Sudden Drop in Rankings/Traffic/Organic Impressions Without a Penalty
-
Hi Moz community!
I have a question about a local client in Raleigh, NC - http://paragonbuildinggroup.com
This client came to us from another agency who had previously not done such a great job with the design/development of the site, or with the marketing of it, so we are somewhat limited in terms of what we can do on design, user experience, etc. But, the SEO is all still easy to tweak and we've been working on it for some time now.
As of July 5th, their keyword rankings have dropped dramatically (we're talking from first page rankings to nothing, according to Authority Labs), and they've fallen completely off the map in the SERPs. Their local listing doesn't appear in search results anymore, and WMT is showing a drastic drop in impressions (from 457 on July 3rd to 92 on July 5th). There have been no manual penalties on the site, no recent major development work done, and from what I can see, no signs of hacking and no bad backlinks. The only thing I can see is that Mozcast showed an 83 degree day with some clouds and rain on July 5th, the day that our rankings dropped off, but I can't find any documentation showing what might have changed.
Any insight as to what might be going on? I'm completely stumped!
-
I did not go thru your entire list of links but I checked on BuiderDirectory.com and it costs money to be included in their directory. How is that not the same as buying links? Shouldn't this be a violation of Google's policy as well?
-
All great suggestions - thank you!! We're working with the associations that the client is accredited with at the moment to try to build some quality links. Branching out on top of that seems to be the right move to make at this point now, too.
-
I am not huge on directories but here are some you should go for - I am sure there are more:
http://www.thebluebook.com/
http://www.homeadvisor.com/
http://www.nahb.org/
http://www.epa.gov/radon/rrnc/directory.html
http://www.builderdirectory.com/ -
I am guessing the algorithmic penalty. Don't change your plans, just jump on them. Content and good, relevant links. I would also break up that interlinking if actually working on the other websites isn't something you are being paid to do. Separate from them, rewrite the content on the website that is your main focus and start working on links (clients, material vendors - anything relevant you can get quickly).
-
That's great feedback, and the content is definitely something that is on our radar to work on. We did inherit access to all of the company's sites, but this Building Group site is our main focus. Unfortunately, the client doesn't have the budget right now for us to combine all services into one mother site (as much as we would like to!!), so we are doing what we can with the way that things are set up between the various sites right now.
Content is definitely actionable - and I appreciate you taking the time to take a glance over things! Backlinks are another action item we have on our list. This change just came about so suddenly that it's really thrown us on the work we've had planned.
-
Question - when you took them over did you get all three websites?
paragonbuildinggroup.com/, paragonroofinggroup.com and paragonpaintinggroup.com
There is some pretty bad duplicate content between the building group site and the roofing group site and with the sites interlinking as they do, I would say Google noticed pretty quick.
I know you are limited as to what can be done but I would say explain to your client that each website needs to have content relevant only to what that particular website is offering - no duplicate content. If the building website wants to touch on roofing then link to the other website - that is fine. Honestly, I would personally rather see all of this put together on one website with different sections for the different services - then the other domain names could just 301 to the relevant sections of the mother website. Also - links. the building group website needs them badly. As far as what happened - there is no way to be 100% sure but I am guessing an algorithmic penalty - the way the three websites (that I found, there could be more) are set up could certainly look like an attempt to manipulate search results to the algorithms. Honestly... it probably was an attempt to manipulate search results, an attempt by the last vendor. Not a penalty for the duplicate content, mind you - but the duplicate content and interlinking etc... were probably signals that all added up to "hey, these websites are not following guide lines" this was just a quick look though - I could be wrong.
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
-
Should my home page be ranking for services provided?
Hello, Should I be tracking and trying to rank my home page for the services we provide? For example, I have separate pages for services that I will be ranking for, but should I also be adding those same service keywords to my tracking list for homepage? Or just merely mention that we have those services on the homepage and leave the attempted ranking of those for their service page? I hope that is clear... Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Gavinn1 -
Click to Call Showing Below Organic Result?
I noticed this about a week ago and can't find any info on it. Basically below some ORGANIC results, when searching on mobile, I'm seeing the option to instantly call the company. http://vzp.ro/1oDV30g (this is a link to my Google Drive where I saved my mobile screenshot.) Anyone know how to achieve it or where it's pulling that data from My original though was schema or it's basis is from a Google+ Brand page. I didn't see any specific markup on the site when I went via desktop so not 100% sure even where to start. Cheers Darin. 1oDV30g
On-Page Optimization | | DarinPirkey1 -
My home page URL http://seadwellers.com/ redirects to http://www.seadwellers.com/. Is this a problem?
"The URL http://seadwellers.com/ redirects to http://www.seadwellers.com/. Do you want to crawl http://www.seadwellers.com/ instead?" I was given this when I tried to crawl my home page using MOZ software. I was not aware of this, do not know if it could be a problem concerning any aspect of SEO, etc? :
On-Page Optimization | | sdwellers0 -
Do these items affect Google ranking or Quality Score?
Hi community, After my first crawl of a site that I'm working to improve the SEO on, I find that I have about 500 issues regarding missing Alt Text and Title text for images on my site, as well as about 175 issues with regard to duplicate meta description, missing meta descriptions, and too short/too long meta descriptions. My client is not sure it matters to fix these items and only wants to do so if they have an affect on Google ranking or Quality Score. Does anyone know? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | gataninc0 -
Homepage SEO: Does Text Content Help Traffic?
Hi Mozzers! My employers homepage (www.swarovski.com) is - amongst other problems we're about to fix - very thin (not to say empty!) in text content. If we were to put relevant text on the next version of the page, would that be beneficial in terms of traffic to that page? Thanks and cheers, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | Diderino0 -
Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
I am doing SEO on WP site. Due to some duplicate pages (rel canonical was done before) I am doing 301 redirects at the moment. And I wonder if I need to redirect both links w/ and w/o trailing slash. Default is non www, w/o trailing slash. Like there is .com/category/news but there is same page linked in .com/news (well it works when permalink structure is set to /%category%/%postname% and returns 404 error when structure is set to /%postname%).
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ
I redirected .lt/naujienos to .lt/category/naujienos. Should I also redirect .lt/naujienos/ (with trailing slash)? There's absolutely no problem redirecting this, but there are some more pages which I want to edit their URLs and I wonder If I should do both redirects from links /w and w/o slash?1 -
Penalty for Changing Home Page Title Tags
Hey Mozzers I'm certain of the answer to this question, however I wanted to get some input from the experts in Moz-land to hopefully provide some additional perspective. I recently disagree with a client's assertion that there is some penalty Google levels for changing the title tags of your home page. Now, I understand changing the title tags can influence serp rankings, however, is anyone aware of some penalty Google levels for simply changing the title tags? Most of what I've read and experienced has people changing them all the time without some phantom penalty. It seems to me a problem of correlation = causality, in that people often attribute a drop to an action that may not have actually been the cause. Anyway, if you have any particular insight on this top I would appreciate it greatly. thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BrandLabs0 -
Why would my E-commerce conversion rate have dropped by half?
I run a website selling used books. Our e-commerce conversion rate is on average around 1.40%. Over the last four days this has dropped to just 0.25%! Any ideas why? We haven't made any changes, apart from uploading a new pricing strategy - obviously you'd look at this first but the price of our whole inventory has gone DOWN by £5000 and our average product price has decreased from £3.43 to £3.09! Everything else has stayed almost exactly the same, hits have decreased slightly, so has referral traffic.
On-Page Optimization | | Benj250