Huge drop for main branded keyword
-
The past week the main branded keyword for a site i am working on has dropped from the top three on Google US to page 7! It is still ranking in the top three on Google in other areas. I recently redirected /index.php to / using .htaccess. Could this have caused a problem?
If not, what else could have caused such a huge drop?
-
Can an EMD update remove SERPS for all keywords, or just the exact matches? We recently lost all our foreign language domain serps, roughly on the 4/5th
-
Quite a lot of traffic lands on the listings pages so im reluctant to set them to noindex. There are only approx. 4,000 listings pages. I'm trying to find where these other pages that are being indexed are coming from.
-
If most of your organic search traffic lands on your homepage, you might want to consider setting all the listing pages to noindex. That'll get the duplicate content out of Google's index.
-
The duplicate content is a problem as a lot of teh listings are pulled in via XML from agent sites. I've been trying to find a way to make it all more unique without editing each listing manually.
-
Thanks for this.
What is the best way to find where all of these links are coming from? The only place i can see is the search results page. I have set this 'noindex, follow'. Should i set it to 'noindex, nofollow"?
-
Good point. All those sub-pages (listing pages) have content that is duplicated across multiple other sites, too.
-
I don't think anyone has mentioned this but your number of internal links is borderline nuts. I found about 190,000 internal pages.
If you remove those internal links and Google this:
"www.phuketproperty.com" -site:www.phuketproperty.com
You'll see that your site has 13,000-ish backlinks. Take a look at the highest ranked ones. They're mostly all cheap/low quality inbound links. You don't have a huge backlink profile based on the tremendous size of your site.
To put it in perspective
www.microsoft.com has 688,000 internal links and 28 million incoming links.
www.century21.com has 11 million internal links and almost 50 million incoming links.
www.phuket.com has 5530 internal links and 287,000 incoming links.
Internal links are not usually 10x incoming links. That could be part of it. You have 13,000 not-quality inbound links. And 200k indexed pages.
-
Thanks for your help. It looks like I'll just have to keep doing what i am doing and hope it bounces back quite quickly.
-
Generally speaking, you want to remove bad links while building good, new ones.
-
Before i took over the site the owners had taken on the service of some link building company. The links the company added where just added in to any wiki type site they could find. it seems that they only used four different types of key words when they were doing it. I have managed to remove over 600 of these links and the site was just starting to rank well for a variety of keywords, then all of a sudden this week the site has dropped back for its main keyword.
Do you think the best strategy is to keep removing the bad links? Apparently the site ranked better before these links were built.
-
I was thinking the same thing, you got hit with the EMD update recently especially if it happened this week.
-
Sounds like you got hit by the EMD update: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214115/Google-Warns-of-Upcoming-Exact-Match-Domain-Algorithm-Change
-
I doubt a 301 redirect from index.php to / would have done that.
An EMD issue could be the reason, as could an automated penalty (Penguin, Panda, anchor text over-optimization, etc.). If we had your URL and keyword, it would be easier to make specific suggestions.
-
Hi
Can you provide me your keyword which dropped and URL of your site?
I think if index.php contains backlinks and you have 301 redirected then some % of link-juice may be loss but it does not have huge affect as you said. Have you contain EMD?? After EMD algorithm updates by Google it may be possible your domain was affected by this update.
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
-
2 pages ranking for same keyword.. Need some advice on what to do.
Here's my question. When I first started my website we started Using keyword anchor building links To my homepage . Over the years Our business has expanded to more than just baby headbands. I now have a baby headband page. When tracking my rankings. I sometimes see Both pages in Google for the same keyword. Other days I do not see both of them. My question is Should I continue building links and keyword anchor text for the home page Or should I switch them and start building keyword-rich anchor text for my baby headband page. I'm just wondering if the Search engine is confused by the two. When searching for the keyword baby headbands. I will sometimes show up for eight and nine. 8 is my home page and 9 is for the baby headband page. I have always shown up for the keyword "baby Headbands" for my home page.
