Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly
-
Hello,
We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this. The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago. At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request. Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site. We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving. Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings". However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found. If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3!
We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned). We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores. The results are the same. Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time. We just could not understand why this is happening. Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months.
Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice? Many thanks!
-
All though possible I would imagine Google would of sent out a warning or similar if there was some sort of penalty.
-
Could this possibly be connected to Google's Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent?
-
Hi There
This is definitely strange - does it still happen for you? I could not recreate the issue here. There's no doubt this is odd, but I'd ultimately be concerned if it was a page 1 result in which you were missing the first search around. Doesn't seem like this is affecting any actual visibility though?
How are impressions in WMT? Anything off there?
-Dan
-
Thank you for checking this for us and confirming that something is not right, I thought I was going crazy...
I will try to contact Google via webmaster tools (perhaps filing another consideration request) to prompt a reply.
If anybody have any suggestions it would be much appreciated thanks!
-
Could be how Google are delivering their results as mentioned or a bug when they tweaked their algorithm, you could try and rock the boat and email them via webmasters though don't expect them to really help out much they are pretty secretive bunch. Have you found no change on the search with active SEO ? I presume there has been some sort of SEO going on though its a really odd thing
-
Ok Now I've just got home and did the search again on a different machine, and indeed you weren't within the first 10 pages on an initial search, but appeared top of page 3 on a second search.
How bizarre, but unfortunately I cannot offer a solution either.
-
That is strange. Using firefox I first searched for you and you werern't in the top 10 pages. I then performed the same search and you were right at the top of page 3.
I can't offer a solution/ reason but i'd be really interested if someone else could!
-
Unfortunately I could not recreate your issue.
I just did the same search and in firefox you appeared first time on page 4, position 32. I did the search in Chome on another machine and you appeared first time on page 4 in the same position.
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
-
Can an external firewall affect rankings?
For security reasons we are now routing traffic through an external firewall cum CDN. Our server and domain IPs remain the same, but any request is routed through an external IP, which then forwards the traffic. Would our rankings be affected because of IP changes? Thanks Sam
Technical SEO | | samgold0 -
Site's meta description is not being shown in Google Search results. Instead our privacy policy is getting indexed.
We re-launched our new site and put in the re-directs. Our site is https://www.fico.com/en. When I search for "fico" in Google. I see the privacy policy getting indexed as meta descriptions instead of our actual meta description. I have edited the meta description, requested Google to re-index our site. Not sure what to do next? Thanks for your advise.
Technical SEO | | gosheen0 -
How can I avoid too many internal links in my site navigation?
Hi! I always get this notification on my pages 'Avoid Too Many Internal Links' when I run the Page Optimization Score. And this is the message I get how to fix it: Scale down the number of internal links on your page to fewer than 100, if possible. At a minimum, try to keep navigation and menu links to fewer than 100. On my website I got a desktop navigation menu and a mobile variant, so in the source this will show more internal links. If I hide those links with CSS for the view, is the problem then solved? So Does Google then see less internal links? Or does Google crawl everything? I'm curious how I can fix this double internal links issue with my navigation menu.
Technical SEO | | Tomvl
What are you guys ideas / experiences about this?0 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
Can you help with some concerns over mobile site in SERPS
Hi Guys I wonder if you can put me right on this query please? We have a mobile version of our site, on an m. domain. it is actually http://m.uniquemagazines.co.uk. I have created a mobile sitemap, and added the sitemap reference to the robots.txt file. I have setup the site in web master tools, and submitted the sitemap to web master tools. The sitemap can be found at http://m.uniquemagazines.co.uk/sitemap.xml. This is an index file, which in turn links to 3 sitemaps, one for pages, one for product pages and one for category pages. I have not blocked any crawlers in the robots.txt file. My query is we have some products showing up in the SERPS with both the mobile and normal website. Secondly, in web master tools I am told that our mobile sitemap contains 3675 submitted URLs. However, it states under the WEB banner that 3675 submitted, and 3675 indexed. But under MOBILE it states 3675 submitted, none indexed... I will attempt to attach a screenshot from WMT of this. Do you have any ideas what has gone wrong here? is it wrong, or is this what you would expect to see? Many thanks Paul ScreenHunter_18%20Feb.%2021%2010.55.jpg
Technical SEO | | TheUniqueSEO0 -
What Would i do to get my site ranking high?
Hello Friends, I need your help please tell me what would I do to get my site ranking high in Google search engine. When I start my work on my site my work blog commenting , social bookmarking, keyword targeting etc.… But now the scene is completely changing. Now I am working on just guest blogging. I don’t understand that what would I do next after the guest blogging. Because I think there is now just one way to promote your site VIA guest blogging. Now please tell me is there any other option to work and get high ranking?
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Google has not been visiting my site
Hi I am working on a site at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com and i had the site using a different template and in the search engines for the search term cheap flights gatwick we were fourth and for the term holiday magazine we were 12th in google but now we are not even in google on the first page for the search terms. But now after changing the template in joomla our rankings have gone out of the window. It took me about a day to sort out the site with the new template so i was not expecting any problems with the search engines but for some reason there is. If you put into the search engine www.cheapflightsgatwick.com then you will see that google has not visited the site for four days and also it is not showing the description and instead it is showing details about joomla. Can anyone let me know if there is anything i need to do to sort this out and why google is taking so long to visit my site
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Site:www.tld.com rank is it a measure of googles per page importance?
Hello, does the order of pages in a site:www.tld.com search show how important each page is to google? what if the homepage is not the first result?
Technical SEO | | adamzski0