$100 to who discovers why our rankings drop
-
I'm offering $100 to the SEO that pinpoints why our rankings dropped. Here's details:
Some very good people have this site:
nlpca(dot)com
and it has dropped for many of it's keywords, including the keywords
"NLP"
"NLP Training"
and many other keywords.
We dropped from 19th to 42nd for the term "NLP".
Here's what I'm doing about it:
(1) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the titles reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more.
(2) making sure all of the keywords (on all pages) in the URLs reflect what's in the content, and that the keywords show up exactly in the content 3 times or more.
(3) We're redoing the home page as (1) above.
(4) We're fixing the 404s
(5) We're shortening the titles that are too long, and we're thinking of reducing the home page keyword count to 3 keyword phrases, although 4 keywords work in all of our other sites that have the keywords showing up at least 3 times in the content.
If it is something else, and you pinpoint it, and if because of you, we rise back up to around 19th (more or less) again then we'll give you $100 payable via paypal as a thank you.
I'm going to leave this question 'unanswered' until this is resolved.
-
Sorry, but not remembering 100% what I was thinking at the time of writing the response since it was a week ago, but trying to reread through what was written, I believe I was talking about how the SERP may have been manually rated. While some of the SERPS are ranked via the algorithms google has developed, I've heard and read that there are a number of them that are affected and rated manually by humans. If there was any human interaction by one of their manual raters, they may have deemed your site less "relevant" for the search.
Have you ever seen the "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of the SERPs? Let's say somebody decides your website and the other 2 competitors are not what they were looking for when it came to the search "nlp" or "nlp training. Well, they could complain and potentially be reviewed by the manual raters or whomever responds to the complaints and drop you. Since it was before the most recent panda change, I was speculating that this could of been a cause.
-
It might be true, but when the drops occur or when the SERP is manually rated and changed in terms of the makeup, it could be because whatever's triggering it could have been finally re-evaluated at the time you dropped.<<
Could you expain this, SeattleOrganicSEO. That might be what happened. It looks like there was an algorithm change that effected us and at least 2 other strong competitors and shifted us all down
-
It might be true, but when the drops occur or when the SERP is manually rated and changed in terms of the makeup, it could be because whatever's triggering it could have been finally re-evaluated at the time you dropped.
However, I don't know if I know all the different pieces you do. Even with the above description of the issues, I think there's a lot more going on potentially that as "outsiders", we can't help with as much. Even when we know everything, we still might be clueless. Sorry, but I haven't had this problem with a client before. I know it will sound cocky, but we've only had the opposite problem (well not a problem) that the rankings go up. I call it a problem because sometimes a ranking improvement doesn't always translate into traffic (or qualified traffic for that matter). Sorry, going off on a tangent...
-
SeattleOrganicSEO,
That's worth looking at, but I'm pretty sure it's not only competition. We tumbled form 19th to 42nd in just a few days for the term "nlp". We'd been on the second page for many years.
-
I don't see it being the larger problem.
Have you considered that your competitors have jumped up their SEO efforts? Have you been paying attention to their backlinks and seeing if they've been doing a bit of link building on the keywords you're targeting? It's a lot of work, but if you know the 2 specific SERPs you're targeting, perhaps you can pay attention to what they're doing. Some SEO software out there make it a bit easier to keep track of...
-
I also just realized that we have articles on our website that are elsewhere on the web. Always with permission, but could this be a problem?
-
If this occurred around Nov/Dec, then it might not be the Panda changes. I just though since you posted recently that maybe the recent Panda change (3.2) could of been a possibility.
-
In that article, SeattleOrganicSEO, one of the comments is
Surviving Panda 3.2 - I will target the right keyword and provide superb content.
This drop in rank was occurring around November or December (Panda 3.1?) when I was trying to target several keywords per page and then later adding content to match.
I thought Panda was for scraping and duplicate content problems, do I need to worry about appropriateness of keywords? Do I need to only target keywords that the page is very obviously already optimized for? If it's not code errors, could this be why we've had a ranking drop?
-
I also am a big believer of clean code, crawalability in general.
but i used the bing SEOtolkit, that sees the site just how bing sees, it, I only found one invalid code error, and one page with too much css. I think the w3 validator picks up a lot of issues that are a bit picky.
but I also believe one open tag, can mean huge amounts of content are not read as visisble content.
This is even more concerneing now we have Microsodata, one error can mean your whose scema is useless.
i dont like to have any css or js in my HTML, I like to look at my souce code and be able to read my content easlsy.
