Drop in SERPS and little movement after redesign
-
I took over a project in mid-March 2015. Rankings went from 5th page to roughly #11 - #13 (but never into first page).
Launched a redesign on August 15, 2015. Rankings dropped from #11 - #13 down to #20.
Weird part: On 3 different Mondays since Mid-August, I have noticed that the rankings shoot back up to about #11 in the morning, then drop back down to #20 by the evening.
Three questions:
1. Has anyone seen a drop like this after redesign? (Assuming you kept the same content, just different layout).
2. Did it seem like the redesign resulted in some sort sandbox effect, where the rankings wouldn't move for a period of time?
3. Any advice on how to get it moving again? Or is this just a function of time?
Ps. The interior pages are moving well.
domain: getinjuryanswers.com
KW: San Diego Personal Injury Lawyer, Personal Injury Lawyer San Diego
I understand these are hyper-competitive terms. What puzzles me is how calcified the rankings appear to be.
-
Hi,
Thank you for your response. I did make some slight changes, and that may have been enough to trigger a drop.
For tracking I use Moz, AHREFs, SEMRush, and also Google Incognito using a VPN (I'm overly thorough).
I like your idea about maximizing the areas I'm ranking well for. In fact, that's what I started doing this past weekend. Really focused on getting every interior page on the first page.
Thank you again for your detailed response. I really appreciate it.
-
Hi There
A redesign can definitely impact rankings. I also notice some slight architectural changes? The removal of "Cases" from the main navigation, among other things.
The trick is, there's tons of moving parts in any ranking situation like this.
Also, what rank tracker are you using? There's going to be a lot of localization/personalization/fluctuation in effect. Google is likely greatly varying rankings by location, user metrics, search history etc. Are you using a de-personalized rank checker? I like Authority Labs or Advanced Web Ranking for daily rank checking.
FYI, I just ran it through the Firefox Rank plugin and got #19 and #18 for your two keywords (I'm in Massachusetts).
Also, for all sites I track I tend to see way more ranking fluctuation for page 2 and beyond in general.
I would really focus on best practices - like great UX, local SEO efforts, CTR optimization - all the "known" things you can really control.
Something you can do - go to Search Console - and make sure all the queries you are ranking well for have the best title/descriptions and snippets for those SERPs to improve your user metrics for the site overall.
-
Hi,
Thank you for your feedback. Yes, we debated a lot about whether that pic would be a good choice. I think I'll try something else.
I appreciate your feedback on the Pagespeed. I used Autoptimize. PM me and I can send you some great info about how to get the PageSpeed in the 90's for both mobile and desktop.
Thanks again.
-
I looked at the current site and the previous one in the wayback machine.
Just my opinion but the image of the two attorneys would put me off. I liked the one of the happy couple on the old site. I'm sure they are wonderful guys but they look pissed.
Site is very nice and fastest WP I've seen in Pagespeed.
Nice job. I'd change that pic... Respectfully!
-
Hi, thanks for the response. That could be it. This new design is a lot nicer than the old one, but maybe something about it doesn't sit right with people.
Thanks for the feedback.
-
Visitor engagement has become a very important ranking signal. If the design of the pages has changed, is it possible that visitors don't engage the site as strongly as they did in the past?
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
-
PriceValildUntil not honored on SERPs
I've added some AggregateOffer schema for some products with properties such as lowPrice
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vuly
highPrice
pricevaliduntil
availability
itemCondition
priceValidUntil we change our sale price quite often and I am relying on the priceValidUntil to stop showing the prices once a date has lapsed. However, I am still seeing the prices on SERPPs once the date has passed. Is there anyway to get around this? note: I have tried updating the schema 2 days before the sale ends just to make sure Google has crawled the page in time. However Google is still a bit slow in crawling the pages even after requesting index. Any suggestion is welcome.0 -
How to be included in related questions (People also ask) in Google SERP?
