Bing rankings question
-
Hi,
We just wrapped up a website redesign about a month ago. The content stayed primarily the same. Once we launched the new site all of our rankings in Google stayed the same but we lost rank for all competitive keywords on Bing. I looked in Bing Webmaster tools and it doesn't show any penalties but it does show that we have too many H1 tags. I don't think the H1 tag thing is the issue but maybe. Do you know what could be causing this?
-
That sounds like it. You need to add both versions of your site (http and https) to WMT and see if there is data in the https. Then make sure that you pick one (if you go https, make sure you have the right certificates set up) and redirect any requests for the other to the right one.
-
Hey thanks!
It's really strange. In GA when I break it down by search engine it shows no drop in organic traffic from Google. On July 22nd Webmaster went from showing an average of 600 clicks a day to 100 clicks a day. During that same time period Google Analytics remained steady at about 900 clicks a day. I'm interested in HTTPS vs HTTP. Right now Google has some of our pages in https and others as http in our index. Could that be what's causing it?
-
Hi BT,
About WMT vs Analytics, it depends on how you are looking at the data. Can you tell me the specific reports and time ranges? Remember, organic traffic in GA is not just Google, there are a number of other SEs out there. It could have to do with a number of things outside of that as well. Are you looking at the right profile in WMT? HTTPS vs HTTP and www vs non-www, plus subdomains in all of that can make a BIG difference. Same thing with Analytics, it depends on where the code is installed.
-
Thank you everyone! You gave me a lot to think about. I will look at this further. Just wondering if you could answer one question for me? In Google Webmaster Tools clicks from search dropped dramatically, around 95 average clicks a day. However Google Analytics shows about 800 organic clicks a day on average. What could be causing the difference in data?
-
Hi ATP,
There are a some post here on the forums, unfortunately with somewhat different points of view about multiple H1's. I have a feeling nobody knows for sure. However if we take Matt Cutts' word on it, you don't have much to worry about for 2-3 H1 tags on a page on Google. I can't say much about the other search engines. Apple.com uses multiple H1 tags.. but then again when has Apple ever followed the norm.
Post 1 (3 years old, okay multiple h1's for html 5)
Post 2 (1 year old, not so great multiple h1's)
Post 3 (1 year old, mixed point of view's staff endorsed)I know all search engines behave in their own way. With that in mind, it is of course advised you always use you best judgement. If Bing drove 90% of our traffic I would be very leery of pushing the envelope with them, and if I did I would watch the results very closely.
I am not currently developing any HTML 5 site, but I do try to stay up to date on the current SEO trends. Recently a user asked about his site and view points, which I answered in similar fashion here.
Hope that helps you as well,
Don
-
Cracking response Don, can say honestly say i've learnt something today.
I have done work with HTML5 and heard of this concept but never gave it any attention as every major SEO site always talks about a single H1 being best due to the variation in different SERPS, the rise in bing traffic etc etc.
Would you say you have had good results, across multiple SERPS, with multiple H1's implimented with HTML5? Or in google only?
Are SERPS activly distinguishing different page sections with HTML5 yet or is there still the danger of H1 dilution with over use?
The article is nearly 2 years old, is there any more recent discussion on the subject (google searches lead me to the same article).
P.S: Apologies i guess im high-jacking the thread, so if don responds I will leave it there so the original poster can get the answers he wants.
-
Hi BT2009,
While ATP's advice is generally the accepted advice there is reason to actually use more then one H1 tag. Most specifically in HTML5 pages which actually uses the H1 tag to break up sections of content within an article tag. This is an important distinction to the old rule. You can read a lot about this new methodology here on Tutsplus.
There are other cases in which one may use more then one H1 tag, like when changing view points for multiple devices. The basic rule of thumb in such case is the purpose of the additional tag for the users benefit? In both of these cases I still would lean more towards minimal use of multiple H1 tags.
Okay so now that we know that lets move on to the question about Bing. First, we all know that Google has way more invested in the search engine software & hardware than any other company including Bing. Bing may still be using the 1 tag rule. This may not actually be a direct penalty but as ATP points out a simple confusion point that the search engine hasn't yet adapted too. Google has flat out said it does not penalize for multiple H1 tags, but I have not seen the same comments from Bing.
