Ranking drop
-
Hello there,
Based on Moz's rank tracker our keywords ranking have been dropping in ranking.
Does anyone know what might be the cause?
We have been building quality "white hat" links which are very relevant to our niche
Thanks,
Robert
-
Keep it easy man. If it is a one position drop, monitor your CTR and whether there are new competitors in your SERPs that have maybe just pushed you down.
-
Hi Robert,
I recommend this all the time, but one thing that may shed some light is the Full SERP Report in the Keyword Difficulty Tool in Moz Pro. It can give you a sense of what your competitors on the SERPs are doing that's helping them pull ahead.
Cyrus Shepard made a quick video on it here.
-
Hi Robert,
It sounds to me like you might just be getting out-competed. Gradual declines in rankings in the absence of content changes or penalties are typically the result of competition. If it had something to do with your link profile, you would expect to see large-scale drops - ditto for Panda-related issues.
I can't see any problem with your anchors, so my guess is that you just have to get back on the link-building grind and perhaps add some new content to freshen up the site itself.
Sucks, but that's the game!
Best of luck moving forward,
Rob
-
If unable to see a sharp drop - unfortunately it is back to basics. SImply have to work through the below. Make differential diagnosis's along the way. Do not discount anything until you are 100% certain.
1. https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
2. https://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit
3. https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015
4. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit
5. https://moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial
Hope that assists. Though it is the long way home.
-
Robert
Panda 4.2 rolled out on the weekend of 19 July. It is going to be very difficult to track Panda 4.2 the way google is rolling it out.
Can you go to your WMT's and in search analytics and run a comparison on all 4, but the result I am after is page position from 20 july to date and pre 19 july as far back as you can go. ie run a comparison on page position. The green line.
Is there a difference in page position?
If that is not clear ask and can clarify.
-
It has happened in the last few months. Nothing major but most keywords appear to drop one position down regularly.
-
Hi Robert
When did you start to see the ranking drop and was it for all your terms?
Thanks
-
Yes I have run the site through OSE. Our spam score is 0 out of 17.
Anchor text for our root domain is as follow:
|
wallpapered
|
61
|
258
|
52
|
137
[no anchor text]
|
10
|
92
world map wallpaper
|
9
|
13
|
8
|
15
here
|
8
|
25
|
7
|
38
http://www.wallpapered.com/custom-map-wallpaper
|
6
|
19
wall murals
|
5
|
388
wallpapered
|
4
|
25
[no anchor text]
|
4
|
5
custom map wallpaper
|
4
|
10
www.wallpapered.com/custom-map-wallpaper
|
3
|
4
executive world map
|
3
|
3
source
|
2
|
2
2
|
2
|
8
standard world map
|
2
|
2
i sell on wallpapered
|
2
|
4
old map wallpaper
|
2
|
2
bryant park wallpaper
|
2
|
2
1
|
2
|
8
custom area map wallpaper
|
2
|
3
921653 wallpapered com
|
2
|
4
black white world map
|
2
|
2
classic spring wallpaper
|
2
|
2
vintage map wallpapers
|
2
|
5
|
2
|
5
design blog
|
2
|
6
|
2
|
3
wallpaper maps
|
2
|
2
|
2
|
5
elizabetholwen rootsandpods
|
1
|
5
find out more at the wallpapered com website
|
1
|
1
|
-
Hi Robert,
It is hard to help you with this without having more details on your site itself. There are many things that could cause a ranking drop. Have you run your links through Opensite explorer to gauge their spam score? What sort of anchor text do these links have? What changes did you make around the time of noticing the ranking drop? How long has it been going on?
Sorry to answer your question with more questions but there are so many factors that can cause a ranking drop, so establishing more detail will help the community help you further.
Best
Matt
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
-
SEO rank down after Magento migration
Since November we migrated our shop from Magento 1 to 2 and our organic traffic has dropped by 50%. We still haven't figured out the cause (or a solution). Are there more Magento users who have the same issue? Charlotte (www.dochorse.nl)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DocHorse0 -
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
Puzzling drop in search referrals.
