What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
-
Hi,
9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places.
For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite.
I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop.
Any suggestions would be most welcome.
-
I appreciate that, thank you.
-
Anytime, if things don't settle down, private message me and I would be happy to help you further if I can.
-
Hi Monica,
That all seems very sensible. Thank you very much for your help.
-
Have you ever heard of the Google Dance?
I started working with a company in August and have been trying to fix some major SEO issues. What I noticed is that at the times I made several changes, 301s, on page changes, revising content, I would see a huge decrease in rankings one week and then they would start to level out over the next 2-3 weeks. This isn't atypical, it shouldn't concern you too much right now.
Here are a few suggestions. Google your keyword + the number of your company. There should be an arrow in the SERP next to your URL, click that and select "Cached". This will tell you if the engine has seen your changes yet or not. If it has been cached, just wait a week and see if it levels out a little better, or at least bounces back to where it was.
The second thing you should do is check your search impressions in webmaster tools. With the two big updates happening in the past 30 days a huge change in your search impressions could cause some of your keywords to move around until things even out. You want to look for search impressions that dip below your lowest average day before 10/17/14. This will tell you if Panda or Penguin are having an affect on your rankings. If they are, this could just be temporary as the rest of the penguin update unfolds.
I say give it a couple of weeks just to be safe. I wouldn't make any other changes just yet. You don't want to fall victim to over optimizing either.
Good Luck!
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
-
I've all the things set up, still keywords are not rankign anywhere in Google.
No results, only just a few - site:10stuffs.com All the search results can be visible through manual URL searching... No manual actions or any technical fault detected. I'm wondering what's wrong with my site and why It's not gelling on with the Google. 10stuffs.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stuffsurya0 -
Pages excluded from Google's index due to "different canonicalization than user"
Hi MOZ community, A few weeks ago we noticed a complete collapse in traffic on some of our pages (7 out of around 150 blog posts in question). We were able to confirm that those pages disappeared for good from Google's index at the end of January '18, they were still findable via all other major search engines. Using Google's Search Console (previously Webmastertools) we found the unindexed URLs in the list of pages being excluded because "Google chose different canonical than user". Content-wise, the page that Google falsely determines as canonical instead has little to no similarity to the pages it thereby excludes from the index. False canonicalization About our setup: We are a SPA, delivering our pages pre-rendered, each with an (empty) rel=canonical tag in the HTTP header that's then dynamically filled with a self-referential link to the pages own URL via Javascript. This seemed and seems to work fine for 99% of our pages but happens to fail for one of our top performing ones (which is why the hassle 😉 ). What we tried so far: going through every step of this handy guide: https://moz.com/blog/panic-stations-how-to-handle-an-important-page-disappearing-from-google-case-study --> inconclusive (healthy pages, no penalties etc.) manually requesting re-indexation via Search Console --> immediately brought back some pages, others shortly re-appeared in the index then got kicked again for the aforementioned reasons checking other search engines --> pages are only gone from Google, can still be found via Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines Questions to you: How does the Googlebot operate with Javascript and does anybody know if their setup has changed in that respect around the end of January? Could you think of any other reason to cause the behavior described above? Eternally thankful for any help! ldWB9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SvenRi1 -
New Website's Not Ranking for Branded Term
Hey Friends, I can't seem to figure out why https://feello.com/ isn't ranking on Google for it's branded term (Feello). It's ranking in 1st position on Bing and Yahoo but on page 2 (16th or so) on Google. Going through the list and can't come up with an answer. Metadata: Yes Indexed to Webmaster: Yes, Fetched pages: Yes Google cache on May 27, 2017: Check Using canonical and redirecting for non-www and HTTPS version: Yes & Yes Feello in domain name: Yes Set up social profiles and GMB: Yes Driving traffic: Yes, some email and ads Checked robots.txt: Yes, not created yet Created and Submitted Sitemap: Yes - https version Checked for blocked resources: None. The list goes on...Any ideas would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GarrettDenham0 -
Community Discussion - What's the ROI of "pruning" content from your ecommerce site?
Happy Friday, everyone! 🙂 This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore. Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney2 -
Keyword Rankings: One keyword dropped, dragging other rankings down. Possible or not?
Hey moz fans, So these week I noticed significant drop in rankings... But what caught my attention is that one specific keyword dropped 18 positions, and all the other just 1-3. Print screen: http://prntscr.com/7fb4g4 Do you think it's possible that the drop of that page, that went 18 positions down, brought the whole domain down? Or is it another cause?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kokolo0 -
Dilemma: Should we use pagination or 'Load More' Function
In the interest of pleasing Google with their recent updates and clamping down on duplicate content and giving a higher preference to pages with rich data, we had a tiny dilemma that might help others too. We have a directory like site, very similar to Tripadvisor or Yelp, would it be best to: A) have paginated content with almost 40 pages deep of data < OR > B) display 20 results per page and at the bottom have "Load More" function which would feed more data only once its clicked. The problem we are having now is that deep pages are getting indexed and its doing us no good, most of the juice and page value is on the 1st one, not the inner pages. Wondering what are the schools of thought on this one. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi0 -
Will blocking google and SE's from indexing images hurt SEO?
Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0