Whats more is each search engine will act in its own way to a website redesign, most focus on Google since it drives most people's traffic, but in fact Bing, Ask, Yahoo, Baidu all treat new content, urls, design differently. I have seen cases were a site redesign takes a couple months before traffic gets back to normal and another few weeks before I know for sure if the redesign actually helped.
There may also be some other issues we didn't discuss here, however since you mentioned the multiple H1 tags is was obviously a concern of yours so I hope we addressed that adequately for you.
Don
-
Hey there,
A very important point to make is that you should have 1 and only 1 h1 tag per page. This is of vital importance on one of the most crucical SEO ranking factors. If your design has changed this I would address it immediately.
When you do a redesign like this and your rankings drop you should ask yourself 2 questions
- Has google, bing or any other SERP changed their algorithm and could it have affected me? - if no...
- What have I changed ?
If the SERP's havn't updated their algorithms then you have changed something for the negative. Look at your pages from before and now, what has changed? Make a list and cross them off 1 by 1 as you eliminate them. If you only had one h1 before and now you have multiple then this is your starting point.
Without seeing the site, the best advice I can give is to give your new design the SEO checklist.
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development contains all the basics. It may sound simple but go through and check them off 1 by 1 making sure your design takes these in mind or improves on what you had before.
My gut feeling is that something has changed (such as more than 1 h1 tag) that bing has noticed and dropped you for it. Google may not have dropped yet but could do should you not address it.
Edit: I forgot
If it is only your competitive keywords that have dropped rankings it could well be something simple like too many H1 tags. Before those pages were screaming
IM ABOUT THIS
now they are saying
im about this
and this
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
-
Unknown Subdomains Ranking
In spot checking some pages that I recently launched, I found subdomains ranking in place of the domain. The strange thing is, we never set up these sub-domains and they don't exist on our server. The pages, though they're indexed with the proper title and meta-description, time out when clicked. We're operating on Drupal 7, pages launched at the beginning of the month. The other pages within the series of content are ranking properly. Any thoughts or tips to resolve this?
Technical SEO | | JordanNCU1 -
Recovering from Sitemap Issues with Bing
Hi all, I recently took over SEO efforts for a large e-commerce site (I would prefer not to disclose). About a month ago, I began to notice a significant drop in traffic from Bing and uncovered in Bing Webmaster Tools that three different versions of the sitemap were submitted and Bing was crawling all three. I removed the two out of date sitemaps and re-submitted the up to date version. Since then, I have yet to see Bing traffic rebound and the amount of pages indexed by Bing is still dropping daily. During this time there has been no issue with traffic from Google. Currently I have 1.3 million pages indexed by Google while Bing has dropped to 715K (it was at 755K last week and was on par with Google several months ago). I know that no major changes have been made to the site in the past year so I can't point to anything other than the sitemap issue to explain this. If this is indeed the only issue, how long should I expect to wait for Bing to re-index the pages? In the interim I have been manually submitting important pages that aren't currently in the index. Any insights or suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Not ranking - Scarped content
Hi, I have a problem with a website, that never compe up with before. The website is: https://www.enallaktikidrasi.com It has a bunch of excellent articles, good enough on-page SEO and a medium backlink profile. However, it is ranking just for very very few keywords. The major problem is that there are original articles that searched by their title won't appear in top100 results but they will appear in other websites that scapre them (even if they give a backlink to our original article!) Also, the website has good rankings in Bing and Yahoo but not in Google. There are keywords ranking in #1 in Bing but nowhere in top10 pages in Google.... I am guessing for 3 issues: 1. Majestic shows a very low trust score (just 13). However, the website has not got any kind of penalty in the last 3 years. 2. There are many scarpers. The odd is that scarpers with no real value outrank our content. (Scarpers with almost zero backlink profile) 3. We ran Sucuri on website as there were a large bots attack. Is there a correlation between it bots attack and Google results? (but why not in Bing and Yahoo too?) It seems like Google underestimates the website when indexing websites for some reason. Moreover, some of the articles are really the best around but the keywords they are targeted are not either within the 30 first pages... Any help?? Thanks..
