Why did I fall off the SERP for my url query? Im i being penalized?
-
The website is privateequityfirms.com, We would rank as high as 4th behind wikipedia from the query "private equity firms" but recently dropped to 77th for no reason. All my other keywords seem to no affected? whats going on, Im i being penalized?
I attached GWT search query info
Thanks,
-
I cant pinpoint the date but it has been in the last 3-4 weeks. We have never purchased links in the past. As for the Panda algorithm we were ranking as high as third for the term with all those slim content pages so i dont think that is it, but ill look more into it. We have two versions of the site, a paid and example. So it shows 2x the pages when a site: search is done, the HTTP and the HTTPS. That is something we are working on fixing.
Thanks for you help and if you have any other idea what could be causing this please share.
I also added another picture showing the drop, maybe its more helpful
-
Hey,
First off thanks for the response, We recently added a sitemap to the site. It is an online database so its a custom site map that changes constantly and Yes im seeing a drop on yahoo and Bing. I do not have any messages in GWT. I don't believe we have both, but like I said before it was ranking around 4th before the drastic drop.
I also added another picture showing the drop.
Thanks again for the help.
-
Can you pinpoint when the drop happened?
Have you purchased links in the past? A number of link networks have been deindexed lately.
It's possible that you could have issues with the Panda algorithm, although don't take this info to the bank as I have only spent about 10 minutes or so looking at your site. When I did a site: search I see that Google has over 94,000 pages of your site indexed. The majority of them have what could be called thin content. I see a lot of definition pages that contain one or two lines of text and also company portfolio pages like this one (http://privateequityfirms.com/portfolio-company/Captain+Tortue+Group) that don't really contain much info. Having tens of thousands of pages in the index that don't offer significant value to readers can be a sign of low quality and can cause the Panda algorithm to look unfavorably on the entire site.
If this is the case, then the answer could be to noindex all of the definition and portfolio pages.
-
Have you made any changes to your site recently that might have affected this? Perhaps put a robots.txt file or robots meta tag in that blocked the page that was ranking for this term? Have you seen traffic for this term drop in Bing and Yahoo at all? Do you have any messages at all in GWT?
Do you have both www and non-www verified in GWT? Maybe the non-www is ranking for this term, and you've only verified the www, which isn't ranking?
-
Hey,
I fixed the image and no i did not receive a manual penalty.
Thanks!
-
Can't see the image.
Please use imgurl as suggested by Moz.
Did you receive any manual penalty? (check in GWT).
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
-
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
How to know if your site has been penalized by Google
Hello, One of my clients ranking drop dramatically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ogdcorp
We believe it was due to an upgrade to his site. While the site was live www.clientdomain.com
Work was being done on the new site www.clientdomain.com/new (1 month) I think google crawled the /new link and took as a content duplication since both sites had the same content. Is there a MOZ tool to see if a site has been penalized or any online tool? Thanks0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Main Keyword penalized. And now?
Hello SEO comunity. In one of the sites that I work, our team won numerous keywords in the first searching results. Unfortunately, on june we lost the most important site keyword. It was a general Word, very disputed, that generated a lot of traffic to us. The problem: it droped from third to fifty position. I’d like your help to identify the possible punishments and than find the solutions. What could happened? Where do we start? Is there any checklist to verify the punishments? What do you suggest to me? PS: We always do a clean job, getting away form the blackhat techniques; We didn’t received any notification from Google; During two year, the keyword was in the first ten positions. Actually, I'm looking for an explanation for what happened to me, to get my top10 again. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webg0 -
Multiple URLs for the same page
I am working with a client and recently discovered that they have several URLs that go to the same page. http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMarketingandDesign
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FS
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=FF
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=ffhttp://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=MShttp://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF#
http://www.maps.com/FunFacts
http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?.nav=FF I am afraid this is happening all over the site. So, my question is: Is this hurting the SEO and how? If so what is the best way to go about fixing this problem? Thanks for your help!0 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Is it OK to have a site that has some URLs with hyphens and other, older, legacy URLs that use underscores?
I'm working with a VERY large site that has recently been redesigned/recategorized. They kept only about 20% of the URLs from the legacy site, the URLs that had revenue tied to them, and these URLs use underscores. Whereas the new URLs created for the site use hyphens. I don't think that this would be an issue for Google, as long as the pages are of quality, but I wanted to get everyone's opinion on this. Will it hurt me to have two different sets of URLs, those with using hyphens and those using underscores?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Business.com0