Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking - No Idea Why
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am in charge of everything Web Optimization for the company I work for. I keep active track of our SEO/SEM practices, especially our keyword rankings. Prior to my arrival at the company, in January of this year, we had a consultant handling the SEO work and though they did a decent job on maintaining our rankings for a hefty set of keywords, they were unable to get a particular competitive keyword ranking. This is odd because other derivations of that keyword which are equally competitive are all still ranking on page one. Also, full disclosure, they were not engaging in any questionable linking. In fact, they didn't do much of any link building whatsoever. I also haven't been engaging in any questionable content creation or spammy linking. We put out content regularly as we are a publicly traded company - nothing spammy at all.
Anyway, one thing I tried since February was engaging in a social media sharing campaign among friends and coworkers to share the respective page and keyword on their Facebook and Google+ pages. To my surprise, this tactic worked just like natural search usually does - slowly and through the months I saw the keyword rank from completely invisible, to page 6, to page 3, to page 2, and finally onto position 6 page one as of just last week.
Today, unfortunately, the keyword is invisible again :(. I am perplexed. It's tough to build links for our company as we are in the public and everything we do has to be approved by someone higher up. I also checked our webmaster tools and haven't seen any notifications that can give me clue as to what's going on. I am aware that there was a Penguin update recently and there are monthly Panda updates, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not those updates would be correlated to this because, at initial glance, our traffic and rankings for other keywords and pages don't seem to be affected.
Suggestions? Advice? Answers?
Thanks!
-
Dana,
Thanks so much for your reply.
Yes, it did drop out of place recently. Just this week I believe it dropped. Also, it hit page one just 2-3 weeks ago, then boom gone.
Across the board, our rankings for other relevant keywords are pretty solid (I say relevant because management does want to monitor our rankings for super broad keywords that have low chance of ranking). I haven't seen any major drops in traffic or ranking as I've been monitoring. Over the past few months, in fact, I've seen natural search traffic increase as the ranking for the term I'm asking about actually went up in ranks
In regards to the conversion question - that's a great way to look at it. In fact I did that and noticed that conversion using that keyword actually increased 4 fold this past month. We went from conversions beginning with that keyword in January from about 1-2% of total non-branded conversions (that we can track i.e. no "not provided" conversions), to about 9% of total non-branded conversions in the month of May. So clearly it holds some weight
That article does provide some useful insight. Upon brief scan, it's certainly useful. I'm bookmarking and reading in detail later! Thanks
Anyone else have any input/suggestions? Dana if you have anything else to add, please do!
-
Hi Pedram,
Has it dropped out of it's position recently? I have seen occasional volatility like this. If you know your page is solid and your content is solid, the best thing you can do is be patient and wait. Many times I have seen a well ranked term plummet down and disappear for a few days or weeks and then pop right back up to where it was before. The other thing to evaluate is how many conversions and how much revenue was being generated by that keyword. The only reason I suggest this is because I am constantly getting emails from one stakeholder asking "why aren't we ranking for keyword x?" When, in fact, "keyword x" is not really a valuable term for us, but is more of a vanity term. If that's the case, you'll need solid data and your "educational hat" to go to your stakeholders and explain to them why they shouldn't get fixated on certain terms.
How are your rankings doing when viewed as a whole, across the board? If you haven't already, I would highly recommend building a ranking index. AJ Kohn wrote a great blog post that will walk you through how to do it. Since I built these about 6 months ago, I haven't had to respond to very many "Why aren't we ranking for Keyword X" emails. Hope this helps!
