My website has dropped in the rankings drastically. How can I get it back up the SERPs?
-
I manage a website that I took over 6 months ago - the site was sitting happily on page one of google so I haven't had to do much to keep it there - other than a few onsite improvements.
However, last week the site dropped off the SERPs.
The site is http://www.pro-techairconditioning.co.uk/content/home.html
Could someone please suggest reasons for this and ways to solve the problem?
Thanks
-
Thanks for the response.
The link profile is something I am currently working on - but I am new to SEO and am struggling to find good relevant links.
Any tips?
Thanks
-
I completely agree with Ruben and Tim. You need original, unique informative content. It is such bad practice to not touch your site simply because it is ranking well. You have to keep content fresh and update the site. Stagnation is never good. Even having a blog will help you keep content fresh.
What kind of social presence do you have? Are you posting enough to have valid social signals? I would beef up social engagement, add a blog and get some relevant backlinks.
-
As per Ruben, the site you are managing is lacking any credibile relevant links to the site, without these preferably naturally occuring quality links, your site is not being seen as an authority in its field. As such this is something you can certainly look into rectifying, but it is no easy fix and will take a lot of hard work and the creation of quality content.
Link profile can be looked into here
Secondly and this is my own personal opinion but the site to me lacks some more natural copy that is targeted to the end consumer, it feels very much like it has simply been created with a tone just for Google and may possibly be being targeted for an over optimisation penalty, especially for the term Air conditioning which appears so many times.
You could also think about adding more relevant copy around the products you install, benefits, features etc. A blog might be useful for this. Finally I would also think about establishing some social channels for the site and local presences in Bing and Google.
Also check out the webmaster elements that Ruben mentioned - sitemaps, 404 errors etc
-
Well, your homepage doesn't have a lot of content, nor does it have many links. The links you do have are mostly from a website design company.
First, I would check your GWT to see if you received any penalty notifications. It's hard to say if you have been hit with one or not. The drop in rankings your described may suggest one, but, (at least by the brief look at the link I saw and the content I read) your site doesn't look spammy. It just doesn't have a lot there to get ranked highly in the first place.
I would add some more detail/quality length to my homepage, and pursue some link opportunities that relate to either Air conditioning, your location or both.
Best,
Ruben
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
-
Ranking 2 pages on the same domain in the same SERP
I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...) Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Can someone help me understand why this page is ranking so well?
Hi everyone, EDIT: I'm going to link to the actual page, please remove if there are any issues with confidentiality. Here is the page: https://www.legalzoom.com/knowledge/llc/topic/advantages-and-disadvantages-overview It's ranking #2 on Google for "LLC" This page is a couple months old and is substantially heavy in content, but not much more so than all the dozens of other pages online that are competing with it. This is a highly competitive industry and this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry. This new page is suddenly ranking #2 for an extremely competitive head term, arguably the most important/high volume keyword being targeted by the entire site. The page is outranking the home page, as well as the service page that exactly targets the query - the one that you would think would be the ranking page for this head term. However, this new page is somewhat of a spin-off with some additional related content about the subject, some videos, resources, a lot of internal links, etc. The first word of the title tag exactly matches the head term. I did observe that almost no other pages on the site have the exact keyword as the first word of the title tag, but that couldn't be sufficient to bring it up so high in the ranks, could it? Another bizarre thing that is happening is that Google is ignoring the Title Tag in the actual HTML (which is a specific question that is accurate to the content on the page), and re-assigning a title tag that basically looks like this: "Head Term | Brand." Why would it do this on this page? Doesn't it usually prefer more descriptive title tags? There are no external links coming up on Moz or Majestic pointing to this page. It has just a couple social shares. It's not being linked to from the home page or top nav bar on the main site. Can anyone explain how this particular page would outrank the main service page targeting this keyword, as well as other highly authoritative, older pages online targeting the same keyword? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
How do you know if SEO factors are holding you back in rankings?
Hi there! I have been working on improving a site for almost a year now, and though we have made great strides in ranking for many relevant keywords our site is hovering at the bottom of page 2 and fluctuates from position 14 to 18 for almost a year. I am pretty prompt at addressing HTML improvements suggestions in WMT, but don't know where I should focus my limited time to get the most results. Competing websites have more backlinks than we do, but content is very thin and I don't think they update or add new content every week like we do. Please help! Am I missing something obvious?? Thanks in advance 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | candiceone0 -
Can you explain why a site with loads of keywork anchor backlinks is ranking well?
Hi All, A couple of years ago my site got punished and i kind of figured out it was due to keyword anchor text backlinks. I recently was considering getting a new SEO company and found one that promotes another company in my industry. However, when i look at the backlinks, of the website they do SEO for, via open site explorer - I noticed nearly all of the backlinks are keywords. website in question is http://goo.gl/6nRzLi And if you see the search results here: http://goo.gl/9bXoxY they are ranking on first page with very big brands - and have done for about a year - but nealy all of their backlinks are the keywords in this search... I understood this is the kind of thing that killed my website 2 years ago - are these backlinks ok? should i still consider this SEO company to work on my site, i 100% do not want my site to be penalised again so any advice appreciated. thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Site re-design, full site domain A/B test, will we drop in rankings while leaking traffic
We are re-launching a client site that does very well in Google. The new site is on a www2 domain which we are going to send a controlled amount of traffic to, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% to 100% over a 5 week period. This will lead to a reduction in traffic to the original domain. As I don't want to launch a competing domain the www2 site will not be indexed until 100% is reached. If Google sees the traffic numbers reducing over this period will we drop? This is the only part I am unsure of as the urls and site structure are the same apart from some new lower level pages which we will introduce in a controlled manner later? Any thoughts or experience of this type of re-launch would be much appreciated. Thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leshonk0 -
If I only Link to Page via Sitemap, can it still get indexed?
Hi there! I am creating a ton of content for specific geographies. Is it possible for these pages to get indexed if I only put them in my sitemap and don't link to them through my actual site (though the pages will be live). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Travis0 -
Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?
A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found. Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend. my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Ranking drop for a particular page on a particular keyword
Take a look at centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction. For months we were ranking in the top 3 spots with this URL for "sex addiction los angeles", even reaching #1 for a while. Late last year we redesigned and developed the site to clean up the code and redirects. We also cleaned up the internal linking structure. For years we had been ranking on "sex addiction los angeles" for the home page ... bumping around the top 5 spots, but we wanted organic traffic to go to /sex-addiction. In the Fall, we saw overall site traffic rise steadily. We made few changes to the site and none to this page or links flowing back to the page once we had achieved strong ranking -- we didn't want to mess with a good thing. Then November 27th we started losing ranking on this term and a couple others. The good news is that we gained ranking on some high volume traffic terms so overall organic traffic is reasonably strong, BUT we're not ranking on the terms where we want to rank. Centerforhealthysex.com/sex-addiction is now nowhere to be found on the target search term despite fairly strong page rank. I tried redoing and resubmitting the site map, cleaning out some potentially duplicative content but to no avail. I see no issues, errors or warnings in Webmaster Tools. We have a few medium priority fixer-uppers in SEO Moz, but we've taken care of the majority of the big stuff. What am I not seeing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshuakrafchin0