Major Ranking Drop
-
My site bestdslrreview dot net was ranking number one for Canon T3i. I was amazed considering my competition. Canon T3i was at number 3 to 5 usually for US traffic.. Canon 7d review was ranking number 2 and Canon 7D was on page one.
Canon 7D keywords dropped about 10 places but Canon T3i Review dropped about 50. and same for Canon T3i.
I worry about a number of things, including thin affiliate site but I don't know, my articles are original. I also worry about to many links with my keywords in anchor text.
My on page results from SEOMOZ look great to me. This drop was my main reasons for going ahead and signing up. Hoping I could find out what happened.
The site is only about six months old. I waited probably three months before doing any significant link building.
The good thing is, I was ranking high from Black Thursday until a few days before Christmas. It can't be someone else just started doing SEO as I fell far too fall. Some kind of penalty. I had Google do this to another of my sites once though and after a couple of months it bounced back for most of my keywords. A site very much like this one.
Is this just the Google Dance?
Thanks
-
Oh I laughed about blaming it on the kids but personally, I think it is more likely the dog. haha
-
I don't THINK I have a think content issue. But I'll re-write those features just to be on the safe side.
I think I built too many links too fast, thousands of them and then stopped. I wont do that again. I think it is a sudden decrease in link velocity. I've have struggled with link velocity a lot and finally, I think I understand why it is important to continue with it.
You touched on it. To me it could look unnatural but like I said a small site could be popular and get lots of links. Another SEO expert told me that is true but if the backlink velocity drops to fast it could be that Google takes that as a signal the page is no longer popular as well as the possible natural linking problems.
I will continue with my blog network, slower but better quality than the others I built. However, I will also work on the duplicate content issue. I have lots of content with no links just to help with the thin but now I realize that a page could still be thin too. Will make things a bit better if I do that too.
As always, I'm all ears.
-
I dont mean that duplicate content on same site is ok, only that you want be penelized for it. But only one version of the duplicate content will rank. meaning you wont get any credit for it. they will pick a version to rank, using a canonical you can hint to the search engines what version that should be.
what the penalty you want to avoid is thin content. meaning what is left on the page after you take away advertizing and duplicate content found elsewhere on the web, then if what is left is not substantual and usefull, then it is thin content. Duplicate content wont hurt you in itself, it wont help you, but thin content will hurt you.
-
Yes, I made them no-index follow. I've now removed the no-follow on category and tags but that's the way it was before. the drop.
As for the duplicate content, only the bullet text is duplicate. That's 105 words out of 890. That's 13% and it is too high for me. I'll re-write that and resolve that just to be on the safe side. Its really two of the bullets that are causing it. But I'll change them all, looks like I got lazy there. I'll check the other articles on the site as well to make sure I didn't do that on those.
The duplicate content issue is as clear as mud. Now I know that Goggle says they don't penalize a site for duplicate content on other sites. Of course, that doesn't hold true for autoblogs. But that doesn't seem to be true when one considers backlinks. I'm uncertain. You seem very knowledgeable and I'm sure you are. What you basing the statement that onsite duplicate content will not hurt you. I'm pretty sure I've read on Google site itself that they HATE that. The reason they do is because of having the same page show up in the SERPs more than once. And I clearly had that going on before.
Yeah, It was Matt Cutts, I just couldn't remember his last name.
I'm really having trouble with this issue and based on what I've seen around the web, I'm not alone. I've got one fairly large site with over 1500 indexed pages. Google Web Tools showed a LOT of pages with duplicate titles and it took me forever to get those to disappear. Finally they did after I removed the index for categories and tags.
I'm having a lot of trouble with canonical URLs. I know I'm not alone. i've read much and understand little. I learned the most for an SEOmoz help link.
If I understand it, the intent is to tell SE where the main article is. I turned the canonical option back on in SEO platinum but then turned it off again. I'll show you why. It gave me two different links in the header. One for my category and one for my article. That seems counter productive to me and exactly what I don't want to happen.
Thanks for all of your help.
I probably shouldn't have marked your message Good answer as that made the thread answered. LOL oh well, I'll know next time. I don't want to take up all of your time.
Thanks very much for the help.
