Huge drop for main branded keyword
-
The past week the main branded keyword for a site i am working on has dropped from the top three on Google US to page 7! It is still ranking in the top three on Google in other areas. I recently redirected /index.php to / using .htaccess. Could this have caused a problem?
If not, what else could have caused such a huge drop?
-
Can an EMD update remove SERPS for all keywords, or just the exact matches? We recently lost all our foreign language domain serps, roughly on the 4/5th
-
Quite a lot of traffic lands on the listings pages so im reluctant to set them to noindex. There are only approx. 4,000 listings pages. I'm trying to find where these other pages that are being indexed are coming from.
-
If most of your organic search traffic lands on your homepage, you might want to consider setting all the listing pages to noindex. That'll get the duplicate content out of Google's index.
-
The duplicate content is a problem as a lot of teh listings are pulled in via XML from agent sites. I've been trying to find a way to make it all more unique without editing each listing manually.
-
Thanks for this.
What is the best way to find where all of these links are coming from? The only place i can see is the search results page. I have set this 'noindex, follow'. Should i set it to 'noindex, nofollow"?
-
Good point. All those sub-pages (listing pages) have content that is duplicated across multiple other sites, too.
-
I don't think anyone has mentioned this but your number of internal links is borderline nuts. I found about 190,000 internal pages.
If you remove those internal links and Google this:
"www.phuketproperty.com" -site:www.phuketproperty.com
You'll see that your site has 13,000-ish backlinks. Take a look at the highest ranked ones. They're mostly all cheap/low quality inbound links. You don't have a huge backlink profile based on the tremendous size of your site.
To put it in perspective
www.microsoft.com has 688,000 internal links and 28 million incoming links.
www.century21.com has 11 million internal links and almost 50 million incoming links.
www.phuket.com has 5530 internal links and 287,000 incoming links.
Internal links are not usually 10x incoming links. That could be part of it. You have 13,000 not-quality inbound links. And 200k indexed pages.
-
Thanks for your help. It looks like I'll just have to keep doing what i am doing and hope it bounces back quite quickly.
-
Generally speaking, you want to remove bad links while building good, new ones.
-
Before i took over the site the owners had taken on the service of some link building company. The links the company added where just added in to any wiki type site they could find. it seems that they only used four different types of key words when they were doing it. I have managed to remove over 600 of these links and the site was just starting to rank well for a variety of keywords, then all of a sudden this week the site has dropped back for its main keyword.
Do you think the best strategy is to keep removing the bad links? Apparently the site ranked better before these links were built.
-
I was thinking the same thing, you got hit with the EMD update recently especially if it happened this week.
-
Sounds like you got hit by the EMD update: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214115/Google-Warns-of-Upcoming-Exact-Match-Domain-Algorithm-Change
-
I doubt a 301 redirect from index.php to / would have done that.
An EMD issue could be the reason, as could an automated penalty (Penguin, Panda, anchor text over-optimization, etc.). If we had your URL and keyword, it would be easier to make specific suggestions.
-
Hi
Can you provide me your keyword which dropped and URL of your site?
I think if index.php contains backlinks and you have 301 redirected then some % of link-juice may be loss but it does not have huge affect as you said. Have you contain EMD?? After EMD algorithm updates by Google it may be possible your domain was affected by this update.
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
-
Keywords, when are you overdoing it in the URL?
Hi guys, I'm auditing a site covering compensation for cancer. Keywords could include: Undiagnosed cancer 20 cancer compensation 10 undiagnosed cancer symptoms 10 cancer misdiagnosis claims 20 cancer claims 10 misdiagnosis of cancer 50 cancer misdiagnosis 70 So, when structuring the URL for the category, this was previously selected: www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-misdiagnosis Although sub-pages appear like this: www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-misdiagnosis/breast-cancer-misdiagnosis-claim/ 'Cancer misdiagnosis' as a keyword attracts the most traffic, but if we're using it on sub-pages - is there a need to include it twice on all sub-page URLs? With that in mind, would it be better to follow the following format? www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-compensation www.site.co.uk/medical-negligence/cancer-compensation/breast-cancer-misdiagnosis-claim/ Or is there a better way to structure this? Thanks in advance guys!
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Keyword links in footer
Hi - I am trying to help a site to get out from under a Google manual action penalty - down as "Partial Matches - Unnatural Links to site".
