Sudden Drop in Keyword Rankings
-
We launched http://www.manufacturedfun.com/ earlier this year and had been ranking 1 & 2 on Google SERPs for the keywords we optimized, but last week we experienced a sudden drop in rankings that pretty much took us off the radar.
For instance, 'popcorn machines' went as far back as page 5 and 'popcorn poppers' dropped even further to page 9.
We are currently working on fixing the numerous Duplicate Page Title and Duplicate Page Content errors identified by SEOmoz, but since we have had those for about 6 months and ranked well anyway, I wonder if there's something else that we are missing.
Any insight you can offer will be sincerely appreciated. Thank you!
-
Well I am just a pest control guy....
But I don't think I am the only one that has had this happen to them.. http://www.seomoz.org/q/one-keyword-rank-inexplicably-blasted-into-oblivion
-
In 12 years of doing this, I have never had a dramatic site drop like you said, for a couple of weeks, only to find its own way back again.
Maybe I have just been lucky, maybe my customers have, but one thing I can say, when they have had drops of this degree, it has been down to a problem that needed fixing.
Don't forget, Google is releasing algorithm updates all the time then tells us after 2 months what they did, unless it's something like a Panda refresh which happens ever 6 weeks or so.
Hope it's noting much, but leave no stone unturned.
Andy
-
This is certainly reassuring. I'll look into the link portfolio just in case. And since this drop in rankings just happened a few days ago, maybe it is Google testing as you mention.
Thanks for sharing, I appreciate it!
-
We have a tool to track rankings, but I've been monitoring it manually too and have sometimes seen the usual 'good rankings' as you mention.
Thank you for taking the time to look into it. Hopefully it is just a temporary fluctuation and not a permanent drop.
-
I'd certainly look at cleaning up the duplicate titles and content. Add cononicals if you have multiple URLs referencing the same material.
What does your link portfolio look like? Anchor text distribution?
If you don't see any huge red flags then take a breathe while google puts you under water. There is constant flux in the serps. Sometimes drops in rank are simply google testing. I've had sites drop out for a week or two at a time then rebound to where they were previously.
-
How are you going about tracking your rankings? Right now via a manual review I see you at the bottom of page one for popcorn machines.
Keep in mind rankings do fluctuate by week, day, and sometimes even hour.
-
I think you have answered your own question there with the duplication problems. However, check webmaster tools for link warnings as well.
Sounds like an algorithm update has caught up with you though and with so many, could still be Panda, or a Page Quality one - or one of many others.
Andy
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
-
Meta Keywords - Should I define them myself
Hi All, Im sure this has been answered somewhere but I couldn't find it. SEOQuake etc suggest you should define meta keywords. However I was under the impression that this was not best practice Can anyone confirm what I should do/ is best practice? Cheers Bowey
Technical SEO | | CFCU0 -
Frustrating Drop in Rankings Despite Good DA
The page below
Technical SEO | | Jayblue
http://www.carefundraisingsupplies.co.uk/fundraising-products/Charity-Collection-Buckets seems unable to budge from a position of near 100 despite previously been around 16 and moving up. We cannot seem to find any issues that are obvious and even some quality link building has moved it down further. Any idease from anyone? The search phrase we are targetting is Charity Collection Buckets0 -
Changing URL - Ranking Disappeared?
Hi All, I named a page URL /plectrums/ within the back end framework. But then decided to change it to /personalised-plectrums/ I resubmitted a GWT sitemap and 301 redirected plectrums -> personalised-plectrums My ranking for personalised plectrums has disappeared and has not come back does anyone know why this is? Or is there something I have missed? Lewis
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Sudden 50% drop in SERP rankings
Hi, Our website is well established and has been growing every month until around Jan. 6th 2013. All of sudden our search rankings on Google dropped dramatically (nearly 50%). We getting tens of thousands fewer visitors through search results than normal. At the same time as the drop (almost to the day) we changed our forum software from Vbulletin3 to Vbulletin4. The forums are on a different subdomain, and our forum developer said there is no way the change would affect the main site. Is that true? So far, we have not been able to figure out what caused the sudden change. Maybe a Google update?
Technical SEO | | AVman0 -
Rank tracker and Rankings report differs
Hi all Is this normal? I have set up a campaign for a site. Tracking a variety of keywords. For one of them, which is a quite important keyword I've been working on I've moved down one step in my rankings report. This is first of all weird because my on page optimization went from grade c to a, and even weirder beacuse if I run Rank Tracker tool on the keyword and the URL I see that I've moved up 6 steps, to 15 in Google. Kinda makes it hard to grasp if I'm on the right path or not! (I've checked and they are both results on google.dk, same URL and same keyword - exact)
Technical SEO | | Budskab0 -
Keyword ranking not moving
Hello, We have a very important keyword for our website (www.decorplanet.com) that hasn't moved in any direction in over a year. The keyword is "bathroom vanities". Our current SEO company has told us that the previous company has "over- optimized/linked" for this particular keyword and now Google is penalizing us for this. They told us that we need to leave it alone for a while and concentrate on other keywords and this one should naturally come back up (I should mention that at some point, we were much higher than where we are right now for that particular keyword). Many of our other high-profile keywords have been moving nicely to the first page. Keywords like "modern bathroom vanities", "antique bathroom vanities", "contemporary bathroom vanities", but the one that we really want ("bathroom vanities") hasn't budged at all. Does anyone have any thoughts on this. Is it possible that Google put us in some sort of a "sand-box" - I mean we are on page 2 so it doesn't sound like that's the case. It's just very bizarre that we can't seem to do anything with this keyword. Really appreciate any thoughts or input on this.
Technical SEO | | steven11330 -
Rankings Dropped Dramatically
Hi All, I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why. We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com. The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs. In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically. keyword 1 4th Jan position 22 9th Jan position 90 keyword 2 4th jan position 34 9th jan position 89 keyword 3 4th jan position 12 9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others) We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings. I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz. Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0 -
Sudden ranking drop, no manual action
Sort of a strange situation I'm having and I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts. Here's what has happened... Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected. I immediately figured that this was some sort of keyword-specific penalty that I had incurred. I had done a bit of link building over the weekend (two or three directory type sites and a bio link from a site I contribute to). I also changed some anchor text on another site to match my homepage's title tag (which just so happened to be the exact phrase match I had dropped in) - I assumed this was what got me. I was slowly beginning to climb up the rankings and just got a bit impatient/overzealous. Changed the anchor text back to what it originally was and submitted a reconsideration request on Tuesday. This morning, I get the automated response in Webmaster Tools that no manual action had been taken. So my question is, would this drop have been an automated deal? If that's the case, then it's going to be mighty hard to pinpoint what I did wrong, since there's no way to know when I did whatever it was to cause the drop. Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions to regain my modest original placement?
Technical SEO | | sandlappercreative0