Still seeing a terrible rank drop after last algo update?!
-
I'm still stumped as to why the ranking has gone so poor on a whitehat site. (see attached image)
As you can see we've steadily been improving the ranking over the last 6+ months and then got hit with a massive change this month... I can't physically see any issues and Moz isn't reporting anything negatively that would have such a major effect..
Like not as if the drops were subtle... they've all gone into the 50+ section!
Any insights into what may have changed in the latest algo update would be appreciated?!
-
Thanks for the information Verb - the reason we track those other keywords separately from traffic is because I normally find their rank a good marker around the primary keywords but I understand what you're saying so there is more clarity in the focus.
I'll look for one of those tools and see if SEOprofiler works or similar. I've done the adwords method before but it's a bit laborious so I would prefer something automated if possible.
Thanks for the reassurance! It appears that yesterday evenings tracking in moz has updated and a lot of keywords have gone back up again so fingers crossed there was just a glitch / settling in phase!
Thanks
-
Hi Snowflake,
I think you need to find a keyword tracking tool that lets you know search volume, Moz's keyword tracking does not. For example "french course morzine" has no search volume in the states or the UK. So it doesn't matter where you rank for it since no one searches for it and there is no chance of click through.
You need to determine the search volume of your tracked keywords so you can cull the herd and put your efforts into battles you that are actually worth winning. You could look for a keyword tracking software that offers search volume (my current tools are at the enterprise level, so will not be cost efficient for just one site, a tools I used a few years back was SEOprofiler, and it worked rather well) or you could use the built in AdWords keyword planner tool and look up individual keywords and record the monthly search volume and competition level for each term. The first option will have a monthly cost + time, the second will have a monthly time cost.
In short, your organic traffic is up YOY so you are doing things along the right path. The only issue is the what you are tracking.
I hope that helps, good luck!
-
Hi Verb,
Normally the keyword / phrase ranking tool is updated weekly on moz and does seem to accurately reflect close to live data which is the main reason I'm perplexed. saying that I did just check a really simple keyword that moved to 50+ "french course morzine" that should easily be number 1 and it was.... so I wonder if whatever madness has happened will be reflected and put back on the next monthly update / weekly update.
We mainly use Google UK/GB for our campaign but do also have alternative language sites that are small but starting to grow.
I've attached a screenshot of the organic traffic it shows a pretty steady pattern of views.. feb received 800 sessions more than this time last year for instance. (again ignore july as thats when analytics was disconnected by accident).
I just don't know why Moz/Google would have us down for 12% visibility with our keywords and then decide to drop off so many of them to 50+ positions and the visibility of our site is now 7%ish for the same keywords / phrases..
Are you allowed to recommend keyword rank tracking tools to me that are outside of moz's products? or pm me some suggestions maybe?
Many thanks
-
Hi Snowflake, although we do use Moz for some tracking, we don't pay particular attention to the keyword ranking aspect of the tool. If I remember correctly it is based on inputted keywords, if rank has dropped but traffic is steady it tells me that the keyword list might be need of updating.
What region is your key market? When I run your site through looking at Google US I don't see any keywords in the converting 1-3 position, although I do see a 67% increase in first page rankings, mostly lower on the page. When running the site through Google UK I do see 2 keywords in the 1-3 position, (french summer school, french summer camp) combined monthly searches of 80. Historically these didn't rank at all before this month, so that is a plus. Plus there is some pretty good intent with those terms.
How does your organic traffic look in Google Analytics? Or you seeing the same dip?
french summer school -
Hi Verb - yep the rank graphic is from Moz's tools. Green is keyword 1-3, blue is 3-10,ect and red is 50+ ie might as well not be ranked!
I should say the dip in july for traffic was purely because analytics was removed accidentally from the site and not spotted soon enough.
The main pattern I'm picking up on is showing how we've done well organically historically moving the same keywords up the rankings and then BANG this month we are almost seeing as many 50+ keywords as we had over 6 months ago! ie back to where we started almost... I've sent you a pm with the url!
Thanks very much
-
Hi Snowflake,
I'm not familiar with this outputted graph, so I'm going to assume the colors in the stack columns are various ranges of ranks (if you can clarify which color means what that might help for those of us that use a different product for tracking keyword rank). Assuming the line is measuring organic traffic it looks good, a slight dip in the shortest month of the year doesn't set off any red flags for me. Can you provide the URL of the site, I'd be curious to run it through my research tools to see if I can't spot a pattern.