Technical SEO | | StevieD
I am checking through their links - the site that links most to them is a local directory style site - it has 2,682 links back into 1 page (Home) The directory site was built by the web co. that built my clients' site and they put a keyword link in the footer of the directory site - the keyword was "Buy Truffles". All my instincts say that is a bad thing! But - this is what is perplexing me - they are ranking no.1 for that keyword! Whereas they have lost rankings (i.e. not top 50) for all the other keywords they were targeting. So I don't get it! Can anyone explain why this is. I feel I should I get that link removed but don't want to take out their only ranking keyword! Webmaster shows about 55 different pages in the directory site have a link back to my client. Hope you can help.
Cheers - Steve0 -
Wrong pages ranking for keywords?
I've just done a search using east england document storage site:ukdocumentstorage.com and found our specific east england document storage page is ranking really low down in our list of pages compared to others. How could this happen?
Technical SEO | | janc0 -
Dropped to 45th spot. How to track ?
Hi.. We specialize in CMS Development and all of our keywords were spotted on 1st page always. Most of them were on #1 only. ON a weekly basis, we only post resourceful blog posts on our website . Since 2-3 months, I have seen quite some drop in traffic and today when I tried the rank status, I see the keywords have dropped to 4th or 5th page. Is there a way, I can track, what went wrong ? Where to start with ? The site always ranked good since 2 years of its start already.
Technical SEO | | mageclub0 -
Traffic has dropped from my site.
Hello, I never had amazing traffic, but during the last week my site seems to have almost dropped of search engines. Nothing drastic has changed during this time that I can see would have caused this. The site is http://www.comparebestodds.com Does any one have any ideas that can help? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0 -
How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?
We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO? My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this? An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/
Technical SEO | | Googleankan0 -
Long tail keywords and duplicate content (product description)
Hi <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> pro's, how are you doing these days? Hope everything is fine... Let's get down to business: I've got a little question about ecommerce sites with duplicate content (product descriptions). I'm already ranking top #1 for exact keyword matche's (did a lot of backlink work with exact keyword). That's fine. The question is: long tail keywords still getting lower results than the competitors, because they published the content first. How to beat them? What I need to do/work to outrank competitors on long tail keywords? (I really need this because almost keywords/products from my niche only have 10% of exact search's). Hope someone can give me a word of light on this! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | azaiats20 -
PageRank Dropped?
The Symptoms About a year ago, our site EZWatch-Security-Cameras.com had a PageRank of 5. Several months ago it sunk to a 4 and we were a little worried, but it wasn't anything to really sweat over. At the end of january we noticed it had dropped again to a PR3, again we were a little more worried. When the farmer update hit we suddenly dropped to a PR1 but our traffic wasn't seriously affected, and in march most of the pages regained their PageRank. I noticed this morning that our homepage rank has once again dropped to a PR1. I am waiting to see if there has been any significant drop in traffic, but I haven't spotted anything that stands out significant, aside from an increase in the average cost for our paid search account of about 5%. The Problems We've Spotted Keep in mind that our current website is fairly old (2005) and we are ready to launch a new one. Our current website is running on X-Cart, and we have a few modules added on. Problem 1 - One such module handles a custom kit builder, this area has not been restricted by crawlers and it could be generating a large amount of needless page crawls. Problem 2 - Another module allows "SEO friendly URL's" according to the developer, but what actually happens is a visitor could type in any-url-they-like-for-product-id**-p-11111.html**, where the underlined section is any character string (or lack of), followed by either a product or category indicator and the id for said item. This causes a massive amount of virtual page duplications, and the module is encrypted so we aren't able to modify it to include rel="canonical" tags. Obviously this causes massive amounts of seemingly duplicate content. Problem 3 - In addition to the regular URL duplication, we also recently acquired the domain EZWatch.com (our brand name, easier to remember). That domain name responds with the content from our regular website, and it will be the primary domain name when we change shopping carts. With the second domain name the content could also be considered a duplication. The Solutions We're Working On The website we use was designed in 2005, and we believe that it's reached the end of its useful life. Over the past several months we have been working on an entirely new shopping cart platform, designed from the ground up to be more efficient operationally-speaking, and to provide more SEO control. The new site will be ready to launch within days, and we will start using the new Domain name at the same time. We are planning on doing page-to-page301 redirects for all pages with at least 1 visit within the past 180+ days, according to our Google Analytics reports. We are also including rel="canonical" on all pages. We will also be restricting dynamic sections of our website via the robots.txt file. So What More Can We Do? With your collective SEO experience, what other factors could also be contributing to this decline?
Technical SEO | | EZWatchPro0