This is one of the reasons i dont like CMS.
-
When did it happen? Any chance it happened around the 18th?
http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-3-2-update-confirmed-109321
-
Those errors are just for the homepage, albeit, there may be much less (once a tag is left open, it tends to really confuse the validator). I'd clean up the whole site for good measure; I'm a big fan of SEO PowerSuite's on-page tools when doing this sort of thing.
The line breaks don't all need to be totally replaced, the big gaps at the top just seemed a bit excessive. That particular recommendation is just based in my own superstitions, and those of others, but is based on this: the first 1/3 rule comes into play so much in SEO (weighting content placed high on a page, early in a tag, etc.); condensing the header section to a more sane level seems sensible. Some SEO auditers, such as WebCEO, will also yell at you if your TITLE tag doesn't immediately follow HEAD, for what I'd expect to be a similar thought; although again, not as scientific of a claim to my knowledge as valid code (which absolutely matters).
-
It's been a while since I did code validation, remind me - is that 79 errors just for the home page?
And will the line breaks confuse crawlers?
And remind me what the cleanest thing to replace the line breaks with are.
-
Not necessarily your one path to salvation (and keep your money on this if it does help gain some ground), but I'd personally start with cleaning up the source:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnlpca.com%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&
doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.279 validation errors could definitely confuse crawlers about how things are organized, and imply usability issues. I'd also do something about the extreme # of unnecessary line breaks. I recently pushed a legal niche site up from page 5 to page 1 on a very competitive, short-tail phrase with not a lot more than cleaning up ugly code.
-
One think i noticed is your linking structure, this would I assume been like it is all along and would not be the reason of the drop. But your menu is on every page (I am assuming), meaning that all pages are linked by all pages. This pattern leads to all pages sharing teh rank, but what you want is your landing pages to have most of the page rank.
you should link to as many pages as you can from the home page, but only link to the home page and landing pages from every other page (where posible of cause). this will shift the PR to those pages. See link for a simple explaination.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
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
-
How would a redesign, content update and URL change affect ranking?
Hi guys, I have a question that I suspect there is no simple true or false answer to, but perhaps someone has done the same thing as we're pondering wether or not to do? We're taking over an existing site that ranks very well on all the important keywords and is obviously very well liked by Google. The site is today hosted on a sub-domain (xxx.domain.com). When taking over, we'll have to redesign the site and recreate most of the content on the site (unique). The site structure, URLs, incoming links etc. will remain exactly the same. Since we are recreating the site, we also have the opportunity to move the site off the sub-domain and on to the main domain (domain.com/xxx - 85/100 Moz rank) and do a 301 Permanent Redirect on all old URLs. Our long-time experience is that content on the main domain, ranks way better than the sub-domain. The big question is wether or not Google will punish us for both changing the content and the location of the site at the same time? Cheers!
Web Design | | mattbs
Matt0 -
Flickr Gallery Effect on Page Ranking
Hello there We are working on a redesign for our site, and our business is very image intensive (sign company) On a typical product page, we have 5 images we are placing directly in the site optimized to try to rank the images in image search We also have about 30-50 sets of images, with 3-5 images each - hosted on flickr, that we are displaying as galleries on the page (user clicks, opens a light box to view the set, etc) Here is the page - http://impactsigns.ugmade.com/sample-page/ If you look at the page code, you will see that the flickr gallery (additional examples) section - adds ALOT of code to the page (lines 498 to 837) My question is : Does adding that flick gallery block negatively impact the page SEO, all else being equal? It seems like a lot of lines of code. And dont want it to seem spammy to the search engines. Thanks for your help and advice
Web Design | | Jumman0 -
Image with 100% width/height - bad ranking?
Hi, we have some articles like this: http://www.schicksal.com/Orakel/Freitag-13 The main image has a width of 100% and a height of 100%. Today, I've discovered that GWT Instant Preview has some troubles with rendering the page. We have CSS rules to deliver the image with the right dimensions. If a bot like google is not sending any screen height / width we assume the screen size is 2560x1440. Does this harm the ranking of the page? (Content starts below the fold/image) What is a "default" screen size for google? How do they determine if something is "above the fold"? Any tips or ideas? Best wishes, Georg.