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
-
Is buying traffic from Internet traffic club harmful to rankings
From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
Search ranking for a term dropped from 1st/2nd to 106th in 3 months
Hello all, Just a couple notes first. I have been advised to be vague on the search term we've dropped on (in case this page ranks higher than our homepage for it). If you search for my name in Google though you should be able to figure out where I work (I'm not the soccer player). While I am looking for an answer, I've also posted this question on a couple other forums (see https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4934323.htm and https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/webmasters/AQLD7lywuvo/2zfFRD6oGAAJ) which have thrown up more questions than answers. So I have posted this as a discussion. We've also been told we may have been under a negative SEO attack. We saw in SEMRush a large number of backlinks in October/November/December - at about the same time we disavowed around 1m backlinks (more on this below) but we can't see this reflected in Moz. We just got off a call with someone at Moz to try and work this out and he suggested we post here - so here goes... On 4th October for the search term 'example-term' we dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console). We also paid an external SEO consultant to review our site and see why we are dropping on the term 'example-term'. We've implemented everything and we're still dropping, the consultant thinks we may have been penalised in error (as we are a legitimate business and we're not trying to do anything untoward). In search console you could see from the graphs on the term we used to rank 1st and 2nd (you could go back 2 or 3 years and still see this). The thing we do find confusing is that we still rank very highly (if not 1st) for 'example-term + uk' and our brand name - which is very similar to 'example-term'. Timeline of events of changes: 2nd October 2018 midday: Added a CTA using something called Wisepops over the homepage - this was a full screen CTA for people to pledge on a project on our site helping with the tsunami in Indonesia (which may have had render blocking elements on). 4th October: we added a Google MyBusiness page showing our corporate headquarters as being in the UK (we did flag this on the Google MyBusiness forums and both people who responded said adding a MyBusiness page would not affect our drop in rankings). 4th October: dropped from number 2 to number 9 on Google searches (this was confirmed in Google Search Console) 4th October: Removed the Wisepops popup 5th November: Server redirect so anything coming in on / was redirected to a page without a / 12th November: Removed around 200 junk pages (so old pages, test cms pages etc that were live and still indexed). Redirects from any 404s resolved 19th November: Updated site maps and video site maps to reflect new content and remove old content. Reviewed the whole site for duplicate meta tags and titles and updated accordingly with unique ones. Fixed issues in Google Search Console for Google search console for 404 and Mobile usability. Removed embedded YouTube video from homepage. 11th December: Removed old content and content seen as not useful from indexing; 'honey pot' pages, old blog, map pages, user profile pages, project page ‘junk pages which have little SEO value’ (comments, contact project owner, backers, report project) from indexing, added ‘no-follow’ to widgets linking back to us 3rd January 2019: Changed the meta title from to remove 'example-term' (we were concerned it may have been seen as keyword stuffing) 7th January: Disavow file updated to refuse a set of external sites powered by API linking to us (these were sites like example-term.externalsite.co.uk which used to link to us showing projects in local areas - our SEO expert felt may be seen as a ‘link farm’) 11th January: Updated our ‘About us’ page with more relevant content 15th January: Changed homepage title to include 'example-term' again, footer links updated to point to internal pages rather than linking off to Intercom, homepage ordering of link elements on homepage changed (so moving external rating site link further down the page, removing underlines on one item that was not a link, fixed and instance where two h1 tags were used), removed another set of external Subdomains (i.e. https://externalsite.sitename.co.uk) from our system (these were old sites we used to run for different clients which has projects in geographical areas displayed) 18th January: Added the word 'example-term' to key content pages We're at a loss as to why we are still dropping. Please note that the above changes were implemented after we'd been ranking fine for a couple years on the 'example-term' - the changes were to try and address the drop in ranking. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Nobody15554510997900 -
Rank drop after link reclamation
Link reclamation is good activity interms of technical SEO and UX. But I noticed couple of times rank drop post the link reclamation activity. Why does this happen? What might be the cause? Beside redirecting to the most relevant page in contest to the source page content; anything else we must be looking into?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Is this traffic drop do to cutting backlinks or Penguin 2.0 (Graphs attached)
I've attached both graphs of the traffic drop. Our website rankings have been steadily declining since May of 2013. We have mostly return customers or our drop would have been much more severe. There's never been any warnings in GWT We cut a bunch (but not all) of our paid links in May of 2013. We didn't have a manual penalty or anything, we just wanted to see what happened if we moved towards being white hat. When our rankings plumited, we quit cutting links. We currently have about 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was May 22, 2013 In looking at these graphs, was it our cutting links that caused the traffic drop, or was it Penguin 2.0? I'm looking for people who have experience in diagnosing a "Unique Visits" Google analytics graph for Penguin and have experience with what happens when you cut links. It looks like, in viewing the graphs, that May 23 was more the day that the big drop happened, but you guys have more experience with this than me. Thank you. ga.png ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Keyword in alt tag and future G Updates
Hello, I notice that it is common practice to put the page's keywords directly into an alt tag. I don't see how this helps the user and how it helps the user using screen readers and such. Do you think future G updates will slightly penalize pages with alt tags that are just the page's keywords and not a helpful phrase? What do you recommend to put in alt tags in light of future G updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW1 -
Penguin Maybe? Ranking low for main term: Trying to find cause and correct
Hello, For nlpca(dot)com one of our main keywords is the term "NLP" We are ranking 25th for that term.Possible causes: 1. keyword stuffing on home page, though we need to use the term over and over again to describe ourselves. Also, competitors like nlpco(dot)com and nlpu(dot)com also mention "NLP" a lot 2. Backlink profile: see this spreadsheet. We have a lot of sites from other countries and many sitewides but all natural and almost all branded. Ou company names are NLP Institute of California, NLP California, and NLP and Coaching Institute. 3. nlpcacoach(dot)org is a sitewide footer link. So is iepdoc.nl. We're going to ask the first site to take our link down. 4. No "What is NLP" article. I think that might help. 5. Most of our 60 articles are posted on other sites. We author about 30 of them. I'm working on authorship via rel="author" and rel="me" links. There's usually 2 authors 6. Most of the title tags used to be 4 keywords separated by pipes -"|" I changed them all after the updates took the keyword "NLP" down. That's about all I can think of. What do we do or clean up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Site dropped suddenly. Is it due to htaccess?
I had a new site that was ranking on the first page for 5 keywords. My site was hacked recently and I went through a lot of trouble to restore it. Last night, I discovered that my site was nowhere to be found but when i searched site: mysite.com, it was still ranking which means it was not penalized. I discovered the issue to be a .htaccess and it have been resolved. My question is now that the .htaccess issue is resolved , will my site be restored back to the first page? Is there additional things that i should do? I have notified google by submitting my site
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | semoney0 -
Has anyone ever reported a spammer and actually seen them de-ranked?
I have a few competitors outranking me using black hat SEO. I reported them to Google, and I'm just wondering if Google will even look at it. What has been your experience with this? Has anyone ever gotten results?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | UnderRugSwept1