Google rankings tanked....Now what?
-
We just experience a drop in Google rankings, some pretty harsh, across all of the keywords we have been ranking greater than 50. I’m a noob at SEO, but a technical noob so I started doing my home work. I’ve seen references to the “google dance” and “Honeymoon”, but this hit seems to have effected competitors too. Everyone seems re-ranked with several junk directories jumping up more than I think they should. Has anyone else seen this? Is this more Google algorithm adjustment or a natural settling based on our new SEO attempts? In either case, what should we do next? I know there is a holistic approach and everything is important however, we need bang for the buck at this point to before we start bleeding. One or two next steps?
Our industry is residential cleaning and the site is www.bitabliss.com
Here is a little history:
The site that’s been running for about 2 years. We initially put up a very basic “throw something up” site without much thought of SEO except for some basics and a long tail approach with a blog, FaceBook and Twitter. We launched an updated site on Feb 23. with new theme and this time some, “on page” work to better hit the basics. The site structure was kept the same and we added on some more localized content in hopes to take advantage of local searches. Also, enter SEOMoz to get us tracking things (Yay MOZ). Until yesterday, we had been doing pretty well in some of our target cites even with the more basic site. When we launched the new site focusing on page titles, descriptions and page content, and a few directory attempts. We started to see some incremental growth. It seemed to me that this kind of growth meant that we were doing the right things and doing a better job than some of the other sites. Any way, yesterday we got smacked down. This seems too harsh for a for the slow increases we have seen over the last month.Any thoughts you have would be great appreciated.
Thanks!
-Shawn
-
Certainly possibly that it was a small algo shift, but unless lots of other sites fell in the rankings, too, I'd say the fresh boost/loss is the more likely culprit in this case.
BTW - you might want to check out this slide deck for some ideas on growing content/links/inbound marketing: http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/inbound-marketing-for-startups-in-2011
-
In our case, new content comes in the form of blog posts, tweets and FaceBook updates. The goal is a minimum two blog posts per month with topics that are related to our business (tips hints, products) or community focused (events, current affairs, etc).
-
Rand,
Thanks! I had a feeling links were going to be going to be high on the list. I'll head that direction.That is one of things I see as a huge advantage the big franchise outfits have. Do you think there is anything to this "reshuffling" that I think I see? For several keywords where the big chains were near the top, we all seem to have been pushed down.
Thank you!
Shawn
-
adding new content, such as?
-
Links is a bit narrow - I'd say citations of any type. We've seen examples where having a site's name brand mentioned in a news article led to a flurry of crawling and higher rankings. It's also the case that adding new content to your site, making it a better converting site, improving usability, design, navigation, etc. can all have positive impacts on your ultimate goals and on SEO, too - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals
-
So lets say when you done optimizing your website the only way to move in ranks is getting new links?
-
No - definitely not. I'm saying that for competitive search results, having a good site and good content isn't enough. You need to show the engines that you're also an important, well-referenced resource and that means citations (links, tweets, shares, mentions, news articles, local citations, etc).
Links are important, but link building without the basics of a good site and business (which Bitabliss.com seems to have) is folly.
-
Rand so what you saying is that the most important part of SEO is a link building?
-
Hi Shawn - it looks to me like the biggest issue is lack of quality links. I think what may have happened is that your on-site efforts, relaunch and start of link building efforts gave you a short term boost that's now ending. I looked through your links at Yahoo! and with OpenSiteExplorer (the latter is usually slower in finding new ones), and there's only a very small number and from only a few sites.
I'd work on earning those citations from quality sources and over time, you'll likely regain some of those rankings. Many SEOs have, in the past, observed something akin to a "fresh boost" and I suspect that's what happened here.
BTW - this link building tip in particular might be useful - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local - in addition to the local links, you can likely get lots of good direct links, too.
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
-
Canonical error from Google
Moz couldn't explain this properly and I don't understand how to fix it. Google emailed this morning saying "Alternate page with proper canonical tag." Moz also kinda complains about the main URL and the main URL/index.html being duplicate. Of course they are. The main URL doesn't work without the index.html page. What am I missing? How can I fix this to eliminate this duplicate problem which to me isn't a problem?
Technical SEO | | RVForce0 -
Google indexing is slowing down?
I have up to 20 million unique pages, and so far I've only submitted about 30k of them on my sitemap. We had a few load related errors during googles initial visits, and it thought some were duplicates, but we fixed all that. We haven't gotten a crawl related error for 2 weeks now. Google appears to be indexing fewer and fewer urls every time it visits. Any ideas why? I am not sure how to get all our pages indexed if its going to operate like this... love some help thanks! HnJaXSM.png
Technical SEO | | RyanTheMoz0 -
Can we re rank our Penalyzed website in Google?
Hello This is Maqbul, from India. I have a jobs portal blog [ bharatrecruit.com]. It was getting around 50K to 100K Views a Day and made me $100 a day. But after a few months, my competitor made negative SEO with 12,000 Spammy backlinks. Suddenly my site was hit by Google and now it is getting 200 to 300 Pageviews a day. So the question is I did not disavow bad links for a long time like 3 to 4 months. Now I disavow all the bad links but the website is not ranking. Can we re-rank this site or create another website. Please reply must. None of the bloggers can answer this. Thanks, Regards Maqbul
Technical SEO | | vinaso960 -
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 -
Google Penalty Investigation
Hi All, I've recently had a google penalty, and have spent a long while working through tying up any loose ends with my site (I'm building a new one, so you'll still see some probs on my current one). My search referrals do slowly seem to be recovering, but only for variations of terms that are similar to 'bike repair'. Now, my site does primarily offer bike repair advice, so that's a good thing, but I'm not yet ranking for any of my specific keywords. One example is that I used to rank quite high for the term 'schrader valve'. Is this a signal of anything in particular? Or can I not read anything specific into this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | madegood0 -
Google not showing my website ?
The website is medicare.md. if you search for term "medicare doctors PG county maryland" it is #1 in bing and yahoo but not even showing on google.com first TEN pages, although not banned. Interestingly if you do that search on google.co.pk it is #4. Quite Puzzuling !! Would appreciate any help or advice . Sherif Hassan
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Rankings Dropped Dramatically
Hi All, I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why. We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com. The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters. Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs. In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically. keyword 1 4th Jan position 22 9th Jan position 90 keyword 2 4th jan position 34 9th jan position 89 keyword 3 4th jan position 12 9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others) We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings. I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz. Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0 -
Google Plus 1
How google plus 1 votes can affect your position in google search engine? On my website i have a google plus button, i have just 3 votes, if i buy lets say 100 votes, but slowly, in a month, will this affect my ranking positively?
Technical SEO | | prunarevic0