My Ave. position and ranking is dropping!
-
Hi,
I added canonicals last two days, and made a tiny change is our meta titles. (adding a secondary keyword). Now my ave. position and visibility has dropped very much. Can it be canonicals or is it the keywords? Can canonicals affect the website so quickly?
My other question is can it be temporarily so should I wait more? how long?
I should mention that our website content is not really good and I'm working on it. When I added meta tags we had a big jump in our ranking and then we stopped getting better,. But now we are going down! Can it be the content? Sorry I know that it is actually all, but i do not know which one matters more and do not understand why it happened immediately after adding canonicals.
Our website is: www.pacificsmoke.com
Appreciate your advice.
-
@DonnaDuncan Thank you for this reply. In a way it answers my long time query with my website https://www.bestcarhireuganda.com/
I am really thankful as this will help my page improve great -
Thanks Donna a ton
-
"Are the following hreflang tags correct? "
Yes
"Or now that we do not have french version yet, should I delete the first line? Because, for instance, we do not have such a URL yet: https://www.pacificsmoke.com/fr/wholesale."
You don't need to add any hreflang tags until you add translated pages. I only mentioned them because you have an /en/ page and you're in Canada. If you don't plan on adding translated pages, then you don't need the /en/ page and you don't need hreflang tags.
-
Hi,
I have another question and very much appreciate your advice. Are the following hreflang tags correct? Or now that we do not have french version yet, should I delete the first line? Because, for instance, we do not have such a URL yet: https://www.pacificsmoke.com/fr/wholesale. In this case, I do not understand why I should add hreflang.
For our homepage:
And an example for other pages:
Should I use instead of rel="canonical"?
Any advice would be a great help.
-
Thank you so much Alex. Appreciate your help and advice.
-
I appreciate your detailed answer Donna! Very helpful
-
I had a client with the same issues and yes, canonicals are a huge problem. You should sort that out first and see how the website reacts with rankings. Google is really punishing websites with errors these days and canonicals are some of the worst ones.
-
I'd start with the canonicals. They're not set correctly.
Your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com) has a canonical of www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home. It's missing the "https://" in front and "/home" should be dropped from the end.
The English version of your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/en/) is canonicalized to www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home. It too is missing the "https://" in front and should be canonicalized to itself.
I'm assuming because of the /en/ page at the end of the page above and your location (in Canada) that you plan on creating a French version of the page. If that is the case, you will also need to introduce hreflang tags. If that's not the case, the /en/ page is a duplicate and should be removed.
If you need help with hreflang tags, Gaston Riera previously answered in a question in Q&A about hreflang tags and listed a bunch of helpful resources. You can find them here - https://moz.com/community/q/hreflang-tags-and-canonical-tags-might-be-causing-indexing-and-duplicate-content-issues.
Other pages may have similar problems.
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
-
Falling rankings - can't figure out why
I am still fairly green on in depth SEO, however I have a good grasp on making a site SEO friendly, as my skills are more down to website construction than technical SEO, however, I am working on a site at the moment which just continues to lose rankings and is slipping further and further. Keywords are dropping week on week in rankings Search visibility is also dropping week on week On site sales have fallen massively in the last quarter We have made huge improvements on the following; Moved the site to a faster stand alone cloud vps server - taken page rank scores from 54 to 87%. Added caching (WP Rocket) & CDN support. Improved URL structure (Woocommerce) removed /product and or /product-category from URLS to give more accurate & relevant structures. Added canonical URLs to all product categories (We use Yoast Premium) Amended on page structures to include correct H tags. Improved Facebook activity with a huge increase in engagements These are just some of the improvements we have made, yet we're still seeing huge drops in traffic and rankings. One insight I have noted which may be a big pointer, is we have 56 backlinks.... which I know is not good and we are about to address this. I suspect this is the reason for the poor performance, but should I be looking at anything else? Is there anything else we should be looking at? As I said, I'm no SEO specialist, but I don't think there's been any Penguin penalty, but my expertise is not sufficient enough to dig deeper. Can anyone offer any constructive advice at this stage? I'm thinking things to look at that could be hurting us that isn't immediately obvious? The site is www.glassesonspec.co.uk Thanks in advance Bob
Technical SEO | | SushiUK0 -
Crawl rate dropped to zero
Hello, I recently moved my site in godaddy from cpanel to managed wordpress. I bought this transfer directly from GoDaddy customer service. in this process they accidentally changed my domain from www to non www. I changed it back after the migration, but as a result of this sites craw rate from search console fell to zero and has not risen at all since then. In addition to this website does not display any other errors, i can ask google manually fetch my pages and it works as before, only the crawl rates seems to be dropped permanently. GoDaddy customer service also claims that do not see any errors but I think, however, that in some way they caused this during the migration when the url changed since the timing match perfectly. also when they accidentally removed the www, crawl rate of my sites non www version got up but fell back to zero when I changed it back to www version. Now the crawl rate of both www and non www version is zero. How do I get it to rise again? Customer service also said that the problem may be related to ftp-data of search console? But they were not able to help any more than .Would someone from here be able to help me with this in anyway please?
