What Happend To My Ranks? Began Dec 22 - detailed Info Inside
-
I have a .co.uk domain that was setup in November 2009 and it has always done pretty will in the SERPS. In Oct-Dec last year I could literally publish a post and be on the first page for a keyword with no backlinks at all.
All of my posts/pages feature-
100% unique content (min 500 words)
Imagery
Embeded video which is part of a video sitemap
External links
keyword density between 2 and 4
keyword in first paragraph bolded
Title tags are written like KEYWORD - Title, eg BLUE WIDGETS - What You Need To KnowThen this happened- http://i53.tinypic.com/2a62fb8.jpg
On december 22nd - december 24th i see a sharp decline in traffic, and then a further decline december 31st - Jan 1st?On that graph I have marked out changes I have made to the site. The bottom bar that was deployed on Nov 30th was simply a floating price comparison bar stuck to the bottom of pages.
Other than that change, nothing else had changed on the site during that period.
Here's what I have done so far to try and fix things-
Optimized load time (now 2.5 seconds)
Deployed MaxCDN content delivery network
Removed some pages which were similar, but 100% unique (unlock pages on graph)
Change H2 tags to H1 (previously there were no H1 tags)
Removed the bottom bar on nov 30th
reduced price compare results to 3 from 10
Ran a broken link check
Noindex/Follow 2nd pages of tag/categories pages
Improved blog posting rates to at least twice a dayI have 100% indexation rate across the site, an average load time of 2.5 seconds. I've tried everything I can think of, and can't seem to pin point the issue and after 5 months of trying to get it fixed I think an outside view is needed!
So what happened at Google mid-end december?
Any advice/thoughts/feedback is greatly appreciated, thanks for your time.
-
Hi Ryan,
I have posted the stats for that further down in this thread
-
Today all my rankings have reappeard!
I have done some analysis of the top 3 competitors for 4 keywords in my niche looking at onsite and offsite factors and comparing them to my page which can be seen here https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AsI-kgMI5Y7qdHhrSDdZUEY0aVJhT2ZZamZwN2lwOXc&hl=en&authkey=CP7Zo7QC
That actually throws up some quite interesting results! Are my pages over optimized?
-
Yes you can postt url
-
Update: As of this morning (UK morning) nearly all of my remaining ranks have disappeared whilst doing a check with Market Samurai and confirming this with manual searches.
-
Hi,
Are we ok to post URL's here? Some forums frown upon this.
THe new design was much cleaner and lightweight. I was careful to make sure I copied the site structure/internal linking across with the new design. However a new plugin doubled the load time on the blog which is where we see the drop after the new design deployment.
-
HI Ryan,
Firstly, the post you have linked is a great resource and I shall take a closer look at that today. Takes a while for my brain to get going in the morning Although my previous analysis has shown that no specific keywords were affected and it was sitewide but your approach to analysis might find something.
I have considered pushing some adwords/yahoo/bing campaigns to help recover some traffic as earnings have taken a serious hit recently. In fact this month I expect living expense to outweight earnings.
I will have a hard time doing a year on year analysis as this time last year the site was only 6 months old and only ranking for a couple of terms.
-
Hi,
Well the WTF is to indicate where the drop occured and never recovered from. I expect drops at that time of the year because people have other things to do, but I would expect to recover shortly after in my niche once everyone has got over their hangovers
The new design was simpler and cleaner with minimal use of imagery. I was careful to replicate the site structure (eg archives in same place etc) but the reason it bombed is because load time shot up from about 5 seconds to 12 seconds thanks to a dodgy plugin.
Since then i have done a lot of load time optimization
Looking at analytics, the rankings dropped across the whole site and not a specific area of the site.
The competition pretty much looks the same, although there is one site that is literally a list of about 100 affiliate links and no unique content which consistenly ranks well across this niche for some reason.
-
At xmass visits usally drop. so it is hard to tell when your problems actualy start. but it guess it is your new design that is causing problems.
Can we see url, be good to see old and new design
-
My sites take a big hit at Christmas!
-
I chuckled when I saw us respond to this simultaneously with, "Christmas, duh."
Matthew, to help clarify things you'll want to look at ranking differences and exactly what keywords are/were doing well and what ones are/were not doing well now. This post doesn't reference any of that.
I've frequently been referencing this SEOmoz post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ as a great practice to go through in your analytics to give you a better idea of what's going on, and giving yourself actionable goals.
-
I agree... in a lot of sectors, just one site, kicking your butt, can damage your traffic badly.
-
There's always a decline on Christmas and New Years as people typically tend to unplug on those days, especially if you're B2B or running a commerce site. The bad news is that you didn't climb back up to previous levels, but you're still not comparing year over year. I'd go to Google Trends, and plug in several years of competitors and some of your top performing keywords to give yourself a better idea of seasonal tendencies.
After you get a solid idea of those swings and figure out which competitors got a boost when you got the boot I'd do site audits on those successful competitors as well as some of the people currently beating you in the SERPs to figure out if there are ways you can improve your content and links.