-
i noticed to made them follow that is good becqause linkjuice can still flow back out.
but you that fact that a page is not indexed does not change the flow of LJ to it.I fyou have 2 duplicates then use a canonical tag, or get rid of one of them things
like tag pages with shippets of other pages, are ok, at worst they wont rank, they
will not hurt you. its duplicate content from other sites that is the problem.As a rule blocking from robots is a last resort. i would concentrate on the duplicate
content from other pages, you need to add enouth original conent to make the page usefull.As Matt Cutts said, take away advertisments, content that is avaiable elsewhere, and what is left,
is it usefull and original?I wouldent bother with the tags in the sitemaps, category pages yes, bing for one say that
they only want the main pages in the site map, not every page, but having said that I asked
Duane Forrester from Bing and he said for a small site listing all pages is not a problem.We have alll been in panic mode when we lose rankings, I am a computer programmer
and when things are not working I start to believe anything and everything is responcible,
I will uninstall things, delete thing, blame my kids, assume i have a virus, but when i settle
down i usually find its somthing simple. -
As users build links to a website or URL, we see that pattern emerge and can
track the time over which links are built. Fast growth can indicate
popularity. Normally links build in a similar fashion across all websites, with
spikes potentially indicating popularity. When we compare that data against the
other signals we track, we get a truer picture of if that popularity is real or
not. Machines can build links quickly, but if we know the source of the links
is a common location or service that is “less than organic”, we’ll discount the
value of the links. -
I'm really glad you brought up the no no-index issue.
Most of that was probably created after the drop and I'll tell you why I did it to hopefully learn why I shouldn't do it.
I no-index privacy policy and disclaimer earnings type pages. I do that because I don't want those pages to dilute my money pages. Is that a mistake?
I also went in and usually do it from the beginning and set tag and categories to no index. I'm not sure when I did that on this site but I think it was after the drop. I'm not sure. The reason I do it is that seems to create duplicate listings in the SERPs. Or I thought it was afraid of duplicate content. Is my thinking wrong on that? I see the same pages/articles listed when I do site:domain.com and sometimes I get two listings for the same page on page one of Google. One for the article and one for the tag or category. I use SEO Platinum to accomplish this I also removed categories and tags from my sitemap using the xml sitemap generator plugin.
On the scripts, now that is something totally new to me. I'm pretty sure I did that after the drop. When I did site:domain.com I saw a lot of them listed. My robots.txt file looks like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://bestdslrreview.net/sitemap.xml
This is likely what is causing the no index on the scrips/plugins. So I should remove those to lines? I'm going to go ahead and do that since I was never sure that they should have been there in the first place.
Also I do not include categories and tags in my sitemap, should I start including those in the sitemap?
Thanks very much for the help. Sometimes I over think when I don't know exactly what the answers are.
-
Thank you. I think it will come back too but the too many links issue.....
I have always wondered about that and I seem to get different advise.
I forgot his name, the Goggle guy, Matt ??? most of you will know... He wrote a post indicating you can't link too many times. That is what most of the people that say you can't build to many links to fast base their advice on. But to me, I've always wondered if it makes since to have 2000 links to a site with five articles. Then I reason people could love a site with only a few pages, I'm sure that happens naturally at times?
If you're right, then I've made it worse because I've been building more links but aiming at higher PR sites when I do it. I've got a lot of links from PR 0 sites but in open site explorer it appears I have a pretty good natural looking distribution of links across different PR sites so I'm not at all sure.
I'm all ears if you and others have more to say to help me with this issue.
-
There is a fewe pages with no index, They see to have content i cant see why you would no index them, like this one
/tag/canon-7d/
You have also no indexed a few scripts, I beleive this is a mistake, because a search engine knows that the scripts are being used, but does not know what you are doing with them, and may lead to a lack of trust.Thhere are a few other technical issues, but not what would lead to a huge drop in ranking.
You do have a fair bit of duplicate content, the reviews are on other pages, if you wrote the reviews i would not worry, search engines usealy know why is copying and who is the creater.
If you are getting this content from elsewhere, you need to add enouth content to each page so that it apears original.
-
So you are saying you have been only building links for 3 months, but looking at OSE the Canon TSi page has 425 linking domains and canon 7D 751 linking domains?? This is way too many for that time frame IMHO. I would say you have tripped a filter. Wait 60 days and see if it comes back up... it should do.
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 I have lost SEO Ranking while removing www from domain
I have lost search SEO ranking for 4-6 core keywords while removing www from domain switch.
