Losing Positions
-
HELP!!!
after implementing some changes suggested by SEOMoz Pro the only changed is that i lost some very very very dear positions. I had expected that my website would raise in position due to the changes but in fact it lost some.
I live in the netherlands so i use Google NL and Bing NL for rank tracking.
For some specific keywords like: kamperen bij de boer, boerderijcampings, boerencampings, Vekabo Campings, minicampings, kampeerartikelen, boerencamping frankrijk
i only lost positions and thus visitors. Some of the keywords lost about 9 positions.
What am i doing wrong? I do everything SEOMoz suggested including changing 301 titles on my website due to titletags with more then 70 characters and the only thing that happens is losing positions? Duplicate content is no longer an issue. No errors were found what so ever and still in stead of improving the rankings the declined.
Who can help me because this is not what i expected from this program.
-
Hi Jamo,
Thanks for the detailed explanation of what is happening on your site. Let's start at the beginning. You say your rankings recently dropped. There could be several obvious explanations.
1. Changed title tags. Title tags are one of the most important on-page ranking factors. If you changed your title tags too much, you might have lost some rankings there. Generally, the first few words of a title tag are the most important - the closer a word is to the beginning the more weight it carries. So if you changed a lot of words at the beginning of you titles, you may have gotten yourself in trouble. On the other hand, if you mostly changed words at the end of the title tags, this probably did little harm.
2. An algorithm change. It's possible Google Panda or the Page Layout update threw an algorithmic penalty at you. As others have mentioned, if this is the case, the only solution is to fix your layout, wait several weeks and hope for the best. Oh, and read this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/donna-on-big-adsense-earners
3. Something else? Unfortunately, any change you made on-site, changes in your backlink profile and changes in the algorithm, or a combination of these factors could have caused your site to drop. We've seen a lot of turbulence in the SERPs the past year and Google is really shaking things up.
Sometimes you can't figure it out, no matter what you do. In this case, it's best to move forward and continue to build a site worth visiting. Sometimes you can't fix what went wrong, but you can always build something better.
-
My link profile is updated on regular basis. All the camping sites on my website have to link to me in order to obtain their own page on my website. This way i "naturally" build a great link asset. Unfortunatly Google decided that this way of linking is not always best for your ranking but i can see no other way of doing this for the campingsites.
i also make sure i get non-reciptorial links and article links to my site.
When i look at my competitors i see them having way more links then i do but they always have had that since the start of my site in 2007.
for my searchword: kamperen bij de boer i now rank nr 2 in Google NL but in Google Com i rank number 1 (maybe due to the .nl or .com extention of the site). But the number one in the netherlands for that term does not even include it in it's title, content, header, h1,h2,h3,h4 or even links and alt descriptions. So why i that now ranked 1?? i can only come to the conclusing that it must be because my website was penalised due to something stupid google made up recently.
On the webmasters forum i asked about the recent google update and i got these 2 answers:
- To be honest, looking at your website and just the physical space taken up by adverts is more than the content on the page.This looks bad but its even worse when the adds that appear are just text adds.You use 3 add blocks.Remove the top one and keep the 2nd and 3rd. Remember, you only get a "click" from one advert being hit, so you are not loosing anything, you still have the adds appearing.The big difference is that the user is not now sown a page of adverts that confuses them.
- Combination of ad placement and site design is on the brink of being deceptive. I wouldn't know at first glance which link is an ad and which one not.
What do you think i should do?
my sites adres is: http://www.kamperen-bij-de-boer.com
maybe you don't understand the language written on the site but you sure can see the site. Maybe look into which resolution would be best to test?
hope to hear from you again
-
I can see your reason for impatience!
Unfortunately there is no definite amount of time to wait before deciding something hasn't worked, though if Google has deep crawled your site since the changes and your still suffering, it may be time to look elsewhere.
There may be other factors in play.
Hows your link profile looking?
Has anything else change in recent weeks?
Have your competitors upped they're game on the run up to summer?
-
Thanks for the quick reply.
I read the link you seggested and it stated that websites that use a normal amount of ads in comparison to text above the fold will not be affected. I think i use a normal amount of it and changed so accordingly. Normally i use 1
of text, then a table with picture and adsense then more content.
i changed this to 2
of text and then the table with picture and adsenses.
Would this be helpfull?
So you're advising to be patient and wait for the changes to take affect? How long should i wait for something like that to take affect? It's been over 1 week that i made the changes and google visited my site again after the changes.
i'm realllllly unpatient as you can imagine. I make about 21K on adsenses each year. If my positions drop so will me earnings... That's why i am that unpatient...
-
If you have made quite a wide range of changes it may take a while for Google to index all of the new changes and allocate your new SERP. Be patient and hopefully things will look up.
I often see a small dip in my serps prior to gaining some good ground.
Could it be that you have been penalised in the layout update? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html
Your Q&A title reminds me of the R.E.M song "Losing my religion" (replace religion with positions...now sing...)
"That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight
Losing my positions
Trying to keep up with you"
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
-
Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google
We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings. When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now. The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored. If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Trying to pinpoint why 1 keyword moved down 100 positions in 2 weeks. Help me speculate?