Finally, I'd look into social media and advertising solutions that could help me boost traffic or natural linking as well as directing some qualified traffic to a few different types of landing pages in order to maximize conversions.
-
So what happened at Google mid-end december?
WTF? in red on your chart looks like Christmas and New Years to me.
Beyond that it looks like you put out a new design and it bombed. Without seeing before and after there is not much we can do but guess.
What can you tell from analytics? Did a competitor start beating you? Rankings drop on one portion of your site. You have access to a lot of information that you have not shared here.
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
-
Duplicate website pages indexed: Ranking dropped. Does Google checks the duplicate domain association?
Hi all, Our duplicate website which is used for testing new optimisations got indexed and we dropped in rankings. But I am not sure whether this is exact reason as it happened earlier too where I don't find much drop in rankings. Also I got replies in the past that it'll not really impact original website but duplicate website. I think this rule applies to the third party websites. But if our own domain has exact duplicate content; will Google knows that we own the website from any other way we are associated like IP addresses and servers, etc..to find the duplicate website is hosted by us? I wonder how Google treats duplicate content from third party domains and own domains. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
When sub domains take away the traffic from search; will this helps or hurts main website rankings?
Hi all, We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
How to you get a company details to appear on the right side of google searches? For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you.
For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you. https://www.google.com/search?q=dr+martens&oq=dr+martens&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2176j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8
Algorithm Updates | | vijayvasu0 -
Absolute Internal Links and their Affect on Rankings for Local Businesses
For many localized search terms (City + Profession), I'm noticing that OpenSiteExplorer is reporting high numbers of backlinks for anchortext from Absolute internal links from that same domain. Now, I'm familiar with the difference in relative and absolute internal links but am wondering if this type of linking may be carrying a lot of weight for rankings. It may be a correlation over causation situation if it's more that those companies that are including absolute internal links for terminology are just doing a better job (generally) with internal linking... but I feel like this may be something worth digging into. Everything I have read says that search engines view absolute and relative internal links essentially equally but does anybody have their own insight on the effectiveness for these two types of internal links in regards to small local businesses who otherwise are getting basically no links at all?
Algorithm Updates | | Kirch0 -
Why does this website rank so well?
We've just taken on a new client who wants to rank well for 'Emergency dentist' related keywords in the London area and they have identified a website that they would like to compete with rankings wise. www.valedental.com I've done a backlink analysis with Open Site explorer and it says that the domain only has 2 inbound links? I've also done a who-is lookup and the domain was only registered in December 2012. Any idea why it is ranking so well for 'emergency dentist' 'emergency dentists' 'emergency dentist london' 'dental emergencies' (when searched for in the london area) thanks in advance for any help Marcus
Algorithm Updates | | dentaldesign0 -
Measuring Author Rank
It's pretty clear that "AuthorRank" is going to be a big thing for SEO. Although the main principles seem to be pretty straightforward (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building) what I'm less clear about is how we can start to think about author influence as a measurable metric. Webmaster tools gives us Author Stats as an impact on the site's impressions/CTR, but how do we measure the influence of an individual author? Are those factors even defined? Will we get to a stage where authors can be given a Klout-like score for Google Authorship? If not that, how will it look? This will be a HUGE question to solve for future content development strategies, and is something I'm thinking a lot about right now. Best, Matt.
Algorithm Updates | | MattBarker3 -
Why is this site ranking 1st?
I'm a relative SEO newbie, so please go easy on me. I've been an SEOMOZ pro user for a few months and have used it to dramatically improve my organic rankings. However, for the life of me, I cannot determine why the site that currently ranks number one, does so. For the factors I can determine, they shouldn't be ranking where they are, but reality is different. Could someone please offer me some ideas? My target keyword is "photography classes edmonton" My site is www.bsop.ca and I'm targetting the Google Canada engine. Any and all assistance is appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | pburwell0 -
CTR for Google Rankings
I run a local business, and I'm working on ranking for keyword + city. I currently rank on the first page for just about every keyword I'm working on, but only the top 3 for a little less than half. Because the search volume is so low for each keyword (for most cities Google doesn't have an estimated monthly search volume) the grand total of a few searches a month for each keyword + city combination is where I get my traffic. Although I seem to be getting consistently higher in the rankings, I am curious as to how much more traffic I can expect. I read somewhere that sites that are ranked number one are clicked 50% of the time, number two 20% of the time, number three 15% and from there on it goes down fast. Rank 7 and on is below 1%. Probably around 30% of my keywords are ranked between 7-10 and probably about 20% are ranked 4-6. Are the CTR numbers fairly accurate? I understand that there are a lot of influences on CTR, such as title/description, but generally is that somewhat accurate? If it is, I am missing out on A LOT of traffic. I am pulling about 800 unique visitors a month from Google. If I get in the top 3 for most of my keywords, can I expect significantly more traffic? I ask the question because there are many other things I could be doing with my time to help the business aside from SEO. I don't want to be working constantly on SEO if traffic is only going to increase very little.
Algorithm Updates | | bjenkins240