Sudden inexplicable drop in important keywords
-
I have been running around in small circles trying to work out why, after a year of careful SEO my companies site has suddenly dropped for all it's main keywords out of the first page to the second or third in our weekly report.
One theory was that five backlinks with a spam rating of 10 might have had an impact - these have been removed, but I have been advised that these may not have been the cause.
Our crawl diagnostics remain squeaky clean.
I add one, carefully checked and optimized (as per Moz recommendations) blog posts once a week and nothing has been changed other than that.
We have slowly and carefully built up a good backlink profile, but as well as the drop in rankings our weekly report also showed that we lost 109 backlinks from the previous week.
I have not been able to find out what I could possibly have done wrong!
I've checked all our crawl reports and webmaster tools and nothing has been flagged up.
I did discover, whilst typing in some longtail keyword phrases that our preview site URLs as well as our live site URLs appeared in SERPs. I checked with our web agency who assured me that this was fine, but that they had put a redirect on these yesterday. I thought this was a bit strange as that seems odd as we have been live for a year. I guess my question is could the fact that these redirects have not been active (until yesterday) have any bearing on what has happened or is this completely unrelated?
Thanks
Catherine - very stressed Mozer
-
The rel canonical tag to the root of the site could work, but would be better to have a metatag like
<metaname="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> </metaname="robots">
For each page that is developmental and not supposed to be live. This will tell google to just ignore these pages, that they are not ready to be indexed and be part of the internet.
It's generally not recommended to do a rel canonical to the homepage, just because it's saying that every page on the developmental site is from the homepage, as well google is still indexing these pages and this could cause issues later on. It's just better to noindex nofollow the dev pages before they go live, since then you can migrate the new to the old and not have some huge issue later on.
I send something like this to your private message as well.
-
Hello Deacyde
Could I ask you another question related to this issue?
The web developer has now added a rel canonical (I'm assuming to the root of our site).
My question is, is it good practice to add a rel canonical to a site which has a development (preview) site, where there will potentially be two urls for each page (the development page and the live page) within serps?
I was told by the web developer that this was not an issue and that it was unimportant.
Is this the case or have they simply forgotten to do it and are now dismissing it as non issue?
That's my question - I hope you don't mind me following up with you - it's just you know the story from the start.
Kind regards
Catherine (work with Zoe)!
-
You're very welcome, glad this helped.
As a web developer and SEO I understand far too often that the two worlds are not in constant communication about many of the things that matter. As well aren't always up to par with latest knowledge from each opposing fields.
This far too often leads to those moments where things happen.
Glad you monitored these and spoke up to seek answers, if not you, who else would have? That's always the scary part.
-
Hello Deacyde
I'm writing to thank you again for you help. I asked our web design agency to remove the 92 offending urls yesterday. They did as requested but I got a curt email a close of play last evening telling me that the remove process would not be immediate and the preview site urls where not the reason for the drop in ranking.
Today, I checked and all the urls for the preview site have disappeared. Our visibility has risen 45% and we are now ranking #2 for our main keyword phrase (we had dipped down to 10 last week).
So thank you very much for you advice and constructive help
Kind regards
Catherine Joyce
-
Hello,
Ok, that certainly can cause some ranking issues, if persay you've for whatever reason got both the preview / development site being indexed as well as the live site, that will confused google and possibly mean that you'd either loose ranking for those keywords or even not be considered at all for that keyword query.
Something that could be tried is to go into Google's Webmaster Tools and click on Google Index > Remove URL, this is a temporary url removal tool that google has incase of mistakes and such. Might be worth it to have the preview sites you've seen indexed entered in the URL removal tool and even do a site:domain.com ( replace the domain.com with the preview site domain ) to see what all is being indexed still and maybe even add those as well.
You're main goal is to basically tell google to forget those URLs, as long as the preview site has noindex nofollow on it now and you remove those currently indexed urls in WMTs you might be able to recover some of that rank loss if not all.
I'd also do some research to see if competitors have made any recent changes that would increase their visibility but to ultimately remember that there is signs of a google update release brewing as well, so if the above actions yield no results, next best option is to wait a few weeks while tackling other tasks.
Hopefully this has helped
Here is some site migration guides to help in the future as well to prevent this kinda issue:
-
Hello Deacyde
When I'm talking about the preview site, I'm referring to the site we build our site in. When we are happy we then build live. However I have noticed that we now have both the preview url and the live url (with the same content) appearing in serps. When I pointed it out the the web design agency who sold us the software and manage the site they told me that they had set up the redirect yesterday (the same day I told them about the rankings drop)!