Hi there, One of my client's sites, a very large and successful ecommerce website with great SEO performance, has seen a significant drop in rankings in the past 2 weeks. The rankings have begun to somewhat stabilize today, except one particular keyword with a search volume of 74k has gone from 1 to 100. Here is what has taken place in 2 weeks, sitewide: I revised and improved upon title tags and meta descriptions to make them more user-friendly and contain more optimized terms. Following all of Google's best practices, as always. Google still appears to be indexing these changes (has anyone seen an initial drop in rankings while this takes place?) The site has seen a very significant increase in 404 errors due to one feature of the site breaking. We got a message about it in Webmaster Tools, and this appears to coincide with when overall rankings dropped. The development team is working quickly to get this resolved. As of today, I am seeing the highest page-load time than any other day in 2015. With regard to the particular page/keyword in question: The keyword is no longer "exact match" at the beginning of the title tag, but rather broken up throughout the title tag so the whole title sounds better for users. **Have you found that this type of change is sufficient for a keyword rank to move down ~100 positions?? **(Either way, I have asked the client to revise the title to start with the exact match keyword, once again.) Google has indexed the page 2 days ago, but is still displaying the old title tag in search results. I have not found any instances of internal or external links to this page being removed. With all this information, does anyone see anything that seems like it could have reasonably caused such a huge tank in rankings? Is this a blip in time? Is there anything I am not considering? Should I just be patient?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Positions dropping in SERPs after Title and Snippet change
Hi! I switched to a better title and meta description today for our page. Instead of ranking us better and displaying the new title - google let us fall from Position 10 to Position 16 (still dip laying the old title and meta description). Why is that? (I only changed it for the homepage) Cheers Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Do 404s really 'lose' link juice?
It doesn't make sense to me that a 404 causes a loss in link juice, although that is what I've read. What if you have a page that is legitimate -- think of a merchant oriented page where you sell an item for a given merchant --, and then the merchant closes his doors. It makes little sense 5 years later to still have their merchant page so why would removing them from your site in any way hurt your site? I could redirect forever but that makes little sense. What makes sense to me is keeping the page for a while with an explanation and options for 'similar' products, and then eventually putting in a 404. I would think the eventual dropping out of the index actually REDUCES the overall link juice (ie less pages), so there is no harm in using a 404 in this way. It also is a way to avoid the site just getting bigger and bigger and having more and more 'bad' user experiences over time. Am I looking at it wrong? ps I've included this in 'link building' because it is related in a sense -- link 'paring'.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Will I lose Ranking if I switch from Volusion to Big Commerce?
I've had a website with Volusion for years and rank in the top position for most relative keywords. I'm planning to move to Big Commerce because of the limitations with Volusion but I'm worried that my rankings will suffer when I move... is this a valid concern and is there anything I should do to make the transition seamless?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CatrinaSpindler0 -
How do I Improve Google Local search position
Hi, I think its called local search position, what I'm referring to is when you do a search on a keyword and google lists not only the best matches but also usually the second match is a group of 3 businesses with telephone numbers, google reviews and at the bottom of the group it will say something like: "See results for <your keyword="">on a map. This is what I'm referring to. in anycase my question is if I click on the link to see more results on a map I'm listed as number 3, however on the search page before where the link is displayed which I just clicked on I'm not being listed and instead one business name is being listed three times, each of the listings uses the same address but a different telephone number, In addtion the business that is being listed three times is also listed in the results being returned above in this case position #1 for the keyword I have searched. I assume this has something to do with them also being listed in the group of local businesses below three time.. The business I'm interested in getting listed in this group of results is currently being listed page 2 position 5 for the keyword..</your> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.. Thanks in advance..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robdob11 -
Losing Rank As A Result Of Domain Change
I have a client who is wishing to switch from an established, but unattractive domain, to a domain he just purchased that is more attractive. For example purposes, his existing site is "His-Company-Website.com" and the site he just purchased and wants to transfer to is "HisCompanyWebsite.com." The only difference is the old site has hyphens in between the words and the new one does not. He is not making this choice from an SEO perspective, but more of a "I don't want to keep saying all those hyphens when telling people about my website." But he said he doesn't want to lose his search engine rankings as a result. So he knows this won't necessarily increase his ranks, but doesn't want them to drop as a result. When speaking with him, I thought we could simply toss in a 301 redirect at the root level and pipe them over to the other site, but he wanted some actual proof. I went back to look at what I thought would be a similar case that I did earlier in the year (transferring from a .net to a .com) and noticed that we did see some rather substantial drops in at least traffic, so I am not so sure about this plan any longer. So my questions for my far more insightful colleagues... What would be your suggestion on this problem? Transition to the more user friendly domain or stick with the unfriendly domain? If he does elect to transition to the new domain, what all can I do to preserve his search engine rankings? Should a rankings and/or traffic drop be predicting when completing this? Thank you all in advance. Any other tidbits anyone has to offer would be great. Looking forward to your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayPotCreative0 -
Why is my competitor Torontoseogroup.com ranked 31 in Chrome, but position 2 in Firefox? How is this possible?
There is a website I am analyzing that ranks highly in firefox - position #2 on top page. But in Google they are ranked only on the top of the 4th page. How is this possible? Looks like some of the codes in the links are different. Why? Link from Firefox link: http://www.google.ca/#q=hamilton+web+design&hl=en&prmd=imvnsfd&ei=nIB3TtG_BYTe0QHm05HnCA&start=0&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=6448f668fd4b6f72&biw=1024&bih=627 Link from Google Chrome: http://www.google.ca/#q=hamilton+Web+Design&hl=en&prmd=imvnsfd&ei=4353TvWmAaPW0QHhq9zYBg&start=30&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=c8e758962267edc1&biw=1024&bih=673 http://www.google.ca/#q=hamilton+web+design&hl=en&prmd=imvnsfd&ei=nIB3TtG_BYTe0QHm05HnCA&start=0&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=6448f668fd4b6f72&biw=1024&bih=627
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | websiteready1