My OSE stats have never been better but my rankings are tanking
-
For some reason my traffic to [Antique Banknotes] has declined drastically over the past month even while my OSE metrics have gone up. A typical example is this 1892 five dollar bill. I used to rank first for this search but now I am 3rd.
Worse, a search for ten dollar bill used to have me near the top which brought a lot of traffic. Now I am way out in the weeds. Can anyone help me understand what is causing me to drop so much?
I know there is a new competitor who outranks me with the url [Antique money] he is likely the cause of my fall in the ratings. I don't know why but OSE loves his site even though I seem to beat him in most areas OSE measures. His Page authority for instance is 45 while mine is 37 but I have higher scores in every category. I don't understand that.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
-
Hey Sha,
Had to give you a thumbs up as I did not consider the issue with disavow links not influencing OSE. Great Point. Thanks,
-
So basically it seems that we don't have much determinism when it comes to ranking anymore. Seems like we really lost something. I guess I will muddle along an hope that I stumble into that special sauce that once brought me #1 rankings.
-
A competitor of mine is ranking 1 step above me for a my exact match domain keyword they aren't optimized for. They have a similar amount of linking domains with similar anchor text style proportions (i.e. between exact and partial match etc.) Their DA is a little lower than mine and their PA is the same.
The main difference I suspect might be that I have only 3 facebook shares compared to their 47, I think that could be why, I have read that search engines are ranking social shares even a little bit higher than links. I actually have 16 shares but according to addthis not all of them can be crawled due to factors like social sharing privacy settings.
-
Hi Greg,
That is an impossible question to answer I am afraid
OSE results are an indicator of how your site stands according to the metrics that influence PageRank.
Your actual rankings may be influenced by any number of things which are known only to Google:
-
Algorithmic filter effects such as Penguin, Panda, Exact Match Domain etc;
-
Manual Actions (penalties) applied for any number of issues, from link spamming to cloaking or even abusing rich snippets markup. Check Slides 6 and 7 of this deck for breaches of the quality guidelines that will lead to a manual action ;
-
Disavowed links (any links that you have disavowed and are disregarded by Google remain live links which inform the OSE results because Moz is not privy to the list);
If your rankings have tanked recently, I would be using OSE to see if there are any obvious issues with anchor text ratios, links originating from places that are undesirable, changes in authority of sites linking to yours etc, rather than trying to correlate the numbers with your results.
Sha
-
-
I actually can't complain that the competitor doesn't have better PA and DA numbers... he does. But I don't know why. In every individual metric I have a better score but he has better rankings, Moz rank and Moz trust. I don't understand why.
Here is the OSE query that shows what I am talking about. http://bit.ly/13iev60
If someone with experience could scan these numbers and tell me if something jumps out I would really appreciate it.
-
I agree things are unpredictable the point i was trying to make was you cant look at ose and say i should rank higher since i have a better score. Those days are over.
-
David,
I wish I could see it as that simple, but I just don't. What I am seeing is there are situations where there are results that frankly are not relevant to the query and they are ranking with hardly any links, etc. Or, you see where a high DA site has a page that is PA of zero ranking ahead of more relevant pages, etc which have say a PA of 55, etc. A classic example in this is go look at practically any service business wherein you use a city plus a discipline: Tucson Plumber. (I have not tried that one). 50 to 60% of the time we see something like Indeed.com with 3 different urls ranking all of which have PA of less than 10. How can a major PMSA (say top twenty) with that type of search not return 10 listings for plumbers?
When you look at queries, the relevance of showing jobs for plumbers is, well, not relevant for that search.
What I am saying is there is no longer a way to speak with real certainty about a question like this re SEO. I think there may be a time when we have more clarity, but it is not now. I miss those days.When you say non anchor text manipulative, what is that?
Thanks,
Robert
-
Google has changed the algorithm and ose stats are no longer a great indicator as to who will rank. Now quality links that are relevant and non anchor text manipulative etc are more important.
