Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

I used to rank 12 or 13 for a specific search term. Now I don't show up at all. What's cuasing this?

Algorithm Updates

741

wlefevre last edited by

Used to rank on the second page for a specific search query, now we don't seem to show up at all for the same query. Has Google penalized us or is something else going on?
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
rmontanez last edited by
Did you change anything? Is your site still showing up?

Rule out a Google penalization by anwsering the following questions:
1. Is your site still indexed?
2. Does your site ranks for your domain name or branded words?
3. Does your site ranks for unique terms from your title tags?
- If you have answer "NO" to any of these questions, you probably have been penalized.
- Otherwise, you don't have a penalty and you need to get high quality links. Also, review your on-page SEO.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

My site is showing indexed in search console but not appearing in Serps

hi, i have recently made sites.google site and submitted to search console but when I copy paste in google , its not appearing
Algorithm Updates | | alan-shultis

0
Page Rank on Moz compared to Ahrefs

So there seems to be a huge philosophical difference behind how Moz and Ahrefs calculates page rank (PA). On Moz, PA is very dependent on a site's DA. For instance, any new page or page with no backlinks for a 90DA site on Moz will have around 40PA. However, if a site has around 40 DA, any new page or page with no backlinks will have around 15PA PA. Now if one were to decide to get tons of backlinks to this 40 DA/15PA page, that will raise the PA of the page slightly, but it will likely never go beyond 40PA....which hints that one would rather acquire a backlink from a page on a high DA site even if that page has 0 links back to it as opposed to a backlink from a page on a low DA site with many, many backlinks to it. This is very different from how Ahrefs calculates PA. For Ahrefs, the PA of any new page or page with no backlinks to it will have a PA of around 8-10ish....no matter what the DA of the site is. When a page from a 40DA site begins acquiring a few links to it, it will quickly acquire a higher PA than a page from a 90DA site with no links to it. The big difference here is that for Ahrefs, PA for a given page is far more dependent on how many inbound links that page has. On the other hand, for Moz, PA for a given page is far more dependent on the DA of the site that page is on. If we were to trust Moz's PA calculations, SEOrs should emphasize getting links from high DA sites....whereas if we were to trust Ahref's PA calculations, SEOrs should focus less on that and more on building links to whatever page they want to rank up (even if that page is on a low DA site). So what do you guys think? Do you agree more with Moz or Ahref's valuation of PA. Is PA of a page more dependent on the DA or more dependent on it's total inbound links?
Algorithm Updates | | ButtaC

1
Second rebranding, what's the best approach?

Our client rebranded in 2007 and it worked very successfully from an SEO persepctive. They put in place page-to-page 301 redirects and the new website replaced the old one in the SERPS very quickly in similar positions. The market has changed and they now need to rebrand again so they are moving to a third domain. So in 2007 they redirected DomainA to DomainB and now are moving to DomainC Domain A was in existence since 1996 so a majority of the link profile is still directed to DomainA and is passing through it via 301 to DomainB. Is the best approach 1. to just redirect DomainB to DomainC, leaving the DomainA links pass through a second set of 301 redirects?
or 2. would it be better to change the redirects on DomainA to go directly to DomainC (the theory here is that each 301 dilutes the value of a link so taking out a hop could be better)
Algorithm Updates | | G-DC

0
Google Search CTR % By Position

Hello I am looking for an updated report regarding the CTR % by position for Google search results. I have the compete.com report which Gives the 1st organic position a 53% CTR but I have not be able to duplicate that number with any other report or research. I am just trying to validate this report before I suggest any recommendations to my company regarding our search efforts. Thank you Ben
Algorithm Updates | | bhalverson3

0
After optimising for SEO my ranking went down...

Hello, My website was ranking for over 100 keywords but was not really optimised properly. For example, the page title was much too long, it was segmented like this: "keyword - Category - domain " I followed recommandations in SEOMOZ and I removed the domain and category from the long page titles to only leave the keyword and updated the H1 to reflect also the keyword. We dropped in ranking since even though we did not change anything, only made things more SEO optimised. I don't understand how it made us drop in ranking?? David
Algorithm Updates | | DavidSpivac

0
How did a competitor's brand name get in google's related search list?

When doing a google search for the term "ulster county real estate" the related search list at the bottom of the serp includes 7 obviously related search terms and 1 brand name of a competitor. (see attachment) The competitor doesn't rank for this term organically at all yet he enjoys a link on the first page with those of us that do by being in the related search list? I don't get it. Anyone know how something like this happens? Innhs.png
Algorithm Updates | | jhogan80

1
Manual query to search for backlinks?

Hello, I've been using open site explorer, dabbled with seo spy glass, and other back linking sites, but I was wondering if there was a manual way of searching for back links? Such as site.www.widgets.com +keyword -widgets.com to show me results of all the sites pointing to www.widgets.com, or pointing to the keywords linking to widgets.com. I do enjoy Open Site Explorer, but it takes a few months index the back links ive done.
Algorithm Updates | | Modbargains

0
Difference in which pages Google is ranking?

Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages. In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages. I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own. Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise. Anyone else noticing similar changes?
Algorithm Updates | | BedeFahey

1