Technical SEO | | pok3rplay3r0 -
What I am Doing Wrong with My Rank
Hi, I am doing something wrong but I don't understand what is the issue. The rank of my website for a particular keyword is by far lower than one of my competitors (they are in top 20 while I am not even in top 50 in google). I did all fixes recommended by MOZ, I have higher number of backlinks (natural built), relatively similar social media activities, bigger content but still I'm far away. Do you have any idea what is wrong? Best, Tony
Technical SEO | | Threeding.com0 -
Why is my site ranking so poorly compared to my competition?
I own a car shipping business (www.carshippingcarriers.com) and I was ranking very high last year, but around the end of August our site lost a TON of rank. Afterwards I had my SEO team at the time (no longer working with them) do a complete overhaul of the website (rewrote content, combined many pages together so no duplicate content issue, made it mobile friendly, etc.. Since then we continue to still lose rankings on Google. Yahoo and Bing seem to keep performing decently, but Google we are getting destroyed. I have been a member of Moz for a few months and I have been using the open site to check my competitors and their linking profile. One in particular, www.joescarshipping.com, has been ranking extremely well and the site looks horrible, doesn't have many links, hardly a social media presence, etc.. Compared my my website which has ton of content, articles on our website, social profile is great (tons of Google+ usage), not a ton of links so a decent amount of links, etc.. Why would a company like that be ranking so high while I keep falling? Any advice or reasoning as to what is wrong or what could be done to get better rankings? I am just at my wits end on this matter. 😕
Technical SEO | | Dutko23851 -
Our rankings for "Tree Service" dropped last month
Hi, we've had a page www.savatree.com/tree-service.html which was ranking top 1-12 on the google rankings but has complete dropped out. We don't have any duplicate errors from that page on here. Do you have any suggestions? We do rank highly on Bing and Yahoo (1-2 pages). We can't figure whats going on.
Technical SEO | | SavATree0 -
Suggestions Required to Improve Ranking
My website URL is: http://goo.gl/AiOgu1 Hello, Recently my websites revoked from manual link penalty, impressions in GWT increased from 3K to 9K within 2 months, but most of all keywords are ranking on the 3rd, 4th and 5th page. Please suggest me some onpage changes.
Technical SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk0 -
Are bad links the reason for not ranking?
Hello Moz community. I'm looking here for some input from the experts on what could be wrong with a site I'm working on. The site is in Spanish, but I'm sure you'll get the idea. We want to rank the site first page on Google Mexico (www.google.com.mx) for the keyword "refacciones Audi" and some other brands (refacciones = replacement parts would probably be a good translation, just FYI). Now, our page hasn't been completely optimized, so in my mind it's OK not to be on first page yet. However, our main competitor is ranking first page for all the keywords we want to rank for, but when you check their site, you'll find there is hardly any content, no keywords are being used in their content, all pages have the exact same title and meta description, their catalog is in a completely different domain. In short, no SEO whatsoever. Looking at Moz data, our site has a DA of 26, while our competitor's has a 10. They have no external backlinks at all, while we have a few hundred. This leaves me scratching my head: how can a completely non-optimized site outrank us? I decided to check our backlink profile, and a previous SEO agency seems to have built MANY fake blogs with lots of backlinks with rich anchor text. Quite a big percentage of our backlinks are of this kind, so this is the only thing I can think can be affecting our ranking. Will disavowing be our solution? If you'd like to check, our site is: www.refaccionariaalemana.com.mx Our competitors' is: www.saferefacciones.com ANY help will be extremely appreciated as I feel a bit lost. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | EduardoRuiz1 -
Redirection based on country and impact on rankings
I have a website that ranks number 1 in google.co.uk for its main key term and ranks number 4 in google.com.au. However i would rather that visitors in australia see domain.com.au rather than domain.co.uk. Is there a way to achieve this using some clever 301s without impacting the rankings in australia and so that the .com.au starts to rank in place of the .co.uk OR Would you advise launching a .com.au version of the site hosted separately with unique / re-written content on it.?
Technical SEO | | thefresh0