Single Keyword Penalty?
-
Hi guys,
I recently taken over SEO for strikebowling.com.au and I'm stumped to what has happened with the keyword 'Bowling' for the home page.
Historically they have been ranking 5-6 for the year and they do come up in the local results.
Start of September, bang they drop out of the top 100 for Bowling. No other words seem to be effected. However the keyword 'Bowling Alley' did improve around the same time for an internal page.
What could have happened? A single keyword penalty?
- No messages in Webmaster tools
- No dodgy link building
Look forward to some theories.
Regards,
Corey
-
Ha, no worries, drama over.
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for the reply.
Turns out my rank checking software has been using my geolocation and obviously when I was checking I didn't change my location.
Odd however is that the website ranks for 'Bowling' ever where expect for Melbourne and a few surrounding suburbs. Definitely something else I need to get to the bottom off.
Thanks for your answers guys.
Corey
-
Hey Corey
It certainly smells like a penguin type penalty against that one keyword but you can certainly do some digging to determine if whether it is that or if it is something else or if there are more keywords that are effected and you have just not noticed. I have also seen a few sites penalised on the brand name where it was an exact match so say the URL is http://www.exact-match.com then they are getting penalised for too many 'exact match' anchors. This seems easier to fix and I have had a couple of sites bounce back from this for the brand keyword without too much effort.
First thing I would do is examine to see what date this happened and whether other keywords were effected so we can identify a list of possible problem terms and problem anchor text.
1. Filter by that keyword in google analytics and determine the date this happened and see if it is on a known penguin date or date relating to any other search algorithm update - check against this list: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
2. Once you know the date, if it looks like a penguin problem, then check to see if other keywords are affected. To do this select a two week period in analytics starting at the day you had the problem and then select the compare to past option below the date to view the two weeks before and after.
Browse to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic to get a list of all keywords and you can see the percentage that these have changed. Scroll through that list and see if there are other keywords that have lost traffic. (If you have some good rank checking you may not need to do this but it's likely you will find more here if it is a penguin issue).
Once you have done that you can get a list of terms together and attempt to determine if you have problematic links. You can import your link profile from seomoz into a free tool called Link Detective that will allow you to filter the links easily by anchor and get a new spreadsheet for each anchor text (or you could divvy it all up in a spreadsheet but link detective gives us a few more details like the type of link).
Then, you can go through the manual task or reviewing the links to see if there are any problematic ones for that term alone.
There is a few more details of how I would go about this here:
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/penguin-diagnosis-and-recovery-strategy/Without a few more details it's hard to know exactly what the issue is but this is a very broad term yet that is a huge drop but if you follow the instructions above it should let you determine if this was a penguin type issue or something else entirely.
Also, there are sometimes fluctuations, so I would not panic too much. Your link profile looks pretty well okay to me, the linking sites (from a very quick look) seem okay and generally, it does not look like you should be punished for manipulative practices.
There is a lot of talk of a reshuffeling of the deck with no specific updates around the end of september so possibly, have a look, see if you can find anything fishy but also, hold fire, this may just resolve itself. http://www.seroundtable.com/september-2012-google-report-15652.html
One last thing, is this a good keyword? Does it convert? What is the value of traffic? Do they stay? Have the results moved around at all for other people as well?
Hope this helps!
Marcus -
It could be, no way to tell. You need to diversify the anchor texts like this
best Strike Bowling Bar
most popular Strike Bowling Bar
watch out for the most popular Strike Bowling Bar etc._It would look natural. _
-
This was my original thinking. But there hasn't been any link building for the word Bowling. However "Strike Bowling Bar" the brand name is used quite often. Do you think this could impact it?
-
_Yes, I have seen numerous occasions where single keyword lost its ranking whereas other keywords continue to rank well. Now if the webmaster tools did not receive any Warning mail, it is not a manual penalty. But if you have been building links heavily with that specific keyword within a network of blogs, it might happen that sites linking to your website lose their value and thus, the ranking of that specific keyword may suffer. _
_So, diversify the keyword and hope this will get fixed. _
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
-
Best Practices For Angular Single Page Applications & Progressive Web Apps
Hi Moz Community, Is there a proper way to do SPA (client side rendered) and PWA without having a negative impact on SEO? Our dev team is currently trying to covert most of our pages to Angular single page application client side rendered. I told them we should use a prerendering service for users that have JS disabled or use server side rendering instead since this would ensure that most web crawlers would be able to render and index all the content on our pages even with all the heavy JS use. Is there an even better way to do this or some best practices? In terms of the PWA that they want to add along with changing the pages to SPA, I told them this is pretty much separate from SPA's because they are not dependent. Adding a manifest and service worker to our site would just be an enhancement. Also, if we do complete PWA with JS for populating content/data within the shell, meaning not just the header and footer, making the body a template with dynamic JS as well would that effect our SEO in any way, any best practices here as well? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Google Webmaster Tools - content keywords containing spam?