Hello All, A few weeks ago I posted in the Q and A believing I had received a google penalty due to a sudden and considerable drop in referrals... http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-penalty-8 ... so I dug right to the bottom of my site and did a complete review of all my links. After clearing all the potentially problematic links, I wrote a very descriptive reconsideration request to google. 10 days or so later I received a 'no manual spam action found' response, which I guess is a good thing but now begs the question- what has gone wrong!? Over the past 4 or 5 months I've been doing some heavy work on the SEO of my site, www.madegood.org. This has all been white hat stuff (as far as I'm aware), and have been using my seomoz pro account to monitor progress. I've done lots of reading on the subject so think I'm up to scratch on most general good advice, in terms of link building and site structure. I've always tried to create very high quality content and have been building some great links from very authoritative sites including The Guardian newspaper and Sheffield University. My pro dashboard is telling me that my link analysis history is improving, despite my keyword performance declining. Is there anyone that can do a deep review of my site? I'm happy to share my analytics/webmaster tools etc info with you if that is helpful? I'm totally lost here and am becoming disheartened with all the hard work I've been putting into the SEO for my site. Thanks so much in advance, any help is gratefully received. Of course I can provide more info should you need it. Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | madegood0 -
Site rankings dropped from ~15 to 500+ but Google says we were not penalized
2 months ago my site was ranking about 15 for my main KWs in the UK (my main market). On July 28 we dropped suddenly to ~500 or not in the top 500 at all in the UK for the 3 main keywords. However, these same terms are still ranking in other markets and we are doing okay in the UK for other terms targeted to the same pages. I cleaned up my links/content and sent a reconsideration request to Google. I then looked closer at my links and realized Google may be counting my affiliate links as if they were mine, so thought maybe that was the problem. I sent Google another reconsideration request and they wrote back the letter pasted below Any ideas about what happened or how I can get my rankings back? This definitely doesn't seem like it was just a simple algorithm change. There were no major changes done to our site, and we are still ranking in other markets. Dear site owner or webmaster
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider your site for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search.
If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team0 -
How do we get individual products to rank ?
Hi, We have a site that sells music and we have been researching SEO and things we can do to help SERPs. We have started on link building and have added links to the footer of our page We have friendly urls, meta tag description added to all products. My question is, Yes we can work on getting keywords to rank better in google, one of ours being buy cds. But when it comes to individual products these keywords and results are useless if people are searching for a CD by artist or title which most do as they know what they are looking for. How do i get better results for all these unique products ? One or more of our competitors constantly show up in first few results for nearly any CD search by artist or title, yet we cant seem to get anywhere near this type of result ? Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PressPlayMusic0 -
Ranking Factors for Google
Yesterday a blog post appeared on SEOMOZ titled 'A Tale Of Two Studies' - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-tale-of-two-studies-google-vs-bing-clickthrough-rate It suggested some of the ranking factors Google and Bing take into account when ranking. A few of them I want to talk about: Social Signals, Age of Domain and H1 HTML Tag So I thought age of domain and H1 both had some weight in Google? I guess not! And social signals, now I know it gives some weight but its right up there in the list for both SE's, so should getting likes, tweets, plus1's now be part of my everyday link building? Bing-Google-CTR-Infographic-e1321978731479.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Sudden drop in ranks and traffic after migrating community website into main domain
Hi, We recently moved our community website (around 50K web pages) to our main domain. It now resides as a sub-domain on our main website. e.g. Before - we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com After - we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com This change took place on July 19th. After a week, we saw 16% drop in organic traffic to mainwebsite.com. Our ranks on most of the head keywords including brand keywords have dropped. We had created 301 redirects from pages on www.communitywebsite.com before this change was made. Has anybody seen this kind of impact when domains are merged? Should we expect that within 3-4 weeks Google will be able to re-index and re-rank all the pages? Is there anything else we could do to rectify the situation? Any feedback/suggestions are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0