Keywords in TOP 5 then disappearing, then reappearing (ongoing for months)
-
Hello marketers,
I've built quite a few successful sites in the past, but I've never issued this scenario. Here's the case:
I have 1,5 year-old site that I've tried to build quality content & links over time. However, there are roughly 15-20 pages and keywords that constantly appear and reappear in the search.
For example, KEYWORD X:
- 1 week appearing in rank 3
- Then disappearing out of 100 for a week
- Then reappears in rank 3 and stays there for ~10 days
- Then again disappears from top 100 for a week or two.
- Then again, comes back at rank 3 for a few days, then gone again.
Now I understand if this is a new site and spammy content and bad links combo, but it's not. It's also not 1 keyword, but multiple keywords and multiple pages.
I know it's hard to say what exactly wrong, but could anyone lead me to the right direction. Is this CONTENT issue? Links issue? CTR issue? Site health issue?
I've also attached screenshots from 2 keywords and their rankings in the last 3-4 months.
Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!
-
Do you have multiple similar products that are targeting the same keywords, could the pages be keyword cannibalising each other and the pages keep switching in your rankings. If so you may benefit from canonicalising similar content pages that may not be direct duplicates or trying to further seperate the content.
e.g. Product review 1 ranks P3 then drops whilst another page say Product review 3 takes its place.
Do you track each url placement?
-
Structure shouldn't matter, but there has to be a reason why this is happening to you.
Have you had a look in Search Console to see how often Google is crawling the site and see if there are any anomalies in there?
Feel free to ping me an e-mail with an example page if you would like me to take a quick look for you. info [at] iqseo dot uk
-Andy
-
Hey Andy
Thanks for your reply. It's mostly a very narrow niche site that reviews different products in-depth (I have about 35 review pages). They are similarly structured, but they are unique for sure. 2000+ words each with images etc.
Perhaps I should rewrite the ones that are not sticking in the SERP?
-
Hi,
Had a very similar issue on a site and it turned out to be not content, but duplicate pages brought on by too many that were similar.
Perhaps this was a bit extreme, but I regularly found 4-5 pages trying to target very similar phrases which left Google wondering just what the hell it should index. Similar sort of thing - one minute at pos. 70, the next position 7. However, not all of them were being indexed.
What is your content like - could it fall into this?
-Andy
-
My first response to this type of problem is to check for duplicate content, such as when another person or bot grabs your content and posts it on another website.
My second response would be a check for a canonical problem, such as when your page can be identified by multiple URLs.
Those are the two best things to check for. However, I also know of a site that has this exact problem. The content is high quality, has been on the web for a few years, yet the pages can be in the top ten for good keywords, then disappear out of the top 100 only to return to the top ten. This has been repeating for a couple of months.
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
-
Keyword Cannibalization on Professional Service Firm
Hi all: We do ongoing SEO for a tax law firm. Their home page, which contains very little text is marked up in the title tag with the phrase 'tax attorneys and preparers.' We are getting warnings from our SEO software that individual bio pages for practitioners are cannibalizing the homepage for the keyword 'tax attorney.' Should I be concerned? The head of this firm is a very well known 'tax attorney.' Its kind of hard to describe him differently but we keep getting told his page competes with the firm's homepage for this search string. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey1 -
Why one of my top pages dropped?
Hello here. Our website, virtualsheetmusic.com, is pretty popular in the sheet music realm, and we used to rank on the first page for the keyword "violin sheet music" until a few weeks ago with our violin dedicated page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html But a couple of weeks ago we dropped to over the 5th page on Google (I can't even find us!) and I have no idea why. Most of our top ranking pages are still there though. This never happened before, after 17 years on the web. Do you have any idea why that could have happened?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Is irrelevant backlinks real? And does anchor text affect all keywords?
