Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly
-
Hello,
We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this. The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago. At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request. Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site. We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving. Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings". However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found. If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3!
We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned). We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores. The results are the same. Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time. We just could not understand why this is happening. Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months.
Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice? Many thanks!
-
All though possible I would imagine Google would of sent out a warning or similar if there was some sort of penalty.
-
Could this possibly be connected to Google's Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent?
-
Hi There
This is definitely strange - does it still happen for you? I could not recreate the issue here. There's no doubt this is odd, but I'd ultimately be concerned if it was a page 1 result in which you were missing the first search around. Doesn't seem like this is affecting any actual visibility though?
How are impressions in WMT? Anything off there?
-Dan
-
Thank you for checking this for us and confirming that something is not right, I thought I was going crazy...
I will try to contact Google via webmaster tools (perhaps filing another consideration request) to prompt a reply.
If anybody have any suggestions it would be much appreciated thanks!
-
Could be how Google are delivering their results as mentioned or a bug when they tweaked their algorithm, you could try and rock the boat and email them via webmasters though don't expect them to really help out much they are pretty secretive bunch. Have you found no change on the search with active SEO ? I presume there has been some sort of SEO going on though its a really odd thing
-
Ok Now I've just got home and did the search again on a different machine, and indeed you weren't within the first 10 pages on an initial search, but appeared top of page 3 on a second search.
How bizarre, but unfortunately I cannot offer a solution either.
-
That is strange. Using firefox I first searched for you and you werern't in the top 10 pages. I then performed the same search and you were right at the top of page 3.
I can't offer a solution/ reason but i'd be really interested if someone else could!
-
Unfortunately I could not recreate your issue.
I just did the same search and in firefox you appeared first time on page 4, position 32. I did the search in Chome on another machine and you appeared first time on page 4 in the same position.
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
-
Mobile site not ranking
Hello, I have a m.site.com version of my original site. It is about 1/10 the size, and no matter what I do-I can't get the site to rank. I've added more pages and specified canonical etc etc. Should I add as many pages as my larger site has? Are there specific places I should be submitting this version beyond the typical? I am at a loss, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! L
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1 -
I have a 404 error on my site i can't find.
I have looked everywhere. I thought it might have just showed up while making some changes, so while in webmaster tools i said it was fixed.....It's still there. Even moz pro found it. error is http://mydomain.com/mydomain.com No idea how it even happened. thought it might be a plugin problem. Any ideas how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | NateStewart0 -
Seomoz Can not Crawl My Site
Hello there Seomoz can not crawl my site. It's been 3 days now not a single page has been crawled. I deleted the campaign and tried again still now crawl not a single page.. Any solutions??
Technical SEO | | ExpertSolutions0 -
Google Trusted Ranking effect?
We are looking into getting the google Trusted badge. We meet the requirements and now just deciding if it is worth the time to do it now or later. Has anyone noticed a difference in your organic rankings or PLAs with it. What about conversion rates? Any input would be great!
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Google not found errors in webmaster tool help
Hi, Google Webmaster tools sent me a few messages recently about the jump in the number of 'not found' errors. From 0 to 290 errors, ouch. I know what it's from but I think Google is seeing things. We developed another page/subdomain we're working on with links back to the root domain. Basically a complete list of articles page that lists each article and links back to the root domain. Not sure what Google is crawling but the links that would result in a 'not found' error aren't there. Will these disappear over time? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | astahl110 -
We're no longer turning up in Google SERP for our brand search when we used to be #1 after our site update. Any ideas why?
We recently updated our website and during the push, someone mistakenly 301 redirected "www.brandx.com" to "brandx.com" instead of the otherway. Since then, our website no longer turns up for the search "brandx" on Google. We have reversed the mistake a few days ago, but we're still not turning up, and we used to rank #1 in Google SERP. Could it just be due to timing between the crawls and that our www. site didn't make it in Google's index due to this mistake? We have submitted our new sitemap to google a couple of days ago as well, as a side we're still showing up #1 in Bing's results however. And it should still show up based on SEOMoz's SERP report. Any help would help as I'm growing increasingly concerned.
Technical SEO | | JoeLin0 -
Can You 301 Unwanted Links to Another Site?
I am trying to clean up my link profile, and have noticed that a I have a lot of crappy inbound links linking to some of my old pages. And those old pages have since been 301'ed to current pages. My question is, is it worth trying to 301 those old pages, and thus those crappy links, to another website? Would this do anything to clean up my link profile?
Technical SEO | | red6marketing0 -
Syndication partner ranking in Google News for our content
Our blog is part of Google News and is syndicated for use by several of our partners such as Chicago Tribune. Lately, we see the syndicator version of the post appearing in Google News instead of our original version. Ours generally ranks in the regular index. ChiTrib does have canonical URL tags and syndication-source tags pointing to our original. They are meta tags, not link tags. We do have a News-specific sitemap that is being reported in WMT as error-free. However, it shows no urls indexed in the News module -- even when I can find those specific URLs (our version) in the News. For an example: Here is a ChiTrib post currently ranking in Google News
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/sns-school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone-20120301,0,3514283.story The original version is here:
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/03/school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone.html The News sitemap URL is
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/kickingtires_newsmap.xml One of our front-end producers is speculating that the Facebook sharing code on ChiTrib is having an effect. Given that FB is FB and Google is Google, that sounds wrong to me when we're talking about specifically Google News. Any suggestions? Thanks.0