Sudden big drop for keyword ranking this month -Numerous possible factors... which is most likely?
-
Hi
I have a fairly new site (domain around 1 year and 6 months old) and in December it was sitting on Google's second page for our main keyword "cv writing service"
In late December we had a couple of stories picked up by the press and got some really good contextual links from a handful of well known media sites with DA60 and above.
Naturally I thought this would have a positive effect on our position for our keyword so I checked and was shocked to see that the site is now sitting on page 4... A drop of 2 pages
Also my site has dropped one point in DA on the Moz open site explorer
I have some possible theroies for the drop but would really appreicate if anyone could point me in the right direction for the possible cause of this drop and what I need to focus on to fix tihs issue.
Theories....
-
I made some big changes to the copy of my homepage and aboutapge a few weeks before the stories were picked up - although the copy is still similar content and optimised for my keywords
-
I had some early SEO work done by a freelancer in the early days and I now realise that a lot of the links are very weak and on quite poor looking sites (although they are not flagged as spammy in OSE, I think they are spammy)
-
The story that got picked up by the media was slightly off topic - it was about jobs rather than CV's - could this make google think that my site is not relevant?
-
Prior to these stories being picked up - we took a short break from link building for a few months due to resource issues
So if anyone knows if any of these factors are likely to have caused the drop I would be grateful to know!
Thanks
Andrew
-
-
Yes - I guess I did know that deep down
It's just strange that it dropped like that as I didn't remove any content.. and even stranger that it suddenly moved back up...
Maybe my site is just a bit too thin and that's why it's fluctuating so much at the moment???
Anyway - thanks for your help... I should probably get back to content creation now
-
If you have ahrefs paid subscription, you can download all links, group them by domain. Then you can check those domains in moz's OSE for spam scores. Usually you'd know good domains, cause they are well known (or at least known in your industry). And the amount of the rest should be that large.
But this is what makes the difference:
Realistically I know I need more content on the site
If you think so yourself - that's what's "wrong"
-
Thanks very much Dimitri
Strangely I'm now back on the second page today, although in a slightly lower position than before
Could I pleas just clarify something if you have time to answer one more question...
The majority of my links (and my competitor's links) don't actually show in OSE (even the really good ones - I think maybe because I'm UK) so how would you recommend spotting links that need to be removed? switching to ahrefs and then using the Moz bar on the individual pages maybe? And how bad does a link have to be before you remove/disavow? some look a bit spammy but still have high DA's etc
Or should I maybe just focus on building more content and links than spending time removing bad ones if I haven't actually been notified of any penalties? Realistically I know I need more content on the site
-
Hi there.
I would recommend looking at backlink profile in OSE and ahrefs to see the spam score and difference between number in total links (in ahrefs) and number in links-which-matter (in OSE). This will get you an idea of how spammy/bad your backlink profile is. Also do competitor comparison. This will tell you how far behind you are.
As for DA drop - DA is relative number, if it went down, it doesn't mean anything until you compare with competitor DA changes. If theirs went down the same or more - good for you. Read this on this matter - https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores
And also do audit and competitor analysis on content. You might think that your content is super awesome, but still, look at what your ranking competitors have, what keywords they are using, how often they are using them and so on.
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
-
Ranking For Non-Context-Friendly Terms Without Anchor-Text
We are now at a point with Google where having a link profile that has a lot of exact match anchor text for a few main keyword targets is not a good thing. So, how do we rank for terms that do not fit into the content of your site, but are still good keyword targets. Here is an example from my situation. A good keyword target for my area and business that I am working for is "plumber riverside" or "plumber riverside ca." In a gramatical sense, these two/three words do not belong together in content, i.e they would not make a proper sentence being placed together, except with maybe a comma or period separating them. In fact, this term probably wouldn't even make a good sidebar link copy. Without having a link profile with "plumber riverside" as my most common anchor text, how can I let Google know that I should rank for this term? Anchor text used to be the go to but now you have to really minimize the use of it for exact match terms. Without on page content, it seems pretty hard. Any thoughts?
Link Building | | tonyflorespsa0 -
Do Facebook pages behave like a regular website pages?
Would be grateful for an answer if Back links convey a benefit to facebook pages just like as they do with a regular website page with better search engines search results.
Link Building | | sherohass0 -
Do you stop link building once you have your desired rank?
So with all these updates hitting sites left, right and center. Now you have your desired rank on Google, do you stop link building for that project? I can see some positives in this You will not add links that will get hit by future updates. If you do get hit in future updates you have less links to remove. Obviously it an outstanding link came along from BBC or CNN you would go for that. But press releases etc would you now stop anything like that?
Link Building | | tempowebdesign0 -
How many days/hours a month should I dedicate to link building ?
I realise that the more time you dedicate to link building the better, but what would you say is the ideal amount of time that I should spend link building to see a significant improvement in rankings? The keywords I'm trying to target are medium to difficult. So far, I've been spending one day link building but since I'm making all link submissions manually, I haven't seen great results, even though I've been link building for a couple of months. How many days do you spend link building? Thank you in advance for your help! 🙂
Link Building | | SEOBunny_0 -
Date specific keywords, what to do for following year?!?
Hi, Lets say I have a page with the keyword 'film releases 2012', I rank the term and it picks up some back links and social signals. The year ends and search begins for 'film releases 2013'. Do I: 1. Create a new page targeting 'film releases 2013' and redirect the old page to the new one. 2. Just have one page with the url .co.uk/film-releases/ and when the year ends for 2012 just change the 2012 to 2013 (title, h1 tags etc). I'm 99% sure number 2 is the best option but the only negative is the url does not contain the year. I could just have the 1 page with the date in the url and when it enters the new year change the url to contain the new date but that would break any backlinks, so I could redirect anyone trying to get to the old url to the new one which should pass the PR across. But im guessing I would lose some PR in the process so maybe not having the date in the url would not effect SEO to much so rolling with number 2 is best bet. Cheers
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Best Keyword reseach tool for spanish site?
Good morning to all. I am looking for a good keyword research tool for spanish website. The google keyword tool does not give enought long tail keywords and wordtracker does not provide good results for spanish sites. Does anybody here have experience with a good keyword tool for spanish sites?
Link Building | | seoroyal0 -
My google rankings went down
I've been working with a company to get some incoming links since April 2011. We are targeting only 2 keywords. For one keyword I was ranked number 1 until a couple of weeks ago. In fact, most of my rankings went down including those keywords that the company was not working on. They are writing 5 articles per month and posting them to their proprietary network. Could those backlinks could harmed my rankings?
Link Building | | cardif0