Just wondered if anyone knows how to be included in SERP if it comes to related questions (People also ask). Do you have to fill some requirements or is it featured snippets kind of thing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Optimal_Strategies1 -
Preserving SERPs during a New SIte Launch
Hi there, Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to help. You people are stellar. When launching a new site with concern for preserving the site's organic placement, which attributes or data are the most important to keep consistent from the old site to the new one? For example, site structure, urls, meta data, image file names, and so on. Thanks again!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leslieevarts0 -
Google displaying SERP link in Japanese
A chamber of commerce site near me has Google displaying their link in japanese characters when they search for them by name. If you google Eastern monmouth chamber of commerce, you will see this. The site is emacc.org. Can anyone tell me what might cause this or how to resolve?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
Drop in Mobile & Tablet Rankings
We have pretty strong rankings and have done since we launched our business in 2004. Over the past two months, we have seen a strong growth in rankings after a bit of a drip last year, however over the past week we have seen a significant drop off in organic traffic. Further analysis has shown that this is coming from mobile/tablet traffic, as the desktop traffic has been fairly consistent. There does appear to be a drop (across all main keywords) on mobile/tablet, but again there is no noticeable drop in desktop rankings. I am obviously aware Google treats these differently, but we can find no obvious reasons why this might have occurred. It is almost as if some sort of penalty has been applied on mobile/tablet only. There are no warnings or obvious problems in webmaster tools and our mobile/tablet site is mobile optimised. At a bit of a loss and would appreciate a bit of guidance in where you think we should start to understand what is causing this and how we should go about correcting it. Thanks in advance for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
After Ranking Drop Continue SEO or Focus on Improving User Experience Instead?
Six months after starting a marketing campaign and spending a lot of money on SEO audits, link removals, wire frames, copywriting and coding my web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) traffic dropped significantly after I launched a new version of my site in early June. Traffic is down about 27%, but most of the traffic from competitive terms is gone and the number of leads (phone calls, form completions) is off by about 70%. On june 6th an upgraded version of the site with mostly cosmetic changes (narrower header without social media buttons, streamlined conversion forms, new right rail was launched. No URLs were changed, and the text remained mostly the same. But somehow my developers botched up either canonical tags or Robot Text and 175 URLs with very little/no content were indexed by Google. At that point my ranking and traffic. A few days ago a request to remove those pages was made via Google WebmasterTools and now the number of pages indexed is down to 675 rather than the incorrect 850 from before. But ranking, traffic and lead generation have not yet recovered. After spending almost $25,000 over nine months this is rather frustrating. I might add the site has very few links from incoming domains and those links are not high quality. An SEO audit was performed in February and in April a link removal campaign occurred with about 30 domains agreeing to remove links and a disavow file being submitted for another 70-80 domains that would not agree to remove links. My SEO believes that we should focus on improving visitor engagement rather that on more esoteric SEO like trying to build incoming links. They think that improving useability will improve conversions and would generate results faster than traditional SEO. Also, they think that improving click through rates, reducing bounce rates will improve ranking by signaling to Google that the site is providing value to visitors. Does this sound like a reasonable approach? On one hand I don't see how my site with a MOZ domain authority could possibly compete against sites with a high number of quality incoming links and that maybe building a better link profile would yield faster results. On the other hand, it seems logical that Google would reward a site that creates a better user experience. Any thoughts from the MOZ community???? Does it sound like the recent loss of traffic is due to the indexing of the 175 pages? If so, when should my traffic and ranking return? Incidentally, these are the steps taken since last November to improve SEO: SEO Traffic & Ranking Drop Analysis and Recommendations (included in-depth SEO technical audit and recommendations). Unnatural Link Removal Program Content Optimization (Audit & Strategy with 20 page keyword matrix) CORE (also provided wireframe for /visitor-details pages at no-charge) SEO Copywriting for 10 pages New wire frames implemented on site on June 6th Jump in indexed pages by 175 on June 10th. Google Webmaster Tools removal request made for those low quality pages on June 23rd. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Local Showroom Tel Showing Up in SERP for Branded Term Search?
We encountered an issue: when user search for a branded term in UK on Google UK, one of the showroom got listed in SERP under site links as a location with Location icon and takes over a few lines - their address and phone number are displayed. This caused confusion for user as it's only one of our showrooms and we don't want to direct calls to the showroom this way. I'm suspecting somehow the localization factor came into play but not sure how to remove the showroom phone number from being displayed. Anyone has any insight/experience with this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Recent ranking drop followed by strange behavior in SERPS
Recently on the evening of August 5th almost all of the keywords our pages ranked highly for dropped by anywhere from 5 to 8 pages. The only activity during this time was an article that had been picked up by a major news outlet and then was apparently copied onto other sources with links to our domain and article. More puzzling though is rather than simply having the same page show up lower for a keyword, in a number of instances a different page is now shown for the result, often with less or no relevance to the keyword. In some cases, for a single keyword phrase we've seen as many as 10 different pages rotated throughout the day when performing a search. Prior to our rankings falling, we've never seen this behavior.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrianQuinn0