondering if it could be this which has been the cause of my local rankings to fail ?. Has anyone else suffered the same as I am at my witts end as to what are the likely factors which could have caused such a drop ? Any tips, greatly appreciated. Happy to give my sites url if anyone would like to take a look ? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Triple listing in rankings
We have a triple listing for the keyword vca cursus (Dutch keyword). But the page we optimized for that keyword ranks lower than our vca examen page. First we had the number one spot but now we rank 2 to 5. In opensite explorer i compared the competiton and we scored on almost all factors better. Do you know the causes why the vca examen page ranks higher then the vca cursus page. Is it possible to change that or reverse the triple listing somehow. And why does our competitor ranks higher?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PlusPort0