-
When you say preview site do you mean your development site as in when you do redesigns, is the preview site domain where you host the redesign site before it's live?
Also, not sure if you have noticed but there seems to be some testing or even a Google update in the works, and with Google still yet to release Penguin never know.
I've been experiencing 1 to 2 page dances with keyword rankings over the last 6 days for our major keywords, some appearing on page 2 at the beginning of the day and then appearing on page 4 around the end of the day, doing this consistently over the last 3 days.
So certainly seems SERPs is being adjusted, just not sure as to the why.
If you have been concerned about keyword changes over the passed week, I'd say to hold tight that the rest of us are experiencing this as well and just are in the mercy of Google.
If it's been longer than that, then you might have competition that's doing things better, got to remember that for every site that increases in rank, the rest of the sites adjust to that.
**Edited to add the link of the recent update chatter: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-chatter-22306.html
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
-
Help! Rankings dropping after optimising
I have been using MOZ a lot, in the past I have always been able to optimise a website enough to rank well in my local areas, but lately every time I optimise a website based on MOZ recommendations the rankings are just dropping and dropping... I haven't focused any efforts on backlinks, but a few sites have gone from the first page of SERP to 2nd and continue to drop... I have 2 example sites: https://www.documentmanagementsoftware.com.au/ - optimised for "Document Management Software" - was initially ranked no.7 in google AU, now it is no.16 after my efforts. http://www.tmphysio.com.au/ - optimised for "canberra physiotherapy" - was no.6 now it is dropping to no.9 after 'optimisation' Any help or insights would be extremely helpful as I feel hopeless!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
Mega Good Bulk Keyword Tool
I have over 1000 keywords to sort out , I need a tool that picks up on variations and symmons. Does anyone know of a very good tool that is available? If not I'll do it the long way round with Excel 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Replicating keywords in the URL - bad?
Our site URL structure used to be (example site) frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs-for-sale/blue-frogs wherefrogsforsale.com/cute-frogs-for-sale/ was in front of every URL on the site. We changed it by removing the for-sale part of the URL to be frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs/blue-frogs. Would that have hurt our rankings and traffic by removing the for-sale? Or was having for-sale in the URL twice (once in domain, again in URL) hurting our site? The business wants to change the URLs again to put for-sale back in, but in a new spot such as frogsforsale.com/cute-frogs/blue-frogs-for-sale as they are convinced that is the cause of the rankings and traffic drop. However the entire site was redesigned at the same time, the site architecture is very different, so it is very hard to say whether the traffic drop is due to this or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Sudden Drop in rank of Keyword "Sobha Aspirational Homes"
Hi, For domain http://www.homeadda-sobhaaspirationalhomes.in/ keyword Sobha Aspirational Homes, We had google india ranking 5 continuously for past 2 months. There is sudden drop in rank and we have been pushed to rank 114. I do not understand why this happened. Regards, Mithun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mithungowda0 -
15 Keywords but only 8 visible on the page?
Hi we launched our site in June this year built using DNN - I have just used Moz's On page Grader for several pages and whilst it shows the KW in the URL, Titles, Meta Description, ALt Tag, it also says that I have 15 KWs in the body of this particular page and yet when i eye ball the page it only shows 8. Is this because of the templated navigation of the site. ie this KW also shows in the nav structure of other pages that are listed in the left hand nav menu? If this is correct will Google think that I am stuffing my page with too many KWs? Any solutions? Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Main Keyword penalized. And now?
Hello SEO comunity. In one of the sites that I work, our team won numerous keywords in the first searching results. Unfortunately, on june we lost the most important site keyword. It was a general Word, very disputed, that generated a lot of traffic to us. The problem: it droped from third to fifty position. I’d like your help to identify the possible punishments and than find the solutions. What could happened? Where do we start? Is there any checklist to verify the punishments? What do you suggest to me? PS: We always do a clean job, getting away form the blackhat techniques; We didn’t received any notification from Google; During two year, the keyword was in the first ten positions. Actually, I'm looking for an explanation for what happened to me, to get my top10 again. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webg0 -
Wordtracker vs Google Keyword Tool
When I find keyword opportunities in Wordtracker, I'll sometimes run them through Adwords Keyword tool only to find that Google says these keywords have 0 search volume. Would you use these keywords even though Google says users aren't searching for them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How important is it to create a subdomain?
I was just reading an article about how Hubpages claims they pulled through from Panda by dividing their content up on subdomains. I'm wondering if anyone else has had similar success? Also, Panda aside, how important do you think it is to separate different types of content out on separate subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0