I'm I being penalize? I fell off SERP for main keyword
-
I have been making minor changes to my site like fixing 404 pages and adding site maps etc.
I have ranked as high as 3rd for the query 'private equity firms' but now Im showing the site around the 10th page and some times never.
any ideas what could be going on?
-
Maybe, Links play a big whole on your ranking, and without this 301 you loss big part of your link profile.
-
Yes, I can. Im Still not understanding 100%. Did it break?
-
Can you place the 301 again?
-
It's possible that the Google Hummingbird update is assuming that when you search for "privateequityfirms" you are really trying to search for privateequityfirms.com because of a lack of other relevant results.
It's also possible that the fact that it's an EMD has something to do with it.
-
Thanks for response and link.
But why would I rank for the query 'privateequityfirms' with no spaces on the first page and then rank so far back without spaces? when its essentially the same query.
Thanks again
-
It looks like you used to have a domain 301 redirect to your domain (pedatabase.com) but that no longer is the case. I'm showing a lot of links to this domain, even some .edu links. If Google has disassociated this domain with your domain, you rankings could be dropping as a result.
Of the linking domains in your link profile, many of them link to the pedatabase.com domain: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?page=1&site=privateequityfirms.com&sort=page_authority&filter=equity&source=external&target=domain&group=1
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
-
Strange: page no longer present in SERPS and I'm not sure why
I indexed a new page last week and it ranked 1st The page is still live, still registering sessions in analytics, registering activity in search console Why is it no longer present for the keyword in ranked first for on Friday?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
Title & Keywords
Hi Quick question on arrangement of keywords in titles. I know the order isn't so important anymore, but would there be a real issue if I want to rank for 'Henry Xtra' but my title reads 'Numatic Henry Xtra Vacuum Cleaner' Rather than 'Henry Xtra Vacuum Cleaner' ?? Will it really make much difference? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Adding a secondary keyword or other keyword variation to the title tag affect ranking for primary keyword?
Hi Moz Community, According to Google Search Console, the main keyword for our website is undergoing a low click through rate, even though we have good ranking for that keyword (top 3). Currently, our homepage's title tag is "Brand Name: Primary Keyword". I am thinking about adding a secondary keyword or other keyword variation to differentiate our company from others in order to possibly increase the click through rate. Will this affect the current ranking for the primary keyword? Also, is the clickthrough data in Google Search Console accurate? Thank you! Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raymondlii0 -
Keyword rank and redirecting
I'm creating a new amazon affiliate site. I've researched other successful sites. I've noticed that they are ranking for 1000s of keywords, but many of these long tail keywords are redirected back to a main page. I can see how this can reduce the overall total amount of content pages on the site. How are you able to rank for the keyword in the first place if the the page is redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lkomontt760 -
Establishing if links are 'nofollow'
Wonder if any of you guys can tell me if there is any other way to tell google links are nofollow other than in the html (ie can you tell google to nofollow every link in a subdomain or something). I'm trying to establish if a couple of links on a very high ranking site are passing me pagerank or not without asking them directly and looking silly! Within the source code for the page they are NOT tagged as nofollow at present. Hope that all makes sense 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mat20150 -
Negative SEO and big decrease in main keyword ranking
Hi about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had. The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword. Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masoudfatemi0 -
My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
Hi all, We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower. One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www). Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August. We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor: We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks. Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day. GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact. Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tact0 -
How Long Before a URL is 'Too Long'
Hello Mozzers, Two of the sites I manage are currently in the process of merging into one site and as a result, many of the URLs are changing. Nevertheless (and I've shared this with my team), I was under the impression that after a certain point, Google starts to discount the validity of URLs that are too long. With that, if I were to have a URL that was structured as follows, would that be considered 'too long' if I'm trying to get the content indexed highly within Google? Here's an example: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/article and in some cases, it can go as deep as: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/organization/article. Albeit there is no current way for me to shorten these URLs is there anything I can do to make sure the content residing on a similar path is still eligible to rank highly on Google? How would I go about achieving this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NiallSmith0