Half my ranks have gone missing
-
I have a site that was rankly very highly for gaming walkthrough phrases. I was ranking #3 for the phrase skyward sword walkthrough
Then it began to drop, despite me building more links (non spammy links) through guest blogs and emailing people requesting they just link to it from their site.
I went in and added more text to the page and it went up a few places but is now gone from the first 5-10 pages.
This has also happened to all of my walkthrough related ranks. My other ranks are still there but these accounted for a large portion of my traffic and is very odd.
My on-page grade is near if not perfect
Some insight would be nice
-
As of today, my page is now ranking 5th on page 1. It is just bouncing all over the place.
-
Can you tell what day the drop happened?
-
If that is the case, why would this page be penalized? Ive never bought links, the on-page isn't totally
spammy, backlink profile isn't all exact match and is a good mix of anchor text and image links. All of the links are legitimately created.
This page for instance was one of my highest viewed pages, has a low BR, high time on site, etc. So its tailored to what people want when searching for this phrase
If I am penalized then it is absolutely beyond me on why I would be.
-
I write it all. No messages of concern
-
Do you have any messages in your WMT?
If you look at your analytics traffic sorted by organic traffic can you tell what day the drop happened?
Is your content completely written by you or do you get it from another source?
-
yes unless you have a major penalty you will always showup for "domainname.com" in quotes in search.
search for your exact meta description in quotes and your site is supposed to show up at the top
-
Are you sure?
It shows up for
"skyward sword walkthrough" "legendzelda.net"
I will cut back on the phrase walkthrough, but I find it hard to believe that using it in the way I am would cause the page to be penalized. And my other walkthrough pages do not use it like that so it doesn't make sense either.
Is there anything else you can see on the page that would cause this?
-
that page is penalized. even for very specific searches it doesn't come up which means it has been ranking suppressed for the keyword phrase "skyward sword walkthrough"
If it has happened to your other walkthrough related pages look at the use of overusing "walkthrough" on your site anchor texts and on page density
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
-
Rankings Drop Week Beginning 19 May
Hi All I have experienced quite a significant rankings drop since week commencing 19 May. I have heard there has been a Panda roll out recently was it around that time? Thanks Gavin
Algorithm Updates | | gavinr0 -
How much link juice does a sites homepage pass to inner pages and influence inner page rankings?
Hi, I have a question regarding the power of internal links and how much link juice they pass, and how they influence search engine ranking positions. If we take the example of an ecommerce store that sells kites. Scenario 1 It can be assumed that it is easier for the kite ecommerce store to earn links to its homepage from writing great content on its blog, as any blogger that will link to the content will likely use the site name, and homepage as anchor text. So if we follow this through, then it can be assumed that there will eventually be a large number of high quality backlinks pointing to the sites homepage from various high authority blogs that love the content being posted on the sites blog. The question is how much link juice does this homepage pass to the category pages, and from the category pages then to the product pages, and what influence does this have on rankings? I ask because I have seen strong ecommerce sites with very strong DA or domain PR but with no backlinks to the product page/category page that are being ranked in the top 10 of search results often, for the respective category and product pages. It therefore leads me to assume that internal links must have a strong determiner on search rankings... Could it therefore also be assumed that a site with a PR of 5 and no links to a specific product page, would rank higher than a site with a PR of 1 but with 100 links pointing to the specific product page? Assuming they were both trying to rank for the same product keyword, and all other factors were equal. Ie. neither of them built spammy links or over optimised anchor text? Scenario 2 Does internal linking work both ways? Whereas in my above example I spoke about the homepage carrying link juice downward to the inner category and product pages. Can a powerful inner page carry link juice upward to category pages and then the homepage. For example, say the blogger who liked the kite stores blog content piece linked directly to the blog content piece from his site and the kite store blog content piece was hosted on www.xxxxxxx.com/blog/blogcontentpiece As authority links are being built to this blog content piece page from other bloggers linking to it, will it then pass link juice up to the main blog category page, and then the kite sites main homepage? And if there is a link with relevant anchor text as part of the blog content piece will this cause the link juice flowing upwards to be stronger? I know the above is quite winded, but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the power of internal linking on SERP's... Look forward to your replies on this....
