Can literally any site get 'burned'?
-
Just curious what people think. The SEOMOZ trust on my site has gone up, all while Google is dropping us in rankings for lots of keywords.
Just curious if this can happen to anyone or once you are 100% 'trusted' you're good.
We went from 120,000 page views down to about 50,000. All while doubling content, improving the design(at least from a user perspective), and getting more natural links.
Seems counter intuitive to Google's mantra of ranking quality.
I would guess 'authority' sites never get hit by these updates right? So when you make it you've made it.(at least from a dropping like a rock perspective, obviously you have to keep working).
I'm guessing we just need a bunch more quality links but would hate to work on building links, quality content, trust etc for it to be something so finicky long term.
-
I see NASA.gov being beaten for quotes from their own content - sometimes even a quote of their title tag. So many people scrape their content or republish it verbatim.
A city newspaper near me had a lot of pages of crappy content. They simply posted a page for every business around with biz name, phone address and couple other pieces of info. These were really skinny pages. Their rankings have been in the dumps and I think these skinny pages are the reason.
-
i think any site can take a hit. it doesn't have to be a punishment, even just a minor tweak to the algo could knock a page down a ranking or two. that alone could be thousands of visitors. or maybe the tweak makes a competitor rank better and puts them above you.
-
From my experience I see that every site no matter how big or small is vulnerable. I'm a Realtor and my focus is to get that coveted top spot on page 1. Currently I'm in the number 7 spot for one of my main keywords and for other keywords I'm high on page 1 or on page 2.
Now who is on top? the national brands. But even they get impacted because they compete against each other and for some terms I beat them in the SERPS. I use Long Tail Keywords in order to do this.
Now, Google is fine tuning their search bots and there will of course be movement up and down for some sites. The thing to remember is to make sure you focus on the long term.
- Great Content
- Blog
- Social Media
- Ease of use for your web visitor
- On Page SEO
- Natural Link building
- Infographics
- Video
- Off Line Marketing
- SEO Continuing Education
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
-
Trying to get Google to stop indexing an old site!
Howdy, I have a small dilemma. We built a new site for a client, but the old site is still ranking/indexed and we can't seem to get rid of it. We setup a 301 from the old site to the new one, as we have done many times before, but even though the old site is no longer live and the hosting package has been cancelled, the old site is still indexed. (The new site is at a completely different host.) We never had access to the old site, so we weren't able to request URL removal through GSC. Any guidance on how to get rid of the old site would be very appreciated. BTW, it's been about 60 days since we took these steps. Thanks, Kirk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbates0 -
Did not get Good reply on my previous query. Can anyone help me?
I did not get satisfactory answer on my previous question here - https://moz.com/community/q/please-provide-solution-for-my-website-duplicate-content-problem Please help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
How get an image on a third party site rank high on goode images?
Hello, I have sometimes articles written about my product online, is there anything else I can do except make a good file name for it, perhaps I can ask the site owner to modify in the article to make it rank higher? Also on some small websites I can see that images rank very high for the specific search term that is difficult to rank for in images, if I were to contact the site with a sponsored post request, what I should make sure the site adds except filename to that sponsored post... I think there are also some other methods such as reddit to make images rank high on third party page, just need to find out how... thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
Some site's links look different on google search. For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
For example Games.com › Flash games › Decoration games How can we do our url's like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lutfigunduz0 -
Google can't access/crawl my site!
Hi I'm dealing with this problem for a few days. In fact i didn't realize it was this serious until today when i saw most of my site "de-indexed" and losing most of the rankings. [URL Errors: 1st photo] 8/21/14 there were only 42 errors but in 8/22/14 this number went to 272 and it just keeps going up. The site i'm talking about is gazetaexpress.com (media news, custom cms) with lot's of pages. After i did some research i came to the conclusion that the problem is to the firewall, who might have blocked google bots from accessing the site. But the server administrator is saying that this isn't true and no google bots have been blocked. Also when i go to WMT, and try to Fetch as Google the site, this is what i get: [Fetch as Google: 2nd photo] From more than 60 tries, 2-3 times it showed Complete (and this only to homepage, never to articles). What can be the problem? Can i get Google to crawl properly my site and is there a chance that i will lose my previous rankings? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | granitgash
Granit FvhvDVR.png dKx3m1O.png0 -
301's, Mixed-Case URLs, and Site Migration Disaster
Hello Moz Community, After placing trust in a developer to build & migrate our site, the site launched 9 weeks ago and has been one disaster after another. Sadly, after 16 months of development, we are building again, this time we are leveled-up and doing it in-house with our people. I have 1 topic I need advice on, and that is 301s. Here's the deal. The newbie developer used a mixed-case version for our URL structure. So what should have been /example-url became /Example-Url on all URLs. Awesome right? It was a duplicate content nightmare upon launch (among other things). We are re-building now. My question is this, do we bite the bullet for all URLs and 301 them to a proper lower-case URL structure? We've already lost a lot of link equity from 301ing the site the first time around. We were a PR 4 for the last 5 years on our homepage, now we are a PR 3. That is a substantial loss. For our primary keywords, we were on the first page for the big ones, for the last decade. Now, we are just barely cleaving to the second page, and many are 3rd page. I am afraid if we 301 all the URLs again, a 15% reduction in link equity per page is really going to hurt us, again. However, keeping the mixed-case URL structure is also a whammy. Building a brand new site, again, it seems like we should do it correctly and right all the previous wrongs. But on the other hand, another PR demotion and we'll be in line at the soup kitchen. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yogitrout10 -
How Long Before a URL is 'Too Long'
Hello Mozzers, Two of the sites I manage are currently in the process of merging into one site and as a result, many of the URLs are changing. Nevertheless (and I've shared this with my team), I was under the impression that after a certain point, Google starts to discount the validity of URLs that are too long. With that, if I were to have a URL that was structured as follows, would that be considered 'too long' if I'm trying to get the content indexed highly within Google? Here's an example: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/article and in some cases, it can go as deep as: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/organization/article. Albeit there is no current way for me to shorten these URLs is there anything I can do to make sure the content residing on a similar path is still eligible to rank highly on Google? How would I go about achieving this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith0 -
One site or five sites for geo targeted industry
OK I'm looking to try and generate traffic for people looking for accommodation. I'm a big believer in the quality of the domain being used for SEO both in terms of the direct benefit of it having KW in it but also the effect on CTR a good domain can have. So I'm considering these options: Build a single site using the best, broad KW-rich domain I can get within my budget. This might be something like CheapestHotelsOnline.com Advantages: Just one site to manage/design One site to SEO/market Better potential to resell the site for a few million bucks Build 5 sites, each catering to a different region using 5 matching domains within my budget. These might be domains like CheapHotelsEurope.com, CheapHotelsAsia.com etc Advantages: Can use domains that are many times 'better' by adding a geo-qualifier. This should help with CTR and search Can be more targeted with SEO & Marketing So hopefully you see the point. Is it worth the dilution of SEO & marketing activities to get the better domain names? I'm chasing the longtail searchs whetever I do. So I'll be creating 5K+ pages each targeting a specific area. These would be pages like CheapestHotelsOnline.com/Europe/France/Paris or CheapHoteslEurope.com/France/Paris to target search terms targeting hotels in Paris So with that thought, is SEO even 100% diluted? Say, a link to the homepage of the first option would end up passing 1/5000th of value through to the Paris page. However a link to the second option would pass 1/1000th of the link juice through to the Paris page. So by thet logic, one only needs to do 1/5th of the work for each of the 5 sites ... that implies total SEO work would be the same? Thanks as always for any help! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OzDave0