Dana
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
-
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Sudden drop in ranking
Hi, I have been on page 1 (around 5-7th) for an area specific phrase (liverpool wedding photographer) for most of last year. I wrote a 2500 word article which was about documentary wedding photography which was meant for a landing page of its own, I decided to put it on my home page. A week later I was second position page 1. This was last November and within a week or at most 14 days I was suddenly dropped to bottom page 1 (9th 10th), then a week later half way down page 2 (14th, 15th) and ending at the bottom of page 2. I had a bad SEO company a few years ago who got me a lot of spammy links so I ended up disavowing a lot of links I had. What are peoples opinions on links now? Do I disavow all directory links, and non wedding or photography related links? Did something major happen to the google algorithm in November? The only other thing I can think of which might cause a penalty is using the keyword "Liverpool wedding photographer" as a link from at leat 10 blog posts back to my home page which is optimised for those keywords. This was something I copied from someone who was ranking nationally for phrases. Just looked at their site now and they are still using this technique and are No1 nationally for their chosen phrase???? I do try and get as many 'good' links as I can (featured weddings on wedding blogs and credits for photography work) but I am totally confused. I thought google likes a lot of content? Very gutted as it could not happen at a worse time as January is the busiest month for bookings and I have been nowhere. any help will be greatly appreciated. Best wishes. David.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WallerD1 -
Permanently Moving Few High Ranking Pages from One Domain to Another
We are planning to move few high ranking pages permanently (301 Permanent Redirection) to another domain, Currently these pages are getting good traffic from organic search and ranking on top positions in Google search engine result pages. We have few questions in our mind right now, It would be a great help if anyone can answer following questions; Is it possible to move few pages from one domain to another by using 301 Redirection in .htaccess file? Will it have any negative impact on our website's current search engine performance? Will it be considered as a legitimate SEO practice by Google Search Engine? Will Google understand that these pages have been moved permanently to another domain and start showing URL's from the new domain on the same positions where they were ranking before moving to new location?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tigersohelll0 -
Trying to escape from Google algorithm ranking drop
in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates). since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings. We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages. we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80). we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions. we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content. we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords. We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower. 1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at. 2. we are even considering going to a new domain and 301'ing all pages to this domain in an attempt to shake off the algorithm filter (penalties). has anyone done this? how long can we expect to get at least the same ranking for the new domain if 301 all urls to it? do you think its worth it? we know the risk of doing this, and so wanted to seek some advice. 3. we have on the other hand considered the fact that we have disavowed so many links (70%) that this could be a cause of the page two problem, however we are link building according to moz metric standards and majestic standards with no benefit.. do you think we should increase link building? Advice is appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Determining if our ranking is due to increased competition
Hello, I'd like to give you a list of DA/PA and see if the slipping of our rank is due to competition. This if for our main keyword. Below is the top ten sites in our industry - their DA and PA for this head term. This is for the plural form of the keyword - a product term. If I don't say differently the following are where the title has the keyword in it exactly and also these are ecommerce site listings. Does this look like we are being outdone by competition or would you say that there might be some other cause: 1. DA 85, PA 38 2. DA 34 PA 34 (These guys are mostly paid links by the way) 3. DA 100 PA 55 (singular form of keyword and also informational site) 4. DA 91 PA 41 5. DA 23 PA 24 (The only thing I see about this one is that their backlink profile is very white hat and they have the nicest looking site in our niche) 6. DA 29 PA 31 (exact match domain) 7. DA 99 PA 1 8. DA 22 PA 34 (Guide including infographics - doesn't sell products themselves) 9. DA 96 PA 1 10 DA 26 PA 38 -- This is us with 57 total root domains sitewide and 43 root domains to the home page. Let me know what additional information you need.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Does the Traffic boost SEO/SERP ranks?
Hello, I know a guy that sells Organic traffic, bought 10k from him, will this help me to bost google seo ranks? Attached a screenshoot thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 7liberty0 -
Google SEVERE drop as of last week (oct 10) on long standing .org site
Hello Experts Wanted some imput if possible. I own a .org informational site that has been #1 in its category for Google Yahoo and Bing under a major keyword for years. The site is aged back to 2005 and all of the sudden it dropped on August 10 (Google only- Yahoo and Bing still #1)) but remained atop the primary keywords that it is namesaked for .org (xxxxyyyzzz.org) and then Oct 9-10 it dropped from the page 1 top ranking it had for years on that primary keyword to page 13. I dont know where to begin to look. Any ideas how something like this could happen and what "Stones" I should turn. We purchased the website and are not SEO gurus so just not sure. Any help would be appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TBKO1 -
Stuffing keywords into URLs
The following site ranks #1 in Google for almost every key phrase in their URL path for almost every page on their site. Example: themarketinganalysts.com/en/pages/medical-translation-interpretation-pharmaceutical-equipment-specifications-medical-literature-hippa/ The last folder in this URL uses 9 keywords and I've seen as many as 18 on the same site. Curious: every page is a "default.html" under one of these kinds of folders (so much architecture?). Question: How much does stuffing keywords into URL paths affect ranking? If it has an effect, will Google eventually ferret it out and penalize it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PaulKMia0