Our keyword rank fell drastically since our last moz crawl. What gives?
-
Our site was just crawled last night an we had a number of keywords fall 25% or so, from say # 30 to 38. What would cause such a drastic fall? We haven't taken down pages or changed changed page titles, url or content.
One thing we are having trouble with is our meta description and meta keywords for each page. Drupal 7 seems to be giving us trouble and the meta information isn't showing up anymore.
Would that cause the fall? Any other suggestions?
-
Wow, thanks for the great response. Where could I learn more about properly configuring it so my dev can make sure its done properly.
Since you mention that, moz does give me a lot of warnings (about 500) about duplicate page content and titles. Maybe that's part of the issue.
-
Sorry Dru
CDN is a Content Delivery Network.
It helps make your site faster by serving your images, CSS and javascript from a network across the world.
If you misconfigure it or configure it lazily (as I did) then it is possible for the search engines to access your content from the CDN and that can create duplicate content, accidentally, for which you may be penalized.
- and that might be a reason for a ranking drop.
-
Thanks!
-
Meta Keywords is not used by search engines
Meta description is used by search engines part of the time.
-
Sorry, I'm in idiot and have no idea what CDN means. Do you mind explaining Alan? Sorry for my novice-ness.
-
Do you have a CDN?
They started crawling some of my pages through the CDN, which I have never seen before, and they are dropping my real pages and replacing them with CDN pages.
-
I have seen some pretty massive fluctuations in two SERPS I keep track of over the past 24 hours. The changes in rankings haven't just affected my domains, but competitors domains as well (both good and bad for them). I am wondering if it has something to do with the changes Google launched in February.
Like others have said I am going to wait and see if the changes remain for a few days until I panic.
-
So meta description is meaningless for SEO correct? But it is helpful in the search engines to the person who searched so they can get a desc of the link provided right? That would be the main benefit?
-
from say # 30 to 38
This could be normal flux. Hang in there.
One thing we are having trouble with is our meta description and meta keywords for each page.
Meta keywords is meaningless.
If you have concerns about your site maybe a consult with a Drupal Expert would put your mind at ease and correct any real problems.
-
Thanks for the help Jeffrey. I've seen some fall for the last three weeks, but much more gradually than last nights crawl. Maybe 2 or 3 places the last two crawls and then 8 places last night.
-
Has it just been one day? I'd give it at least a day or two more before panicking. Things tend to move around in Google like that.
Meta keywords and description have zero direct impact on SEO rankings.
Don't bother filling in meta keywords at all. It's a waste of time.
Meta descriptions can be important for getting clicks, but they won't help for where you rank in Google if you're trying to optimize the descriptions with keywords.
-
We also had a similar situation the previous week. This week we seem to have stabilized. I'm trying to figure it out myself as we have been steady with our pages, and actually significantly increasing in content and # of pages.
PS. If this response helps, please hit the "thumbs up"!
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
-
Is Moz Premium Show Authenticate Keyword Difficulty States???
Hi, I am a regular user of Moz premium. I was advised some of my friends about Moz benefits. 4 months ago I found a low competition micro niche longtail keyword and made a website on it. The keyword difficulty was 16 and I was confident that I will rank on the top page. but now after posting 15 articles of that micro niche, I am still ranking on 129 position on Google search results. Can anybody advise me what is the problem with my site. Was the keyword difficulty had manupulated states on authenticative. My site name and https://www.vixpr.com/. Please guide me how I can take further benefits of Moz Premium.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Iuj873g0 -
How to rank for a keyword
Hi guys, I'm looking to rank a new blog for a search term which we currently already rank #1 for. I want to create a blog which provides a better solution to a searchers query and knock our current #1 page for this new one. Is there a way to do this simply without losing the real-estate the currently ranked #1 page has already accumulated? Or is just a matter of working on this new blog to find it's own way to the top? Thanks in advance, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameseacott0 -
How to rank a product page
Hello, I have a product page and just did a little introduction ( 5 lines of text) but I have the feeling this is not enough for google. What is the solution ? Is it to increase the amount of content even though it is not going to be user friendly ? Or will google look at the product page I link too and take into account the content on those subpages to boost my "pillar / product page". Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Keyword cannibalization
Hi, I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization. 1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations. The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...). My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page? Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content. Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three? 2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related? In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans? In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization? Looking forward to your comments!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Moz page optimization score issue, have a score of 95, but can get to 99 if I ad my keyword basically twice in the url.
Hello, I have a keyword for lack of providing too much info we will say my keyword is laptop-bags. Now we have a /laptop-bags/ page and inside that page **/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder/ ** We got a score of 95 for that page. Now I got a score of 99 when I changed it to **/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/ ** The way Bigcommerce handles is it will use the product category title in the url, page title and site links, to me it feels like it's spammy, as well as on my /laptop-bags/ page, I now have 18 keywords of " laptop bags " on that page when before it was 12, since I added laptop-bags to all 6 categories inside the laptop-bags page. How would you handle this, use the /keyword/ then /longtail-keyword/ in full or would using /laptop-bag/leather-shoulder/ still rank for leather shoulder laptop bags? I've asked this before and was told to use whatever sounded better to the user, but now moz is telling me different.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Why is my ranking not improving???
Our site is about 4 months old now, although the domain is older. We are adding fresh new content, building good facebook/twitter/Goolge+ and undertaking good PR - but our ranking does not seem to be improving at all. Have I missed something obvious???? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Is there something wrong with my rank?
So I have blog with 5 posts. I don't know why but 1 of my posts rank higher than my main page...and it's not even trying to rank for the keyword. I'm not saying it's a bad thing because the post has some amazon on it but my main site is supposed to rank higher. Something wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 6786486312640 -
Do pages with irrelevant keywords hurt the domain overall for ranking for relevant keywords?
I have been doing SEO for the University I work at. We are optimizing our degree pages on a page-by-page basis. So hypothetically we have a page optimized for "online accounting degree" and another for "online marketing degree", etc. Although our focus is on specific page optimization, we hope the by-product is that the whole domain will start to rank better for "online degree". First of all, is this a reasonable expectation? Second, if this IS the case, will pages full of irrelevant keywords hurt the overall strategy? For example, our registrar and financial aid PDFs that are full of legal/financial mumbo-jumbo. Are these lowering our keyword density of relevant keywords across the domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SNHU0