Web Design | | GeorgFranz0 -
Old site to new WordPress site - Client concerned about Yahoo Ranking
Hello, Back Story I have a client (law firm) who has a large .html website. He has been doing his own SEO for years and it shows. I think the only reason he reached out to a professional is because he got a huge penalty from Google last fall and fell very far down in rankings. Although, he still retains a #1 spot in Yahoo for his site for the keyword phrase he wants. I have been creating a new WordPress theme for the client and creating all new pages and updating the formatting/SEO. From the beginning I have told the client that when we delete the old site and install a new WordPress site (same domain name, but different page hierarchy) he will take a bump in the search engines until all the 301 redirects get sorted out. I told him I can't guarantee any time frame of how long the dip in SEO will last. Some sites bounce right back while others take longer. Last week, during a discussion, he tells me that if he loses his #1 ranking on Yahoo for any length of time he thinks he will go out of business. Needless to say I was a little taken back. When it comes to SEO I use best practice techniques, do my research, stay on top of trends but I never guarantee rankings when moving to a new site. I'm thinking of ways I can help elevate any type of huge SEO drop off and help the client. Here is what I was thinking of suggesting to the client and I would love some feedback. Main Question He has another domain he isn't doing anything with. It's pretty much his domain name with pc added. I was thinking about using that domain to create a simple 1-2 page WordPress website with brand new content (no duplicate content) aimed at attracting his keyword phrase. I would do as much SEO as I could with a 1-2 page site and give it a month or so to see if this smaller site can get into the top #10 in Yahoo, or higher. Then, when we move the site he will still have a website on the first page of Yahoo for his keyword phrase. I hope I explained it clearly 🙂 I would be open to any suggestions anyone may have. Thanks
Web Design | | Bill_K0 -
Ranking for competitive keywords
Hi Folks, I am relatively new to SEO and I was hoping folks here could give me some guidance/tips on ranking in a competitive keyword space. My client is a health care provider and they wish to rank for terms like 'heart attack' which I believe will be quite difficult due to it being a short tail keyword and it is a very competitive space. Any an all advice and input is greatly appreciated. Regards, Dave
Web Design | | icanseeu0 -
Does stock art photo attribution negatively impact SEO by leaking Google Page Rank?
Greetings: Companies such as Shutterstock often require that buyers place credit attribution on their web pages when photos you buy from them appear on these pages.. Shutterstock requests that credit attribution links such as these be added: Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com Do these links negatively impact SEO? Or do search engines view them as a positive? Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
How will a sites ranking be affected??
Hey guys, My MD has just put this to me, we have a site the is currently ranked in top 3 for all there chosen search terms. The company is undergoing an overhaul of their design and want a new site to match this. They have asked how changing the site design will affect their rankings. More content is going to be added with this there will be new pages links etc Any information would be greatly appreciated.. Thanks Anthony
Web Design | | Anthonykal-group0 -
The primary search keywords for our news release network have dropped like a rock in Google... we are not sure why.
Hi, On April 11th, a month after the farmer update was released for U.S. users of Google, the primary keywords for ALL our sites significantly dropped in Google. I have some ideas why, but I wanted to get some second opinions also. First off, I did some research if Google did anything on the 11th of April... they did. They implemented the farmer update internationally, but that does not explain why our ranks did not drop in March for U.S. Google users... unless they rolled out their update based on what site the domain is registered in... in our case, Canada. The primary news release site is www.hotelnewsresource.com, but we have many running on the same server. EG. www.restaurantnewsresource.com, www.travelindustrywire.com and many more. We were number 1 or had top ranks for terms like ¨Hotel News¨, ¨Hotel Industry¨, ¨Hotel Financing¨, ¨Hotel Jobs¨, ¨Hotels for Sale¨, etc... and now, for most of these we have dropped in a big way. It seems that Google has issued a penalty for every internal page we link to. Couple obvious issues with the current template we use... too many links, and we intend to change that asap, but it has never been a problem before. The domain hotelnewsresource.com is 10 years old and still holds a page rank of 6. Secondly, the way our news system works, it´s possible to access an article from any domain in the network. E.G. I can read an article that was assigned to www.hotelnewsresource.com on www.restaurantnewsresource.com... we don´t post links to the irrelevant domain, but it does sometimes get indexed. So, we are going to implement the Google source meta tag option. The bottom line is that I think we put too much faith in the maturity of the domain... thinking that may protect us... not the case and it´s now a big mess. Any insight you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Do you think it was farmer or possibly something else? Thanks, Jarrett
Web Design | | jarrett.mackay0