Algorithm Updates | | sanj50500 -
How important is Social Media for building domain authority / Google rankings? Are there any cases?
I really would like to know if someone tested the importance of Social Media for Google rankings.
Algorithm Updates | | Seeders
Are there some sites who build authority only by doing good social media?
Ofcourse, I know it is all about the mix (content, linkbuilding, social media, etc.) but how important is it?
I know many sites who rank good without any form of social media, but I do not know any sites who do only social media and rank high. I hope there are some good cases which give good insight. ps. I know it becomes more and more important...0 -
Ranking factors
I found this page: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors Is there any new page with more up to date data ? Thank you i.
Algorithm Updates | | iivgi0 -
Infographic rankings has nose dived? Anyone else experienced this recently?
I posted an infographic back in April, 2012 on my company blog.
Algorithm Updates | | adamlcasey
I added embed code at the bottom, so people could embed on their websites (not many did that I can tell) I also submitted it to a number of Infographic directories and got links back from around 5-6 of them. The title of the Infographic is exact match long tail search term.(6 words) By July it had hit Position 6 in Google.co.uk, where it stayed in the top 10 until December fluctuating between positions 6-9. I haven't done anything else to the post and yet since December it has started to trickle down the rankings, in the past 3 weeks it dropped from 15th on Feb 3rd to 93rd on Feb 17th, then bounced back up to 33rd on the 25th of Feb and has now fallen again to 89th yesterday. Is this normal or have I been hit with a penalty of some sort? Not sure if this matters but I have the word infographic at the end of my title?? Also when I run it through OSE I don't see some of the backlinks that I can see from GWT.0 -
Why does my Rank Checker result differ to SERPs
Hello SEOmoz members I've got yet another naive question for you. RankChecker is telling me that my client has risen to pg 1 position 7. Whilst SERPs is telling me they are still on position 14. I know that SERPs is variable depending on many factors, but this holds true for separate searches on other computers in various far flung locations. Please give me some insight into what is happening. I'm waiting to open the bubbly! Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | catherine-2793880 -
SEO updates and rank changes
We have been updating page titles and meta descriptions for a client (not changing ANY links and the content we are replacing is "fluff," no major keywords or any relevant information) yet in the past few weeks, rankings have plummeted. I used the SEOMoz grader to check and make sure we have the keywords in there, in the right places for the updated page source info, and we're getting A's yet for those same keywords, the website is nowhere to be found. For example for the phrase "organic t shirts," we get an A for this page: http://greenpromotionalitems.com/organic-t-shirts.htm but when searching organic t shirts, no Green Promotional Items... Ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | laidlawseo0 -
Site Usage Statistics and organic ranking
I'm not sure if anyone has tested this properly but i'm begining to suspect that google is using site usage statistics as a site quality guide and ultimately as a ranking variable. The this what i've seen so far on one of my sites (site A) Week 1= bounce rate (83.88%), Avg time on site (0:0:57), Pages/visit (1.28) no changes made to the site apart from the usual link building. Week 2: Traffic drops by 30%, Keywords generating traffic drops by 39%. Bounce rate (87.25%), Avg time on site (0:0:43), pages/visit (1.21). I replaced all affiliate links on my homepage to internal pages where the chunk of the content is and did a reconsideration request. Week 3: Traffic goes up by 30%, keywords generating traffic goes up by 65%, Bounce rate (30.41%), Avg time on site (0:3:02), Pages/visit (3.74). This is not the most scientific test but surely google must be using these variables and a ranking factor? Anyone seen something along these lines or have thoughts on it?
Algorithm Updates | | clickangel0