Technical SEO | | PB20070 -
Drop in traffic, spike in indexed pages
Hi, We've noticed a drop in traffic compared to the previous month and the same period last year. We've also noticed a sharp spike in indexed pages (almost doubled) as reported by Search Console. The two seemed to be linked, as the drop in traffic is related to the spike in indexed pages. The only change we made to our site during this period is we reskinned out blog. One of these changes is that we've enable 'normal' (not ajax) pagination. Our blog has a lot of content on, and we have about 550 odd pages of posts. My question is, would this impact the number of pages indexed by Google, and if so could this negatively impact organic traffic? Many thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
How do we maintain keyword rankings when creating a domain?
We are creating a new corporate "marketing site" on Hubspot and connecting our existing product site to that as a sub-domain. Our existing site ranks very well for all of our targeted keywords. The existing product site will now be behind a login, so how do we transfer juice to the new site in Hubspot? Or can we?
Technical SEO | | Reis_Inc.0 -
Why is Google showing sitelinks for 1 of our keywords, but not the other which is very similar?
For the term "Corazonas Foods" Google displays the sitelinks in the SERP listing. But for the term "Corazonas" it does not. The second term, Corazonas (our brand name), is not a generic term for anything so why wouldn't Google do the same for both terms?
Technical SEO | | getwilder20 -
Can backlinks from advertising cause a traffic drop?
Hi, I recently noticed that our organic traffic has started to drop and maybe coincidently our adwords traffic has increased. I was asked to investigate the drop. I know that from the google update that unnatural backlinks would be penalized so I thought it might be the backlinks from a site that we advertise on because of the sheer number we have required from them in the last month. Would you think that would be the cause? if not, what could it be? and if it is, how do I go about correcting it as fast as possible? Any Help with this would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | digital.moretogether.com0 -
Content: How Much and What Kind for top Keyword Rankings?
Aside from well optimized meta tags, alt tags, captions I could use some help figuring out: What's the recommended number of words (original of course) on page? What should be the keyword % ? We've recently engaged an SEO company to provide an audit, and hired another for comparison and guess what ... 2 different viewpoints. I consider this to be the worst $3 grand we've ever spent! I look forward to your opinions
Technical SEO | | HMCOE0 -
Keyword targeting & differentiation between similar keywords
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around keyword targeting when two keywords are very similar. Here's my dilemma, lets just I sell ACE brand Widgets I'm doing well with “ACE Widgets” queries but not “ACE” How do I fix this since “ACE” is already all throughout the results page & supposedly anchor text is playing a less and less significant role in link relevancy so just getting links with “ACE” as the anchor text wouldn't really help (I wouldn't think) Just a little confused. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
301 redirect while keeping OLD domain for branding
Say you have CharityName.com. They use a dedicated domain name CharityNameEvent.com to advertise their main event. They use this domain on posters, flyers,etc and want to keep using it because it's easier to remember. CharityNameEvent.com has far, far more inbound links than CharityName.com (about 8 times more). Current problem: their current web developer has put the SAME content on both websites instead of setting up a redirect from CharityNameEvent.com (easy to remember) to CharityName.com/Event which would have made more sense. My intention is to consolidate the 2 websites and make sure CharityName.com benefits from links to the Event. I plan to move and 301 redirect CharityNameEvent.com to CharityName.com/Event. I know this would keep links and PR intact but I have a couple of questions: 1. Is it enough to set up the 301 redirect or would they have to ask websites to ACTUALLY change the links to CharityName.com/Event? 2. They plan and need to keep using CharityNameEvent.com for its ease of use on posters, flyers, etc. The 301 redirect would be in place. Would this cause any problems with search engines, especially when/if some people STILL link to CharityNameEvent.com instead of CharityName.com/Event? Basically, my understanding of 301 redirects is that they're used when a website permanently moves. In this case, the OLD DOMAIN name would still be used for reasons mentioned above but would be 301 redirected to CharityName.com/Event. Any chance this might not maximise the potential of new/old links? Any other way to go about it? Anything I'm missing with this scenario? Thanks
Technical SEO | | carmenmardiros0