On-Page Optimization | | velomate
Referring domain: https://cashforscrapcarsydney.com.au/ Earlier the domain was in the format: https://www.cashforscrapcarsydney.com.au/ But when I checked the search result, search engines had not yet crawled to the new format. Let me know if the server change or any algorithm hit might cause it. Also please share the feedback on - does removing www from the domain losses keyword ranking. Helpful replies are needed.0 -
Ecommerce product rankings tank when procuct out of stock
When checking our weekly ranking update this morning I noticed that several products where down 2-3 pages (or even dropped from the first 50) from last week. Looking through these products, they share one common trait: these pages are for products that are no longer available or are temporarily out of stock (and have been for the last few weeks). I understand Google is looking at bounce rates, but do they also looks at our website (or Schema markup) to see if the product is in stock or not? We also use Google Shopping to they should have a pretty good understanding of our stock levels and the general availability of our products. If it's just a question of bounce rates, we could switch to pre-orders for our products (we don't take any order for out-of-stock products at the moment) or we could offer the more expensive versions with a discount. If Google is looking at inventory status, we could disable this to keep ranking high and increase our search presence. Any drawbacks on this? Just getting back in the SEO-game after a focus on the business processes so I could use some help here. We seen great improvements where we've stepped up and created great product descriptions, but it is really disheartening seeing products get dropped so easily.
On-Page Optimization | | HDPHNS0 -
Can we use internal no-follow links without negatively affecting rankings
we are creating a site structure for a travel website. the site homepage has a top navigation bar with 8 top level links and a total link count of 33 links in this (within menus). There are also 10 footer and ad-hoc links As this top navigation bar is a site-wide navigation, when entering s specific "travel destination" page, the "travel destination" page has its own contextual links and reference links, making the total inks on the destination page approx 107. do you think its ok to make all links in the top navigation bar no follow on all pages except the homepage? how would you approach this to create less links to maintain effective link-juice flow to required pages
On-Page Optimization | | Direct_Ram0 -
Rankings dropped overnight
We have been doing some optimization for a client. They were not ranked for many keywords before we started, and up until last week 10 were on page 1, with the the last few following closely behind. Everything was moving in the right direction. In this weeks ranking report every one has dropped significantly and some 30 places in one week. We have made no significant changes to the site in the last few weeks. The only issue we picked up on was the slow site speed on their current host 1&1. Any ideas what could have caused the site to have lost ground on all rankings so significantly?
On-Page Optimization | | FLDESIGN0 -
Replacing website, same URL, lose ranking
We had to do a rush job for a client and get a website up very quickly. We had to just replace the existing files on the server, but URL stayed the same. Now "teeth whitening glasgow" which they were number #1 for isn't coming up. Know there is still some on page work to be done - but the link profile should still remain the same? Just looking for some advice to get back to where they were - should we do a website change of address or just verify the site in Webmaster and get all the on page done? Thanks, Laura
On-Page Optimization | | lauratagdigital0 -
Entire subfolder not ranking.
I'm currently running an ecommerce site on which an entire subfolder namely the: /category/ extension is not ranking for any keywords.The category pages are being indexed within Google. Pages with very similar content are however being ranked for keywords on extensions such as /pages/, I created a new page to test this and within a week it was ranking for the keywords where /category/ pages have not for months. I was wondering if anyone had come across this issue before and had any solutions or suggestions? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | JMoran0 -
What's the best practice for handling duplicate content of product descriptions with a drop-shipper?
We write our own product descriptions for merchandise we sell on our website. However, we also work with drop-shippers, and some of them simply take our content and post it on their site (same photos, exact ad copy, etc...). I'm concerned that we'll loose the value of our content because Google will consider it duplicated. We don't want the value of our content undermined... What's the best practice for avoiding any problems with Google? Thanks, Adam
On-Page Optimization | | Adam-Perlman0 -
Are blog pages hurting rankings?
Let me begin by saying that I have a Wordpress site with a customized theme. When I view my webpage's crawl diagnostics, it keeps showing a lot of Warnings. There are 89 pages with Too Many On-Page Links and 90 Pages with a missing meta-description tag. The problem is that the pages are listed as follows for both errors: Blog Page 10 Blog Page 11 Blog Page 12 Etc. There are no other pages, just the blog pages (which include about 7 posts/page). How do I eliminate the too many links without deleting them from individual blog posts, and how do I add meta-description tags to blog pages without duplicating the tag for /blog? Thanks! | | | | |
On-Page Optimization | | DuBois
| | |
|
|
| | | |
|
| | | | |
| |0