SEO - Why variation in Google positioning? Are we penalized?
-
Our webiste is made of 2 different parts hosted in 2 different directory on the same domain:
1. The website itself, which can be seen as a catalog.
2. A blog on WP.
Sometimes we lose 50% of our traffic and 5 to 10 days later the traffic goes up again.
When looking at position in Google it appears that when losses of traffic happen, the Google positions of pages from the website become bad. The blog pages themselves keep their good position. Suddenly after few days we find our previous good postioning and we have a good traffic again.
Here at the questions we have:
1. Why do we have variation on our Google positioning? Which parameters can influence? Bounce rate? Speed?
3. Why only the website is penalized and never the WP blog whereas they are on same domain?
If someone has experienced it before or has a idea, your expertise is welcome...
Thanks.
-
Hi Celine, How are you checking your rankings?
-
Penguin attacks rankings of the pages which ranked for searches where the links that caused the penalty were pointed. So, you could have a home page that is penalized (b/c the offending links pointed to the home page and the offending links contain high traffic terms) and some, all or none of the individual pages in the blog. The wild (temporary) fluctuations in the SERP results might be Panda related.
-
Hi,
Thanks for your answer.
The domain is not new. (2 years). Not too much link building. Frech content every day.
For example: we have a page which was first on Google research with one keyword for at least 2 years. it brings us a lot of traffic.
Suddenly the page goes down to position 49 for few days and go back to the 1st position. It happen few time since Pinguin.
Right now, we are penalized again and it lasts since 10 days now.
-
Is it quite new domain? This is quite normal for newish domains, think of it as Google testing you out and seeing where you fit best in the rankings.
Do you do much link building, updating the site with fresh content. Continual SEO work on the site will help.
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
-
Google Docs
Hi Mozers, I was wondering what do you guys think about indexing Google Docs files as Documents or Spreadsheets? Can you do that and is it any help if you what to get some content on the firs page of Google. And also can Google see that content and links, because when I deactivate the javascript on chrome I couldn't see anything from the content Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VeeamSoftware0 -
Is my site penalized by Google?
Let's say my website is aaaaa.com and company name is aaaaa Systems. When I search Google aaaaa my site do not come up at all. When I search for "aaaaa Systems" it comes up. But in WMT I see quite a few clicks from aaaaa as keyword. Most of the traffic is brand keywords only. I never received any manual penalty in WMT ever. Is the site penalized or regular algorithm issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Google Penalty - Has It Been Lifted?
Hi, We have been trying to remove a ‘partial’ google penalty for a new client by the way of removing unnatural backlinks over a period of time and then submitting a reconsideration request, and uploading a disavow file etc. Previously Google listed the partial penalty in the ‘manual actions’ section of webmaster tools, making it possible for us to submit a reconsideration request. Having just logged in however we get the message ‘no manual webspam actions found’. So there isn’t any way we can submit a reconsideration request. Does this mean that the penalty has been lifted? Or could it still exist? If the latter is there any other way to submit a reconsideration request? Many thanks in advance, Lee.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webpresence0 -
Stuck at position 23 - Google Sandbox?
Hello, We have an exact match domain, that for it's exact match term is stuck at position 23. We launched around June 20 I'm talking about only the exact match term On the home page, we have yet to put keyword into the content, h1, or meta description, although they do occur in fragments in the meta description. The keyword is in the title This is not a very competitive industry For other sites that I built a couple of years ago, exact match domains (for their exact match term) would get on the first page after the sandbox was complete (4-6 months) for non-competitive industries even without backlinks. Are we experiencing a sandbox? How long? What information do you need? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to Block Google Preview?
Hi, Our site is very good for Javascript-On users, however many pages are loaded via AJAX and are inaccessible with JS-off. I'm looking to make this content available with JS-off so Search Engines can access them, however we don't have the Dev time to make them 'pretty' for JS-off users. The idea is to make them accessible with JS-off, but when requested by a user with JS-on the user is forwarded to the 'pretty' AJAX version. The content (text, images, links, videos etc) is exactly the same but it's an enormous amount of effort to make the JS-off version 'pretty' and I can't justify the development time to do this. The problem is that Googlebot will index this page and show a preview of the ugly JS-off page in the preview on their results - which isn't good for the brand. Is there a way or meta code that can be used to stop the preview but still have it cached? My current options are to use the meta noarchive or "Cache-Control" content="no-cache" to ask Google to stop caching the page completely, but wanted to know if there was a better way of doing this? Any ideas guys and girls? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Where is the Real Value in SEO?
Interesting topic and would love to hear some thoughts. How do you justify SEO, measure results, etc etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612900 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0 -
Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
I'm looking for some clarity... Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop. The following are points to consider when responding The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on. There is roughly 2000 products Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself. Should we really be considering this path? The domain is diveidc.com One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner. We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0