Technical SEO | | alex33andros0 -
.htaccess redirect question
Hi guys and girls Please forgive me for being an apache noob, but I've been trawling for a while now and i can't seem to find a definitive guide for my current scenario. I've walked into a but of a cluster$%*! of a job, to rescue a horribly set up site. One of many, many problems is that they have 132 302redirects set up. Some of these are identical pages but http-https, others are the same but https-http and some are redirects to different content pages with http-http. A uniform redirecting of http to https is not an option so I'm looking to find out the best practice for reconfiguring these 302s to 301s within .htaccess? Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | craig.gto0 -
New keyword simply not Ranking
Evening all, first post. I'm currently ranking OK for a broad range of keywords - nothing at number 1 but some are on the first page. However, there is one particular keyword which simply refuses to get indexed. I've witnessed this behaviour before with another site where it appears at SERP 300 or so, then vanishes, comes back at 200 odd and then vanishes. Right now, it's not even ranking in any position. I'm using SERPFox for SERP position on Google. I've had Moz analyse the content on page and it's getting an A. The article is about 2000 words, with good Title and page description and the keyword is appearing under 1%. My question is, have you witnessed odd behaviour like this before where other keywords are ranking OK but an odd few don't even get indexed? I have a few links built to the URL and asked Google Webmaster tools to index the URL but still nothing. I have no penalties or anything to worry about. The only other info I have is that this URL is on a brand-new domain but the previous domain has a 301 redirect with a page authority of 42 and a domain authority of 38 (not too high). And, everything else appears to be running along OK. The point is, I have no expectations about the keyword ranking in a certain position but find it odd how the keyword keeps popping in and out of Google SERP. The keyword has a difficulty of: 58% Any thoughts appreciated. Robert. uH7vtbh
Technical SEO | | hooneyrobert0 -
My site has dropped in rankings what can i do to change this
My site is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/ Hi, my site has always done amazing in the rankings, for a few years i have been number one for the word gastric band hypnotherapy as well as many other keywords which includes hypno band. but in the past couple of weeks i have seen some of my keywords drop and end up on pages two and three of google instead of page one. Can anyone please give me advice on what i need to do to change this situation please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Why my ranking on google just disappeared
I have my website ranked on page one probably in top 6, but all of a sudden around 3-4 months before my website just disappeared for that keyword. Any suggestions? Keyword: Brass rod, brass rods webpage url: www.jayjalaramext.com/brass-rods/ and the website itself www.jayjalaramext.com Is it over optimized? or optimized more often which lead to bad history? or any panda or penguing effect ? Waiting for the suggestions.
Technical SEO | | HirenKhambhayta0 -
Event Landing Pages not ranking
Hi there I need to optimize the website of a club/concert venue. The site isn't bad and has authority, but the event pages don't seem to rank and I'm unsure about the reason. There is an overview page of the events: http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/ What happens currently when clicking on a specific event (on "WEITER", top right of each event) is that users get redirected to a hashtag page by jQuery. The href of "WEITER" itself links to another landing page (which is IMO the one we should see ranking for the specific event). Here is a concrete example: Look at the event "Tanz & Konzert: Andreas Vollenweider, Seven & ROKPA-KIDS" on /events by clicking on "WEITER", you get directed to http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/#2790/andreas-vollenweider the actual "WEITER" link in the source code though, points to the landing page http://www.kaufleuten.ch/event/andreas-vollenweider/ This seems to be done by an AJAX load: jQuery loads a DIV with the ID "ajax-content". Apparently, this is the code responsible for it: $(„.link“, click(function() {
Technical SEO | | zeepartner
el.find('.wrapper').load(target+' #ajax-content', function() {
});
return false;
}); I know the site has good authority and should rank well. however, the event landing pages never seem to appear, but only the page /events is ranking: SERP
(Strangely, when using the site command, the event page suddenly appears above: SERP. (But I have never seen this in a "normal search query", even though we are the organisers and should at least be among the top 5). Now my question: Does Google consider this AJAX load to be some sort of cloaking? (because the href in the code is different to you actually end up by clicking "WEITER"). Will the landing pages begin to rank if we disable this AJAX load? Or should we stick to hashtags and not even create landing pages? (but then, we will have no control over title tags of specific events, right?) Thanks for your help, I'm a bit lost here as my JS knowledge is meagre... Cheers,
Phil0