Sudden dramatic drop in "some but not all" keyphrase rankings for client, 3 weeks ago
-
I noticed recently that 4 of my keyphrases which ranked on page one, and were climbing 3 weeks ago, have suddenly dropped to > 50. What could have happened? I did find an issue with my sitemap (yoast generated), but why would that suddenly change? And even more importantly, how do I fix it?
-
Thanks for the response, Patrick.
I did find that there was an error on my yoast sitemap-index.xml (404 on pagemap-index.xml) which I was able to fix last night. Not sure why suddenly there was a problem. I also found I had the wrong URL specified for the sitemap in my robots.txt - fixed that too. Other than that, I resubmitted the sitemap, re-fetched my site, and everything looks copacetic in google webmasters as it certainly is being crawled, and no crawl errors.
Up until know, I've simply been massaging the content, ensuring that I hit all of the google criteria according to moz.com as well as the SEO plugin (Yoast) that I am using. I've not done anything out of the ordinary except I added a slide-in plugin to promote a course my client is teaching (see fisherfinancialgroupllc.com). I'm not really doing anything with links because I was having such great luck on the work I was doing with content, blogging and social media. I can only think that maybe the slide-in plugin (had incorrect URL for the button link) might have caused some kind of recursive problem?
It's weird because my key phrases (financial advisor northbrook il, financial advisor northbrook, and financial advisor northbrook illinois) were all ranked around 5 & 6 and still moving up at the end of August, and the following week dropping to > 50. And the drop didn't effect the "Fisher Financial" centric key phrases, just plain odd.
Not sure what other information I can provide to enable you to help me. It's a small site and we only update it a couple of times a month other than the occasional blog post done by the client. I appreciate any information you can provide!
Not sure why my question is marked as answered. This is the first time I've ever posted a question here, and saw that I if I liked your answer but wanted to keep the thread open to click on "Good Answer". Sigh. Hope you see my response, and that others can as well.
Cindy
-
Cindy,
It sounds like you were hit with a penalty by Google. If you have a Webmasters account, check that for any notifications about a penalty or tactics which would adversely affect your website pages. If you don't have a Webmasters account, then I'd do that asap and submit your website for indexing... then see what comes back.
It's hard for anyone in this forum to give you advice on how to "fix it" without knowing what you were doing. Can you provide some more info about what tactics you have been implementing to climb rankings in terms of SEO, traffic generation, etc? Knowing this would help get a better idea of what the problem could be and how to resolve.
Patrick
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
-
How To Stop Google's "Fetch & Render" From Showing Up In Google Analytics
Hi all, Within Google's "Fetch & Render" (found in Google Search Console) is the ability to index certain pages from my website on-demand. Unfortunately, every time I ask Google to index a page, it registers as a bounce in Google Analytics. Also, if it means anything, my website (www.knowtro.com) is a single-page application, functioning similarly to Google. If you guys know of any solution to this problem, please help! I originally thought that Google would know to block its own Fetch & Render crawler from Google Analytics but that doesn't seem to be the case. Thanks, Austin
Reporting & Analytics | | A_Krauss0 -
Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
Hi everyone, Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended. For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration. At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving. Some possible causes include; Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it? Thank you very much for your input in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | serges780 -
When I click on organic search, the biggest drop is on keyword "not provided". What does this mean?
I am trying to identify the reason for the drop in organic search.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sable_Group0 -
Organic Traffic Drop and Rank Increase After Video Thumbnail added
So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be. It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics. It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.
Reporting & Analytics | | OfficeFurn0 -
Any issues with Google impressions dropping in Webmaster Tools?
I'm seeing a drop in impressions across all my websites that are hosted at a certain location. Just wanted to make sure that it is not some reporting issue that others are seeing.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Advanced Web Ranking Proxies
Hey, How can i set up multiple proxy server for Advanced Web Ranking? I managed to block everyone from Google the last time I used this 😕 Thanks, Luke.
Reporting & Analytics | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
Moz Rank & Trust | Page vs Sub vs Root
Hey guys, Just need some help deciphering my OSE link metrics for my site theskimonster.com . Page MozRank: 5.51 (highest among my competitors) Page MozTrust: 5.74 (#2 among my competitors) Subdomain MozRank: 4.19 (#4 among my competitors) Subdomain MozTrust: 4.63 (#2 among my competitors) Root Domain MozRank: 3.89 (#5 or last place among competitors) Root Domain MozRank: 4.1 (#5 or last place among competitors) What does this mean? What am I doing right, what do I need to do?
Reporting & Analytics | | Theskimonster1 -
Tool to check pervious rankings for a keyword ?
I am looking a tool/site to check ranking history of specifc keyword . Is this possible ? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | bfletc40