Hi all, When I looked in Google Webmaster Tools today I found under the menu Google Index, Content Keywords, that the list is full of spammy keywords (E.g. Viagra (no. 1) and stuff like that) Around april we built a whole new website, uploaded a new xml-sitemap, and did all the other things Google Webmaster Tools suggest when one is creating a Google Webmaster Account. Under the menu "Security Issues" nothing is mentioned. All together I find it har d to believe that the site is hacked - so WHY is Google finding these content keywords on our site?? Should I fear that this will harm my SEO efforts? Best regards, Christian
Technical SEO | | Henrik_Kruse0 -
Someone is building anchor text links with child porn keywords..help :-(
Hey Everyone; I recently found that there are tons of links to my url (30+) from several sites with the anchor text "download child porn, kiddie porn, and the likes". Although the sites linking to us where the person built the links do not have this content (thank god) it is just my url + the horrible anchor text someone is putting. [added image] Obviously I would not do that to my own site especially since I was ranked for over 15 keywords in the top 5 spots on Google and Bing. I am guessing its a competitor and I am wondering that is there any way I can remove them? Is this negative seo? Also could this be the reason my site has dropped off google page 1 last month for all my positions? I am consistently trying to rebuild but my positions are flying all over the place. Im going from ranking #12 one week to #198 the next; then to #60 and finally not even on google or bing anymore; then back to #50, etc for the past month and a half... Its very aggravating and it has hurt a few of my websites; im at a total loss on how to recover now if this is the case...It seems they have started to build these links in January from what I can find on the postings.. Thank you SEOMOZ im so happy im a member now. Any suggestions on how i can get these links off or if it is why my site has lost its original rankings.. Should I just can my website and start all over with a different URL? How can I watch out for this in the future? Any help would be so so so greatly appreciated and valued 🙂 xpVjMw8
Technical SEO | | Circa0 -
My seo company has a footer link that links to my site by keyword will this effect my rankings
My old SEo company has a footer link by keyword to my site so it acts like a site wide link will this effect my rankings. My site was in the top 5 for many keywords now page 2 and 3 so I am trying to see what has effected it as we havent changed what we do
Technical SEO | | Casefun0 -
When keywords are on the top of the google search engine then what to do ?
My two keywords are on the top of my desired market place that means google.co.uk . So now what should I do to sustain this position???
Technical SEO | | JohnDooley0 -
Domain authority and keyword difficulty
I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment. When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Hyphens in keywords
Anyone know if hyphens affect the SEO value of keywords? So is: Sandwich-making course Worse than: Sandwich making course I'm talking about in titles and body text. I already know that too many hyphens is a bad idea in URLs and domain names.
Technical SEO | | JacobFunnell0 -
Including spatial location in URL structure. Does subfolder number and keyword order actually matter?
The SEOMoz On-Page report for my site brings up one warning (among others) that I find interesting: Minimal Subfolders in the URL My site deals with trails and courses for both races and general running. The structure for a trail is, for example: /trails/Canada/British-Columbia/Greater-Vancouver-Regional-District/Baden--Powell-Trail/trail/2 The structure for courses is: /course/28 In both cases, the id at the end is used for a database lookup. I'm considering an URL structure that would be: /trail/Baden-Powell-Trail/ca-bc-vancouver This would use the country code (CA) and sub-country code (BC) along with the short name for the region. This could be good because: it puts the main keyword first the URL is much shorter there are only 3 levels in the URL structure However, there is evidence, from Google's Matt Cutts, that the keyword order and URL structure don't matter in that way: See this post: http://www.seomoz.org/q/all-page-files-in-root-or-to-use-directories If Matt Cutts says they aren't so important then why are they listed in the SEOMoz On-Page Report? I'd prefer to use /trail/ca-bc-vancouver/Baden-Powell-Trail. I'll probably do a similar thing for courses. Is this a good idea? Thoughts? Many thanks, in advance, for your help. Cheers, Edward watch?v=l_A1iRY6XTM watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I
Technical SEO | | esarge0