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
-
Does link position matter in the content/html code
My question is that if I have several links going to different landing pages will the one at the top of the content pass more value than ones at the bottom. Assuming that there are not more than 1 of the same link in the content. The ultimate question is whether or not link position in the content/html code make a difference if it passes more value. This question comes in response to this whiteboard Friday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAH762AqUTU Rand talks about how if there are 2 links going to the same URL from the same content page then google will only inherit the value of the anchor text from the first link on the page and not the both of them. Meaning that google will treat that second link as if it doesn’t exist. There are lots of resources that shows this was true but there isn’t much content newer than 2010 that say this is still true, We all know that things have changed a lot since then Does that make sense?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 97th_Floor0 -
If you do 302 redirect then change to 301 redirect do you lose all link juice?
Hello everyone, I was wondering if you could help me with understanding the following story: A website has been moved from its HTTP version to a HTTPS version. The SEO manager has advised developers that they needed to do 301 redirects. However, in the end, 302 redirects have been put in place instead. Now, 301s should be put in place ASAP. The million dollar question is: has the website lost all of its link juice already given the nature of the redirects? Also, does it depend on whether Google has indexed the new 302 pages or does it depend on something else? Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingGH0 -
Cloudflare - Should I be concerned about false positives and bad neighbourhood IP problems
I am considering using cloudflare for a couple of my sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
What is your experience? I researched a bit and there are 3 issues I am concerned about: google may consider site bad neighbourhood in case other sites on same DNS/IP are spammy.
Any way to prevent this? Anybody had a problem? ddos attack on site on same DNS could affect our sites stability. blocking false positives. Legitimate users may be forced to answer captchas etc. to be able to see the page. 1-2% of legit visitor were reported by other moz member to be identified as false positive.
Can I effectively prevent this by reducing cloudflare basic security level? Also did you experience that cloudflare really helped with uptime of site? In our case whenever our server was down for seconds also cloudflare showed error page and sometimes cloudflare showed error page that they could not connect even when our server response time was just slow but pages on other domains were still loading fine.0 -
New URL Structure caused virtually All rankings to drop 5 to 10 positions in latest report ?.. Is this normal
Hi All, We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' ) and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago. We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions i.e from 3rd to 10th etc... Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells. I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?.. Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated... thanks Pete .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Homepage is losing rankings...need help!
Hi folks, Our company has been doing SEO for www.3dincites.com since October. Since the website hadn't been optimized at all, one of the first things we did was to add keyword-optimized page title and meta description to the homepage. The person who implemented didn't do it right the first time so we needed to change the page title again after a week or so. We also changed the preferred domain in GWT. Ever since those changes were implemented, the homepage has been decreasing in rankings for the the keywords we optimized it for. This is very surprising as the website has high-quality unique content and pretty solid backlinks. Moreover, the search traffic to other pages is through the roof (2K increase since October) so the client is happy, however, this decrease in rankings for the homepage (from 3d to 6th page for "3d IC technology" which is the main keyword) doesn't let me sleep well at nights. Any ideas why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoomzoom0 -
Adwords CTR by position
Hi first post and look forward to contributing at some point. I've learnt our sector is going to have a shakeup with some big trademark bans on the way. I'm trying to get an idea of the percentage of traffic that currently clicks on paid ads at google vs organic results. Are there reports that have been done that show CRT for each position for each category?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cruiserDan0 -
Flash to HTML? Will I lose rank when I return?
My clients site in in flash! I am taking it down and building an all HTML site. the domain is 11 years old and google has only indexed 3 pages...Yikes! My question is that when I rebuild the site and optimize it for certain keywords and get my placement moved higher and then switch back in 6 months to the all flash site. Will I lose my gained rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0 -
How to best migrate / rebrand our organisation without losing the SEO on our current website?
I searched the current questions and found similar questions but nothing as specific as what I wanted, so... We are a graphic design school in Melbourne Australia. We have a website - www.graphicschool.com.au - that ranks fairly well in Google for our particular search terms. We have rebranded the organisation and want to change the website domain name to the new branding - www.grenadi.vic.edu.au - but obviously do not want to lose our hard earned SEO and rankings. We only have two strategies so far, and are not sure what the pros and cons to either strategy are, or whether there is a better way. The two ideas we have are: Option 1) Just swap the domain name. We were thinking about swapping the domain name and setting up 301 redirects to tell Google that the old page that ranked well is now this page 'x' on the new site. I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links. Option 2) Build a second website. This idea is that we would build a second website with our new domain name and branding and build up that site until it ranks as highly as the first site and then start to remove the first site. We're planning on completely redeveloping the current website anyway and changing and adding lots more content as well so this option is not out of the question. Any help, thoughts, suggestions or further options would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to discuss. Can I also please suggest that a new category is added under 'The SEO Process' - something like 'rebranding / migration' Cheers, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0