Aggressive Loss in Rankings
-
I recently launched a website and used local directories, web directories and guest blogging as a means of getting links to the site. Within 60 days the site was ranking on the first page for a highly competitive keyword. It was hovering on the first page for about two weeks before it plummeted in ranking to near 200. I am not finding any crawl errors or duplicate content issues on the site. Could my links have caused this massive decrease in rankings?
-
No problem, good luck with your link building and rankings.
Ally
-
Thanks Ally. This is the route I have been taking but may have been over aggressive in the use and anchor text on directories. It seems there are a lot of people that just got hit by Google.
-
It depends on a few factors. I would initially start and look at your competitors backlink profiles (in your case whoever hasn't lost their rankings and is still on the first page) and see if there are oppurtunities for you to try and get a link. I would look at the sites that you are trying guest post on as well and check their link profile to ensure there is nothing odd there.
Also ensure you are creating fresh content on your site and blog so people will naturally link to you.
Thanks,
Ally
-
This definitely help. We have been varying the anchor text on our links to show a more natural backlink profile but definitely focused a lot of the links on our target keyword (which is also the name of the site/domain). Have you seen/heard anyone be able to quickly get their rankings back if they are able to build a more natural link profile?
-
Hi,
I think the biggest indicator is to look at the types of links you were building. What was the quality of these directory sites and the blogs that you were posting on?
Over the last couple of weeks Google has been penalising sites that considers having gotten links from blog networks. You may have been affected by this. Also have you been blogging on your own blog? Have you actively created fresh content for your blog that others would like to link to themselves.
Havre you also been focusing on your brand name when link building? As just focusing on a competitive keyword shows clear signs to Google you are over optimising.
Try and build a more natural linking strategy and also ensure you are updating the content on your own blog.
I hope this helps,
Ally
-
The domain has never had a site on it. I agree that in a competitive space there will be movement but this is drastic. The site went from the first page to close to 200. That signals to me there is something wrong. Any ideas? Could it be some of the links that were built (i.e. web directories)? The site does show up for the www and non www version and I just signified to Google the preferred domain in WMT,
-
Was the site a never before registered domain? Or was it already well in existence prior? If it's the latter, it might have had a history that was passed along to you.
The other thing to consider is that if you are entering a competitive space, your competition might have stepped up their game too...
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
-
Brand name not ranking in Google
Hi Moz'ers, Could you help me with something I cannot seem to figure out by myself. In June 2017 my company started a rebranding campaign. We've changed our brand name and launched a new website: https://spotler.com. Everything is going fine, but if you Google our brand name "Spotler" our website doesn't show up. How can it be? Our domain authority is 38. It would be wonderful if you could help me. Let me know if you need more information. Best, Simone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spotler0 -
301 Redirect and Loss of PA and DA
Mozzers, http:itsgr82bme.com Old domain homepage had a DA of 24 and a PA of 36 Currently redirected to http://thekidstime.com Homepage shows a DA of 6 and a PA of 1. That is a significant loss of authority. I thought a 301 is supposed to be better than that. What gives? What are the next steps, asking the old backlinks to update their links? Thanks for your help, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matt.nails0 -
Keyword Ranking Fluctuations
Hi Guys I am currently working on a website where one of the keyword targets is fluctuating. The keyword is fluctuating between page 2 and page 5. What makes this strange is that we are not experiencing the issue with any other keyword targets. They are all ranking fine. It is only 1 keyword. The keyword target happens to be the main homepage keyword target - not sure if this makes a difference? The homepage targets 2 keyword e.g. Business Offices & Accessories. The homepage ranks perfectly fine for e.g. Business Accessories but is fluctuating for e.g. Business Offices! Very strange. What makes it even stranger - the keyword variations of the fluctuating keyword e.g. office for business - these variations are all fine and not fluctuating. Its only 1 keyword. If anyone has any ideas or feedback that would be great! Thanks, Duncan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
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 -
Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for. We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user. Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pasware0 -
Trouble ranking
I have a site that got messed over pretty hard by a BigCommerce issue. They used to rank but then Big Commerce had a glitch that set every page on the site to a https which was auto set, by their system, to not be indexed. This caused the entire site to go missing. It was then fixed by me, only to have the same glitch happen again. I again fixed it, and BigCommerce released a patch to resolve the issue. They admitted blame to my client and said it can take a while to resolve. It has been a few months now, and google is slowly recrawling the site. It has about half the pages indexed. The pages that are indexed do not rank at all. I was wondering if you guys see any major flags that would cause this or if it is still related to the big commerce glitch. link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Why my blog ranks poorly on Google ?
Hi 🙂 I need help for my blog, my blog http://www.dota2club.com/ for many keywords it is not in first 50 results on google. What am i doing wrong ? Can you tell me what errors / mistakes i have made and what can i do to improve my blog ? Thank you !!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wolfinjo0 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610