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
-
Should I Add Location to ALL of My Client's URLs?
Hi Mozzers, My first Moz post! Yay! I'm excited to join the squad 🙂 My client is a full service entertainment company serving the Washington DC Metro area (DC, MD & VA) and offers a host of services for those wishing to throw events/parties. Think DJs for weddings, cool photo booths, ballroom lighting etc. I'm wondering what the right URL structure should be. I've noticed that some of our competitors do put DC area keywords in their URLs, but with the moves of SERPs to focus a lot more on quality over keyword density, I'm wondering if we should focus on location based keywords in traditional areas on page (e.g. title tags, headers, metas, content etc) instead of having keywords in the URLs alongside the traditional areas I just mentioned. So, on every product related page should we do something like: example.com/weddings/planners-washington-dc-md-va
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdrama231
example.com/weddings/djs-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting-washington-dc-md-va OR example.com/weddings/planners
example.com/weddings/djs
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting In both cases, we'd put the necessary location based keywords in the proper places on-page. If we follow the location-in-URL tactic, we'd use DC area terms in all subsequent product page URLs as well. Essentially, every page outside of the home page would have a location in it. Thoughts? Thank you!!0 -
Blacklisted website no longer blacklisted, but will not appear on Google's search engine.
We have a client who before us, had a website that was blacklisted by Google. After we created their new website, we submitted an appeal through Google's Webmaster Tools, and it was approved. One year later, they are still unable to rank for anything on Google. The keyword we are attempting to rank for on their home page is "Day in the Life Legal Videos" which shouldn't be too difficult to rank for after a year. But their website cannot be found. What else can we do to repair this previously blacklisted website after we're already been approved by Google? After doing a link audit, we found only one link with a spam score of 7, but I highly doubt that is what is causing this website to no longer appear on Google. Here is the website in question: https://www.verdictvideos.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodneywarner0 -
Is a Rel Canonical Sufficient or Should I 'NoIndex'
Hey everyone, I know there is literature about this, but I'm always frustrated by technical questions and prefer a direct answer or opinion. Right now, we've got recanonicals set up to deal with parameters caused by filters on our ticketing site. An example is that this: http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets?location=il&time=day relcanonicals to... http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets My question is if this is good enough to deal with the duplicate content, or if it should be de-indexed. Assuming so, is the best way to do this by using the Robots.txt? Or do you have to individually 'noindex' these pages? This site has 650k indexed pages and I'm thinking that the majority of these are caused by url parameters, and while they're all canonicaled to the proper place, I am thinking that it would be best to have these de-indexed to clean things up a bit. Thanks for any input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
Help my site it's not being indexed
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design.... The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site. After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do.... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
I'm afraid I may have messed up my site's organization
So I recently started working on an existing site for a company, and I'm afraid I may have done something to lose some backlinks. So to start off, say the website is www.domain.net and when I arrived domain.net and www.domain.net showed up as two separate sites so I changed my web.config file to direct all domain.net to www.domain.net The homepage was called default.asp, and I wanted the homepage to always show up as www.domain.net instead of www.domain.net/default.asp. Of course they both showed the same thing but I couldn't figure it out. So I removed www.domain.net/default.asp from indexing and changed the my internal links to the homepage to point at www.domain.net instead of simply pointing at the file default.asp. So now www.domain.net/default.asp still brings up the page, but I want it to revert to www.domain.net. I'm also a little worried because I noticed that one of my incoming links points at www.domain.net/default.asp and it doesn't get passed along to www.domain.net and I think i may have damaged my sites SEO I guess this is a very complicated and roundabout way of saying this, but how can I get www.domain.net/default.asp to take you to www.domain.net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcrabill0 -
Keyword Selection - Long Tail or not long tail keyword
Hi Friends, We have a keyword "plus size clothing" but we used this as "plus size clothing 2012" to Cover the both keywords "Plus size clothing" and "Plus size clothing 2012" My question is, are we still focusing on "plus size clothing" when use "plus size clothing 2012" instead of the main keyword.? What strategy do yo suggest that when to use long tail and when to not. (when I talk to use a long tail than it means use it prominently on the page as main keyword should be used.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexgray0 -
What's the best way to phase in a complete site redesign?
Our client is in the planning stages of a site redesign that includes moving platforms. The new site will be rolled out in different phases throughout a period of a year. They are planning to put the new site redesign on a subdomain (i.e. www2.website.com) during the roll out of the different phases while eventually switching the new site back over to the www domain once all the phases are complete. We’re afraid that having the new site on the www2 domain will hurt SEO. For example, if their first phase is rolling out a new system to customize a product design and this new design system is hosted on www2.website.com/customize, when a customer picks a product to customize they’ll be linked to www2.website.com/customize instead of the original www.website.com/customize. The old website will start to get phased out as more and more of the new website is completed and users will be directed to www2. Once the entire redesign is completed, the old platform can be removed and the new website moved back to the www subdomian. Is there a better way of rolling out a website redesign in phases and not have it hosted on a different subdomain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueAcorn0 -
Aside from creative link bait, what's a solid link building strategy involve?
All things considered, directories, blogs, articles, press releases, forums, social profiles, student discount pages, etc, what do you consider to be a strong, phased, link building strategy? I'm talking beyond natural/organic link bait, since many larger accounts will not allow you to add content to their website or take 6 months to approve a content strategy. I've got my own list, but would love to hear what the community considers to be a strong, structured, timeline-based strategy for link building.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman1