Can someone please help me understand my sites recent loss of rankings?
-
My site has been top 3 for 'speed dating' on Google.co.uk since about 2003 and it went to below top 50 for a lot of it's main keywords shortly after 27 Oct 2012. I did a re-submission request and was told there was 'no manual spam action'.
I have a Page Authority of 53, a regular blog http://bit.ly/oKyi88, a KLOUT of 40, user reviews and quality content.
I did discover that another URL I using was set to a 302 instead of a 301 for some reason. I don't necessarily think this was an issue as Google should know which is the trusted URL and therefore which content to list. I removed this redirect completely about 3 weeks ago, but I've seen no improvement.
I'm looking at improving various things, but I'm still not sure why I've been hit and wonder if I'm missing something obvious? Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
-
Thanks for your comments Bryan.
It seems the Exact-Match Domains update on the 27 Sept exactly coincides with my drop. I'm not sure why I would be affected as my domain name is my brand not keyword.
The other update on this day was Panda #20 but I don't what to take from the details of that update. I would say it's more likely Panda #20 and not the EMD update. Do you know what this means? "Abandoning the 3.9.X naming scheme"
-
Hi Ben,
These are the recent algorithm changes made by Google: http://mozcast.com/events
If your site did not get punished for any of these and you have a natural looking link profile (Anchor text ratio & authoritative qualities) then most likely you are not doing enough link "EARNING" Google+ search #RCS for some ideas : )
Hope this helps!
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
-
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?
So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Help understanding 301 domain redirect
Can anyone help me understand a specific process of a 301 redirecting a domain. Here is what I would like to know.... When you 301 redirect a site, most if not all the links follow to your new site. But how does this process happen? 1.When Google sees the new domain does it simply apply the backlink profile of the old site to the new one? 2. Does it have to re-crawl all the links one by one and apply them to the new domain? 3. or something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Can someone share poisitive SEO stradegies?
I'm looking to up my currently knowledge of SEO. I've looked at many different software packages, I've seen articles that say old ways are out with nobody really expounding on whats happening now. I'm really over paying people to get mediocre results and I'm not looking for an SEO service as much learning more. Anyone care to help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drsmallbusiness0 -
White Hat but unexplained loss of rankings.
I'm getting increasingly worried as my site stopped ranking for all keywords 3 days ago and is yet to return. The sites been up about 6 months but I only started link building via MyBlogGuest about 2 months ago. I saw great results the very day before it disappeared as my rankings increased significantly. As far as I know MyBlogGuest is a legitimate way of building links and I was careful to use a variety of anchor text, url and branded links. I just can't explain why it's gone completely. It's still indexed when I check with site: and there are no errors in webmaster tools. The site is http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (The site does have some adult content!) and wondered if anyone could take a look to see if I'm missing something obvious. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Can converting a site to HTTPS impact ranking?
We have a client with a very large site that would like to put a login on each page; however, that would require the entire site be put behind a secure connection (changing http:// to https:// on every page). They rank for a ton of keywords and rank well. Would the change impact their rankings at all? Could it possibly help them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dknewmedia0 -
Think I may have found a problem with site. Can you confirm my suspicions?
So I've been wracking my brain about a problem. I had posted earlier about our degrading rank that we haven't been able to arrest. I thought we were doing everything right. Many years ago we had a program that would allow other stores in our niche use our site as a storefront if they couldn't deal with setting up their own site. They would have their own homepage with their own domain but all links from that page would go to our site to avoid duplicate content issues (before I knew about canonical meta tags or before they existed, I don't remember). I just realize that we had dozens of these domains pointing to our site without nofollow meta tags. Is it possible that this pattern looked like we were trying to game Google and have been penalized as some kind of link farm since Panda? I've added nofollow meta tags to these domains. If we were being penalized for this, should this fix the problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
How often do you refresh meta descriptions? And does refreshing meta descriptions help in ranking?
1. And does refreshing meta descriptions help in ranking? 2. How often do you refresh meta descriptions? I am not sure whether it's a new feature, but I noticed this little time stamp on one of the search results, it says 1 day ago, and the website ranked quite high. So is there any correlation here? o4JIw.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0
