NEED HELP, Figuring Out Ranking Drop!
-
Hello, I need help from somebody, anybody, in trying to figure out why my site dropped so much for the keyword “wildblue” and “wild blue”. On the week of Feb. 13, 2012, my website jumped from middle of the first page to the fourth page, and then a week or two later jumped completely out of the index (or at least off the top 5 pages). We do not engage in any deceptive practices. Our entire website is centered around this keyword, and we are very relevant, and have informative and continually updated content for visitors.
I thought at first we got hit by Panda, but our overall organic traffic has not decreased, it has actually been steadily increasing compared to same time last year. I have tried over the past several months to get us back up, or at least figure out what happened, with no luck. If anyone could advise me on what might have happened, how to correct it, or even has any ideas of how I could figure out what happened I would greatly appreciate it.
Website is:
-
Trademarks can be registered in some countries, but not worldwide. Will it be any difference in selected country search if trademark is not valid there?
As i see in some results, google just hides the result if that page had official trademark violation, but does not penalize the website.
-
Well, we didn’t change URL structures or hosting or anything. However, Wild Blue is a trademarked term. However, we have permission from WildBlue to use the term for marketing purposes. This leads me to the same puzzler, which is that so many other sites similar to ours (many of the them much less relevant) replaced us in the rankings. I have tried for several months to figure this out. I hate to give up as this is so pertinent to the very core function our site and the information we provide, but I just don’t know what else to do. I even submitted a reconsideration request to Google. I haven’t heard back from them yet.
-
Is it possible that "Wild Blue" is a trademarked term? Just a thought, but I wonder if you could have been taken out of the index because of a DMCA takedown request?
Did you do anything else during the time period preceding the drop? Like change url structures, change hosting, etc.?
-
I appreciate your help. When our site was ranking for that term it was about 5 years old. We have ranked extremely well for that term for the entire existence of our site, with the exception of after February. This drop actually occurred even before Panda was released (about two weeks before I think). I did get one of the unnatural linkings Alerts In July (well after the drop occurred). However, I did a lot of research on it, and my conclusion was unless you got one of the warning messages related to unnatural linking don’t worry about it, as the site has not actually been penalized. From my understanding this message was more or less a “change what you are doing before it gets worse” type of message. Frustratingly we have never engaged in shady practices.
The only thing we have done that people now say has no effect is article marketing. Last year, we did invest some resources in creating some very high quality articles and submitting them to a few different directories. These were very informative and useful, and not the least bit spammy. Once Panda came out we stopped. To further complicate things, we didn’t focus any of these article efforts on the “WildBlue” keyword. Prior to Feb. we didn’t have to do much work for this keyword because we naturally ranked so well.
We actually use to have that keyword in our title, but took it out just a bit ago because we were not gaining any traction, and thought it best to reinvest that space with another keyword. The most puzzling thing for me about this situation, is that I understand gradually dropping for a specific keyword due to several factors. However, being completely dropped from the rankings in one week from a keyword that your entire website is designed to represent is still very puzzling to me.
-
There are a few things that stand out to me when looking at your site. First of all, you don't have the words "Wild Blue" in your homepage title, so if you are trying to rank your home page for this term that would help. I do see it on your inner pages, but do you have links built to the inner pages?
Your linking profile looks very unnatural, especially when you rank it by anchor text. However, if your drop happened in February of 2012, it wasn't because of Penguin because that didn't happen till April. Have you checked your webmaster tools for unnatural links warnings? This could be the cause. You've got a lot of anchor texted links as top anchors. A natural profile would have your url and brand as the most popular anchors.
When you were ranking for "wild blue", how new was your site? You may have gotten a honeymoon boost and then dropped down a few weeks or months later. However, it is a little strange...I don't see you in the first 8 pages for that term. I would expect at least one of your inner pages to rank...but again, if it's a competitive field and you've got no links to inner pages (I didn't check...just assuming), and don't have the keyword in your title then this could just be normal and not due to a penalty at all.
-
Why do you think other non-brand owners, would replace us? Looking at it from Google’s perspective it seems as if it would be counter intuitive to replace one website in the rankings with another one just like it.
-
I think that is a good conclusion.
-
Well, I thought about that too. However, many of the people that jumped ahead of us are not the brand owner either, nor are they in my opinion as relevant to the subject as we are.
-
Ive just this minuted posted a discussion about Google hurting aggregators on this very forum http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-google-making-life-harder-for-aggregators.
I think you may be seeing ranking drop for a branded term as I believe Google is working on reducing sites optimised for branded terms when they arent the brand owner.
-
No, wildblue.com is owned by another company.
-
Are you also wildblue.com? That site ranked in first when wild blue is search
-
What do you think caused your problems in ranking?
-
I kept adding new links and in time I recovered. I varied the links anchors to bring the direct to non direct ratio closer to 20%.
-
Any suggestions on what to do, or advice from what you did?
-
I had the same thing happen to a few of my keywords.
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
-
Help identifying cause for total rank loss
Hello, Last week I noticed one of my pages decreased in rank for a particular query from #8 to #13. Although I had recently made a few minor edits to the page (added an introductory paragraph and left-column promo to increase word count), I thought the reason for the decrease was due to a few newly ranked pages that I hadn't seen before. In an attempt to regain my original position, I tried to optimize the meta title for the singular form of the word. After making this change, I fetched and rendered the page as Google (status = partial) and submitted the page for indexing (URL only, not including on-page links). Almost immediately after submitting, the page dropped from #13 out of the top 50. I've since changed the meta title back to what it was originally and let Google crawl and index the page on its own, but the page is still not in the top 50. Could the addition of the page description and left column promos tipped the scales of keyword stuffing? If I change everything back to the way it was originally, is it reasonable to think I should regain my original position below the new pages? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jmorehouse0 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
How the heck is this guy ranking on top of Google for everything?
Hey everyone, how is the website below ranking so high for everything with his website? His link profile is spam junk, he uses forums and hides backlinks in smiles and quotes. Plus the guy even seems to be hitting all the competition websites with bad backlinks etc. It seems he is jus using automated tools to build tons of backlinks. Why isn't Google picking this site up and doing something about it? Search google for "advanced warfare hacks" he shows up on top. Same for "titanfall hacks" Same for "ghosts hacks" Check his link profile and sneaky ways, his main site is hackerbot [dot] net
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Draden670 -
Better ranking competitors have paid links from blog pages
I have a trial of all the tools at the moment and it's a lot of fun. I have been delving into site explorer and found that some competitors have links to them from obvious seo promoting paid blog sites. One has no other links except a paid for blog from a site that openly admits it offers paid marketing and they shot up to 4th on page one for a main keyword phrase. The info from moz and matt cuts video's say not to do this, but it's so tempting. The blog is well written, while I sit here and do the right thing, my competitors have page one. If the blog is well written and is meaningful is it OK and if google ever decide it's paid and don't like it, wouldn't it be better to be page one for 6 months and then recover? I'd love to give the link to the seo, blogger thingy but don't want to come across as promoting it in any way. I am sure there are loads of them anyway.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Peter24680 -
Do legitimately earned links from unrelated sites help or hurt?
We have a few charity events coming up that have offered to link back to our homepage. While we do genuinely like the charities we are going to sponsor, I'm not sure how those links will look seo-wise. For example, one is for the local high school basketball team and another is for a Pediatric Care Mud Run. To a human, these links make perfect sense, but to a robot, I'm not sure if it differentiates these links from spam/some negative link. Granted, I understand that a small percentage of links probably won't do anything either way, but I'd like to ignore that for the purposes of my question. All things being equal, do links such as these help or hurt? Thanks for your time and insight, Ruben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Hits in H1 will improve ranking by regular crawling ?
Hello ! I was wondering if it's a good idea to keep the "Hits" in the H1 ? http://www.ibremarketing.com/item/netapp-e5400-storage-system.html Will Google come to check regularly the update (new information if I'm right) or if he will not like the idea to come back just for hits update. As I have very good results on this part of the website, I do not want to take any risk. Thanks a lot !
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AymanH0 -
Do pingbacks in Wordpress help or harm SEO? Or neither?
Hey everyone, Just wondering, do pingbacks in Wordpress help or harm SEO? Or neither?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
I need de-spam help/advice
For one of my sites I am working on I outsourced SEO about 3 years ago. One of the "tricks" the SEO used at the time was to pay for several Blog posts to be "sponsored" by this web site using exact match keywords for the domain. 1 Where do I look to determine the spammy links pointing to this site? 2 Have you had success getting rid of these bad links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kadesmith0