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
-
Lost ALL my rankings
Dear experts, We have suddenly lost all our positions on our keywords, I’m talking for example from position 2 to 35 in one huge drop ☹ . Even when you search for our name and domain name namely “KV16”, the main page does NOT come up. (We do however still get the local business / map result on the right side!) I have looked in google search console, but nothing to see here – no penalty. However, I need to mention, that we just now, after the issue, setup the google search console – so maybe that is why there is no information about a penalty!? (If the problem is a penalty, btw we have not been doing any link building!) One year ago, we made a permanent redirect from our old site, www.kontoret-gammeltorv.dk, because we moved our coworking office, to a new location, and needed a new name – (because the old name is referring to a location, hence no longer made sense.) This worked flawlessly, and we got all the link juice, and the new site ranked just as good as the old one. Aprox four months ago, we made some changes to the site, where we amongst other things, changed the title description on the frontpage, focusing more on another keyword – and doing this we unknowingly change the permalink to the frontpage (in WordPress). I have read that this can do some real damage, however its so long ago, that it seems unlikely to be the cause!? Please help!? Thanks a million, in advance. Cheers, Christian pJp4Uyx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Christian_T0 -
Length for ranking, is it keyword dependant ?
Is the time it takes to rank keyword dependant ? in other word does it take more time for a page to rank on a keyword that has 5000 request a month than for a page to rank on a keyword that has 50 requests a month ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Rankings drastically changing
I monitor our positions for a few keywords but they are very unstable. One day they will be at position 1, 2 or 3 and then all of a sudden not even on Google. We use an IP redirect to guide users to the correct site and I suspect this may be a cause. Could anybody shed some light? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanRowlands0 -
Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google
We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings. When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now. The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored. If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Keyword ranking verse all other data
Hi there I have just joined Moz so I am not sure if i am doing a good job of analysing all the data, but from what i can see i have a few questions: 1. I seem to have a fairly high visibility compared to a few other competitors 2. All the other competitors i am looking at have a much lower domain authority 3. I win the link metrics in all categories compared to my competitors 4. I have a page optimisation score of 94 5. I dont have any crawl issues (except that i just changed to https and i believe there is a synching issue with Moz and cloud flare..) YET I barely rank for any of the main keyword in my industry.... Kitchen, New Kitchen, Kitchen Renovation etc. I also have a page optimisation score of 94 for related keywords. I feel like i am really missing a big point and was hoping I could get your expert thoughts on this 🙂 Thanks so much! PS my domain is www.bluetea.com.au
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bluetea0 -
2 pages ranking for the same term
Hi everyone, I have had two pages ranking on page two of Google for a while now for the same term. I have tried dedicating a page to it but as the other has a url with the search term in Google is ranking both it seems. How can I without deindexing one of the pages help better tell Google which one to rank? I imagine if it only ranked one page I would get a higher result rather than 2 weaker ones? On-site has been done and so has links to the homepage, but the innerpage still ranks also as it has the search term in its url. Would a canonical tag be worth it here? the page is however getting some traffic itself for other terms so I am reluctant to do that. Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdigital0 -
What next to help with my rankings
I'm after a fresh set of eyes and any suggestions to help me with my site on what next I should be doing to help increase rankings. The site is: http://bit.ly/VR6xIm Currently the site is ranking around 9-11th on google.co.uk for it's main term which is the name of the site. The site is around a year old, when it launched it went initially up towards positions 3-5 but has since settled at around where it is now. I have a free tool webmasters can use to implement our speed test into their sites which also includes a link back to our site in it to recognise that we are providing the tool for free, I periodically change the link achor text so it is not always the same anchor text that every site uses. Is there anything obvious I should be doing or that is missing that would help with my rankings? *Just as a note, I am not after a review on the actual speed test on the site, a new one will be developed to help further increase accuracy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wardy0 -
How to rank for difficult terms
I am helping launch a new business venture that sells oak furniture in the UK. The key product terms are along the lines of; oak bed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pretige12
oak dining table
oak chairs etc which are very popular search terms. Im used to being able to hang of local or branded search which arent available in this project. The domain is around 12 months old, it has few inbound links which we are working on now with an overseas freelancer (keeping an eye on them). The pages of the site are unique-content rich and the titles and other meta boxes are ticked. What else would the experts recommend?0