Drop in non-branded organic search April 1
-
I saw an intense drop in non-branded organic search for major pages on my site on April 1st this year. The homepage wasn't affected and it's not an annual thing. I've attached a screen shot showing the drop.
I'm new to the company and recently learned that they had hired a pretty black hat company last year and I'm worried that this is Panda...although the timing seems wrong. Has anyone experienced panda effects between the two updates?
I'd love to get some feedback!!
-
What happens when you look at non-branded organic search by engine? I want to make sure that we're talking about a Google dropoff here, and not that suddenly you've been de-indexed from Yahoo and Bing and we're looking at the wrong issues.
Were there any code changes to your site recently where something might have gone wrong?
Did you run Adwords or some other type of paid search advertising that wasn't correctly tagged (thus showing up as organic) that ended and is now showing a huge drop?
-
I can't explain the reason for the drop, but if you want to get it back up you need to get some more links for the individual pages. You've got some great links into the domain, plenty of domain trust and authority, but the pages themselves such as /teach don't fair so well. This means they'll get passed link juice internally but they certainly do do with more external links coming in, and with keyworded anchor text at that (though don't over-do it and make it look unnatural):
Currently, for that page you have: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ciee.org%252Fteach%252F/a!anchors
It would be well worth you changing the anchor text on internal links too. i.e. at the moment, it's just "learn more" from the main link on the homepage.
I'd use the campaign tool on here and run a crawl test too, whilst the site looks great... it seems problematic in many ways (gut feel from a brief look), I wouldn't be surprised if you got a lot of crawl errors back in the report.
Maybe take a look at Rand's stuff on keyword cannibalization too, your page titles have many similar keywords in. i.e. "Teaching English Overseas" on pretty much every title for each country. Whilst there are different keywords in the titles too, I don't think this would help... maybe "Teaching English in <country>" would be a better option.</country>
-
ciee.org. ciee.org/teach was affected the worst, but also was .org/study, /highschool, etc.
-
What's the URL?
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
-
Export domain reference full on google search console
Hi all My website is https://simthanglong.vn/ and it have +7000 Referring domains from competitor use tools bad backlink. i want to disavow it but Google Search Console accept export up to 1000 domains. So, What I have to do. Help me Please.67oetuz.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | simthanglongdotvn0 -
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 -
SEMrush vs GA rankings drop since February and December 2018?
I am wondering if someone can help me understand what's going on with our site. We had a 50% drop in the number of keywords ranking from February 2018 to October in SEMrush. Looking at SEMrush, I am actually seeing a drop after 2/208 with many competitor's sites as well. We saw moderate improvement in November, but around December 6th, we started seeing a decline the number of keywords ranking again. In Google Analytics, there was a 10-15% drop in traffic after February 2018, which recovered September to December, but since early December, there is a drop again. In GWT, I am seeing something similar to analytics with impressions and clicks. We have done some SEO the past couple of years, but we have taken care to do things white-hat so as not to incur a penalty. We have also invested in writing content for our blog on a regular basis. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Has google done well with these search results?
I am struggling to grasp the new logic behind google, my understanding was that they wanted to return more related searches so that the search matched the results giving people exactly what they are looking for from trusted suppliers. However I work in the vacation rental niche and I have found that the individual long tail searches have started to become less valuable as they are no longer giving the exact property. Here is a screenshot of the top 10 results for the key phrase "10 bedroom villas in quinta do lago" Position 1 & 2 are good results and would be expected however the next 7 positions are completely not related to the search, yes it is quinta do lago. But I am looking specifically for a 10 bedroom villa, none of these pages offer 10 bedroom villas. I actually found my listing outside the top 20 and mine is a 10 bedroom villa in quinta do lago. Does anyone have anything that can enlighten me on this? Thanks Andy 0bqdRJi
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | iprosoftware0 -
SERP dropped Today ??
Hi, Long story shot. my 2 main keywords 'makeup artist sydney' and
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EdsonGroupMedia
'sydney makeup artist' that have fluctuated in #1 - 4 position for the last year even after panda, have now moved to the 2page as of last night 23 May 13. I have checked webmaster tools and have no messages or error, i have checked Bing and still rank # 3 for the keywords. I am all out of ideas! am I being paranoid ? there hasn't been any major changes to the site and I don't seem to have major duplicate content issues! Any suggestions and Ideas would be great, website is www.sparrowmakeup.com.au Thanks.0 -
Ways to find private - non-indexed forums in a niche
I would wondering if there were ways to find non-indexed content in private forums/discussion boards. Is there a scalable 'foot-print' that suggests the forum has a private section?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0 -
Links In Blog Posts: 1 Paragraph VS. Full Article
Hey guys, I've been using an article network to post unique articles (not spun). Been posting 1 paragraph articles with 1 text link. Just wondering what the main difference would be if I were to post a full article with 2 or 3 text links vs 1 paragraph with 1 text link, besides the fact that you get more links and save more time writing only 1 paragraph. Will the full article with 3 backlinks improve keyword ranks more or not by much? Cheers!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | upick-1623910 -
Sudden Ranking Drop from 1st Page
My client's Website http://countryfeelingholidays.com is experiencing a huge drop of its rankings since Aug 1st. It was at 2nd on 1st page on google.lk for the keyword Holidays Sri Lanka . But When I checked it last it has gone to 20th page. I really cannot find a reason for this drop . Only thing that comes to mind is that we put a comment on a blog but finally it appeared on all pages because of top commentator plugin . huge rise in backlinks in oneday . from next day we lost its ranking on google.lk but on google.com it is still at the same position where it used to be . What would be the reason for this ? Could it be a penelty ? What should we do now to get its ranking back ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Osanda0