Did any one else notice rankings drops since 14th-21st Feb this year?
-
Hi everyone,
I'm looking for some guidance please. Our website saw a drop in rankings on around 14th - 21st Feb 2019 and the rankings haven't really recovered. I can't see anything significant in Search Console, there was a possible unconfirmed algorithm update during early Feb but I can't really find anything factual to determine if this was the cause.
The ranking drop seems to be across different keywords.
What else should I check?
Did anyone experience such a drop around this time and if so found out why this happened and how to recover?
Thanks for your help
Caroline
-
Hi Caroline,
Recommendations would be to do as you have suggested review keywords, & pages.
Make sure you have a robust About us section that proves you are experts, look to introduce new high quality and relevant content.
Start actively searching for relevant and quality backlinks.
Steve
-
Hi Steve,
Many thanks for sending the links over. I've reviewed them and there seems to be some suggestions that algorithm updates happened around the time mentioned (14th - 21st).
There are few posts on here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-27131.html and here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-27077.html mentioning updates around this time.
There's the Valentine's Day update: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-update-valentines/293451/ which talks about the algorithm focusing on relevance.
https://www.thewebmaster.com/google-updates/google-update-12-february-2019/ talks about the relevancy of content, E-A-T and how we should look at the keywords each page is targeting.
So it looks like there have been algorithm updates that may have affected our site? Some of the above links talk about how people saw their rankings recover shortly after the update. Ours dropped (our rankings practically halved around 14th - 21st Feb) and remained at this level until around 18th April where they have improved very slightly.
What would your advice be? Maybe review the keywords & pages that have dropped in rankings and check if we are utilising the most suitable keywords for those pages?
Thanks again for your help
Caroline
-
Hi Caroline,
thanks for the response. It appears that you haven't made any changes that would have this sort of impact.
You have checked everything I would look at and found nothing to show that the site may be "broken" which is good.
Here are some links which show minor changes around the dates you have asked about, take a look and see if they may relate to your site. If they do please let us know. If not again let us know and we can keep on investigating.
https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-update-valentines/293451/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-february-march-2019-updates/297493/#close
https://www.thewebmaster.com/google-updates/google-update-12-february-2019/
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-algorithm-update-27077.html
Hopefully this will help you.
If not as I say let me know.
Steve
-
Hi Steve,
So sorry for the delay, I've been manic. Amazing thank you for the info!
I don't think any changes have been made to sitemap.xml or the htaccess files. Sitemap.xml is automatically updated when we create new pages on the site. However, I have asked our developer if he has access to a change log just to be sure, so will let you know.
I've used Moz's On Demand Crawl and there are 73 crawler warnings (no critical crawler issues), please see a breakdown below...
- Meta Noindex (50 total) - these are all blog category or blog tag urls
- URL Too Long (12 total) - these are all blog URLs which I will improve and create 301s to the new url
- Title Too Long (5 total) - I will update these
- Missing Description (5 total) - I will update these
- Missing or Invalid H1 (1 total) - this is sitemap page on the website
I'm guessing none of the above would have affected rankings, the Meta Noindex warning has been visible in Moz for over 18 months, its not a recent warning.
I've looked in GA and I have compared the second half of the month, including the week where we saw a drop in rankings (14/02 - 21/02) with the first half of the month (14/02 - 28/02 vs 30/01 - 13/02) and below are the results:
- Organic: 2%
- Direct: -14%
- Referral: 12%
- Social: -61%
The keywords are pretty static and the vast majority are higher during the second half of the month. If I should be using different dates for comparison please let me know and I'll take another look.
I've looked to see if there is a particular site that stopped driving traffic to us but there isn't one really. Facebook and Instagram traffic reduced due to a change with campaigns but all other referrers' figures increased.
The site speed according to Google's Page Speed Insights is 37/100 (mobile) and 77/100 (desktop). We are currently working on some of the recommendations but we haven't seen a huge improvement so far. The report suggested we would benefit from around 7 seconds by serving images in next gen format (WebP). We implemented this change last night and the mobile score only increased from 33 to 37. We have also properly sized a couple of images and ensured text remains visible during webfont load.
Is there anywhere else you recommend I look into?
Thanks very much for your help
Caroline
-
Hi Caroline,
Apologies for the delay in replying it's been a busy day.
- ok that's good
- The change looks good and was made a few months before the drop in traffic so it should not be related
- you can use MOZ on demand crawl, SEO power tools or if you are using any SEO tools they should pick it up.
- Good work
Did you check the sitemap.xml and the htaccess files to see if there had been any changes?
When you look at Google Analytics is there any particular traffic source or keyword that has suddenly dropped or is it roughly the same across the board?
Again if you let me know the answers to these questions I will try my best to help further.
unfortunately, I do not have any websites in the leisure market so cannot compare there.
Steve
-
Hi Steve,
Many thanks for your reply
The website is for a leisure company, their site has been live for over 18 months
1. The site has been on https for a couple of years
2. The only change to robots.txt was made by myself in Dec where I added the below, no other changes have been made as far as I can think:
Disallow: /basket/
Noindex: /basket/3. What is the best way of detecting redirect issues? Is there a particular tool you recommend?
4. We have 1 x 404 which I've just corrected and I've just created 2 x custom 404 reports in Google Analytics for future reference.
Is there anything else I can check please?
Thanks again, Caroline
-
Hi Caroline,
it would really help us to help you if you could share more information, such as the topic of the site(s), URLs if you can (we understand this is not always possible) but if you could give us an idea as to the topic this will really help us.
Otherwise, we can only provide generic information and guestimates.
Some things to check
- Did you make any significant changes to the site - implementing HTTPS for instance
- Has someone changed your sitemap, robots.txt or htaccess files
- Are you having redirect issues?
- Are you getting more 4xx errors in Google analytics
Steve
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
-
What kind of impact does a 404 have in a sitemap regarding ranking?
We recently had a site update where our robots file disallowed our sitemap for about two weeks. When we found the problem and resubmitted the sitemap to Google Search Console, it found a 404 error. Does this have any impact on ranking or visibility if we are still recovering from the disallow?
Algorithm Updates | | GaryBlanchard0 -
We are ranking for unexpected industry keywords; not for the main keywords. What might be wrong?
Hi all, Our company falls into a SaaS industry LIKE seo. We used to rank for our industry keywords just like seo, seo software, etc... We have fallen out of rankings for these obvious top keywords with high search volume, but ranking for these 2 keywords like seo homepage and seo website. I think we have some strong ranking authority at Google by ranking for our industry keywords "homepage" and "website" which represents a very relevant site to the industry. But not sure why we are not ranking for top keywords. Any thoughts on this?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Does an EAT score on my YMYL site impact my rankings?
I've read some conflicting information on YMYL and EAT. If the Google Quality Raters are out there reviewing YMYL pages and scoring them on EAT, does that site's score have an impact on that page's/site's ranking?
Algorithm Updates | | BFMichael0 -
Safari and IE killing our mobile ranking
My client's website does fairly well on mobile in a Google Search. So one day, my client is in a staff meeting and everyone does on search on their phones. The client’s website is nowhere on the 1st three pages. I get a call asking why. I tell the client that Google has maybe as high as 90% market share on mobile. Of course, their phones have the factory installed Safari and IE. Client says lots of people don’t change the factory settings on mobile . Question: How do we rate higher on lesser search engines?
Algorithm Updates | | jgodwin0 -
Indexed Pages Increase and Major Drop June 25th and July 16th?
I am seeing information regarding a possible Google algorithm that may have taken place on June 25th...and seeing total number of pages indexed in GSC increase (cool!)...BUT, then on July 16, I'm seeing a consistent drop (BIG DROP) of pages indexed - not only on our site, but several. Does anyone have any insight into this or experiencing the same issue?
Algorithm Updates | | kwilgus0 -
How could Penguin kill my top ten rank and promote this garbage page to a #5 spot
Hey, Before penguin, I had a #9 rank for the term "yoga poses". So as many of us are doing, I started looking at my link profile... and yes, there were around 300 links from an old yoga news website (anchor: yoga poses)... that lead to the page on my site optimized for this term. The problem is they took the site down, but not properly... I.E. they generate a "not available" message for browsers, but underneath, I guess the bots can still index all the pages... so I guess they were interpreting these links as coming from a cloaked site. So, I was able to get them to remove the links... webmaster tools reports half of them gone now. What I don't get though... is how Google can give this garbage page a #5 spot for a competitive term like "yoga poses"... Check out http://www.ebmyoga.com/beginyoga.html and compare it to my page... http://www.yogaclassplan.com/yoga-poses/ This page leads to highly quality 100% unique yoga pose articles... in my mind we deliver so much more value than the site with a #5 rank. I don't understand. Any insight? Thanks,
Algorithm Updates | | biomat0 -
SERP and SEO Moz ranking
Until a couple of months ago the predicted SEO Moz ranking for a specific keyword was fairly close to what I actually experienced with my website. However, since then the correlation has not been good. For example, according to SEO Moz I am ranked #1 for a specific keyword with google.ca and google.com yet my site actually shows up consistently at #3 for that keyword. Has anyone else noticed this divergence?
Algorithm Updates | | casper4340 -
Changing Wordpress Permalink Structure, 301s, and Possibility of Rank Loss?
I have to change the permalink structure in wordpress, as using /%postname%/ in conjunction with a couple thousand pages triggers verbose rewrite rules, which further triggers about 5,000 requests per page load. The permalink structure must change as wordpress development probably won't change this in the near future. Now, changing the permalink structure worries me quite a bit, as about 25% of my traffic is attributed to my blog posts -- the rest is covered through CMS-like-use of pages (75%). blog posts will change permalink/url structure, pages won't The website is very respected in my niche and has quite a few links going to most of my posts and pages, as well as the homepage I've noticed in the last year that anything I post starts ranking on page 1 of Google for very competitive kws in 1-3 days, often with top 3 rankings PR4 / decent Alexa / Moz ranks not too shabby either / quality content / decent social media linking (mainly Facebook) / no penalties I provided the factors as to not gloat, but rather to get the best answer from those who have fairly established websites and perhaps had to change their URLs and noticed some or no changes to their rankings. How long of a hit am I going to take / how much my posts might drop down in SERPs if I change the permalink structure, properly 301 them, and implement all changes in one swoop? Info for WordPress users Benefits of changing the permalink structure to /%post_id%/%postname%/ -- for example -- include: way faster load times, not having 5,000 requests per page load, avoiding verbose rewrite rules trigger, finally modify the site without worrying about crashing the website and using a local server to make changes on thousands of pages (the database backups, the ritual of changing the settings in the local database, changing the post/page, saving the local database, loading the locally saved db on live server, and crossing fingers and pray it works -- just takes so darn long.) Ahh..yes, huge time saver. ** this issue occurs when using WP as a CMS with several hundred pages + and using the /%postname%/ or /%category%//%postname%/ or /somethingstatic/%postname%/ -- IF USING the date based way /%year%/%postname%/ or /%post_id%/%postname%/ you should be fine.
Algorithm Updates | | pepsimoz0