I ask because I see many of my competitors with irrelevant backlinks still ranking at the top, despite what SEO say about it. I have a Web Design business, most of my competitors have their backlinks from sites they built ie "website by _____" and thats how they rank at the top. Should I keep getting backlinks from my clients (with permission)? Also does anchor text on backlinks affect all keywords in your website? Example is if you provide multi services ie plastering and decorating. You have 100 links pointing to your site with anchor text of "plastering". Technically your site still has 100 backlinks, will that also help boost the onsite optimisation for the keyword "decorating"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marvellous0 -
Should I buy a keyword rich domain to prevent competitors from buying it
Some people in the company I work for have suggested that we buy a keyword rich domain that matches a new product line that we're planning to release. I've advised that this in itself is not a good idea, as we'll need to produce high quality content for that site rather than just having it exist for ranking purposes. We already have a section on our main site focussed on this product line, so I don't think having the keyword match domain would really add anything unless we worked out what we'd use this site for. That said, I was wondering whether it might be worth buying the exact match domain anyway, in order to prevent a competitor from using it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Consistent Ranking Jumps Page 1 to Page 5 for months - help needed
Hi guys and gals, I have a really tricky client who I just can't seem to gain consistency with in their SERP results. The keywords are competitive but what the main issue I have is the big page jumps that happen pretty much on a weekly basis. We go up and down 40 positions and this behaviour has been going on for nearly 6 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_bangonline
I felt it would resolve itself in time but it has not. The website is a large ecommerce website. Their link profile is OK in regards to several high quality newspaper publication links, majority brand related anchor texts and the link building we have engaged in has all been very good i.e. content relevant / high quality places. See below for some potential causes I think could be the reason: The on page SEO is good however the way their ecommerce website is setup they have formed a substantial amount of duplicate title tags. So in my opinion this is a potential cause. The previous web developer set-up 301 redirects all to their home page for any 404 errors. I know best practice is to go to the most relevant pages, however could this be a potential issue? We had some server connectivity issues show up in webmasters tools but that was for 1 day about 4 months ago. Since then no issues. they have quite a few 'blocked URLs' in their robots.txt file, e.g. Disallow: /login, Disallow: /checkout/ but to me these seem normal and not a big issue. We have seen a decrease over the last 12 months in Webmasters Tools of 'total indexed web pages' from 5000 to 2000 which is quite an odd statistic. Summary So all in all I am a tad stumped. We have some duplicate content issues in title tags, perhaps not following best practice in the 301 redirects but other than that I dont see any major on page issues, unless I am missing something in the seriousness of what I have listed.
Finally we have also do a bit of a cull of poor quality links, requesting links to be removed and also submitting a 'disavow' of some really bad links. We do not have a manual penalty though. Thoughts, feedback or comments VERY welcome.0 -
Keyword Question: How to Target my Niche
Hello, I'm a health coach helping people with multiple sclerosis. Here's my website: bobweikel(dot)com What do you think the top 4 local keywords would be for my niche? I'm in Boise ID. I'm thinking MS Boise MS Boise Idaho Multiple Sclerosis Boise Multiple Sclerosis Boise Idaho With your intuition, do you think these are valuable keywords for a coaching site? Also, can you think of any other keywords? I want this 100% white hat.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
One Website, Multiple Top-level Domains
I have two clients, both of which have a single website, with multiple top-level domains, many of which represent "subpages". For example, when you navigate to the home page, the URL is "[CompanyName].com". However, when you navigate to a subpage, the browser appears to remain at the same website, but in actuality (as you can tell from the URL bar) you've navigated to "SubPage.com". Client A is an insurance company that has multiple branded insurance products. Each product is independent of the other (it's unlikely that a single client would purchase multiple insurance products from different brands) and have their own brand. Thusly, each section of the site that represents a different brand has its own top-level domain. The website design/structure remains the same, with some light color changes and image swaps. Client B is a consultant and offers various services. None of these services are "branded" (a single client would hire the consultant for a wide range of available services). Each subpage on the site represents a different service and has its own top-level domain. Here are my questions: Are either Client A or B breaking guidelines set forth by major search engines? Are either Client A or B hurting their optimization with this trickery? My inclination is that Client A is doing it right, but Client B is not. Your insights would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PinckneyHugoGroup0 -
How to Preserve PageRank for Disappearing Pages?
Pretend that USA Today has a section of their site where the sell electronics, which they locate at http://electronics.usatoday.com. The subdomain is powered by an online electronics store called NewCo via a white label. Many of the pages on this subdomain have relatively high PageRank. But few, if any, external sites link to the subdomain--the PageRank of the subdomain is largely due to internal links from the usatoday.com root domain. USA Today's deal with NewCo expires and they decide to partner with my startup instead. But, unlike NewCo, we won't be providing a white-label solution; rather, USA Today will be redirecting all of the electronics-related links on their root domain to my site instead of the electronics.usatoday.com subdomain. They also agree to direct all of the pages on electronics.usatoday.com to me. Ideally USA Today would add 301's to all of their pages on electronics.usatoday.com that direct to the corresponding pages on my site, but they don't have the engineering wherewithal or resources to do this. Therefore, what is the best way to pass the PageRank from the electronics.usatoday.com pages to my site? Would it work to have USA Today change the CNAME for electronics.usatoday.com to my site and then create pages on my site that mimic the USA today URL structure? For example, let's say there was a page located at electronics.usatoday.com/ipods. Could we give electronics.usatoday.com a CNAME form my site and then create a page on my site located at mysite.com/ipods that 301'ed to the ipod page on my site? Would that preserve the PageRank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jack789078900