Drastic Fluctuation in Site Rankings
-
All,
Hope you are having a good day!
Recently I had a strange issue with one of my site and I am not sure what might have caused it. I am sure this would be a good place to discuss about it and get some feedback from the elite people in the industry.
Here is the problem.
Last weekend (On sunday noon) my site which was ranking on Page 1 suddenly dropped its ranking for its main keywords to nowhere, I was panicked to see what was happening and by the end of the day it was slowly coming back and by next morning everything was back. Again on Wednesday noon, the same thing happened. However, this time it din't come up by the next morning. Making it worse, all of my keyword rankings went down from good spots to no where and there was a point when I could no longer see my site. I was worried something might have happened this time and was not sure what could the reason be. On Friday afternoon all the ranking came up better than the previous (which is a very good news for me). At the moment, my site is doing very well and I am really happy about it.
I did realize that Google was updating their Algorithm, but this behavior is the strangest I have seen over years. Can someone enlighten me on this peculiar behavior. Is there something wrong with my site or is it a common thing that I have never noticed? I have never done anything blackhat for the site. To be honest, all I have done is some low level link building on the site and the site had some advantage of a re-direct from one my previous site which was doing very well in search engines (I changed it to take advantage of the new domain I had).
Your opinions/suggestions are a appreciated.
-
The comment was for irldonalb, asking for more information about how it could be said that it wouldn't happen again.
-
If that comment is pointed to me, I was not sarcastic. I was happy someone assuring that it wont happen again.
-
Could you elaborate a bit on your opinion, or add a notation that this is sarcasm?
-
I am not sure how can you ascertain that, but thank you so much. I feel happy
-
It won't happen again - trust me.
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
-
Google smacked my site and dropped all rankings, can't find out why
I have checked out everything, I mean everything. We have no dupe content, our content is a little thin, but it is ours and accurate enough to help our customers.We follow all SEO guidelines and make sure we de-index any pages with no / little content (like privacy, or faq) All in all, we haven't done any major updates to the sites, and everything was great (page one on almost all kw) but beginning of the month, all kw wiped to the second page, than third, than back to one and now pretty much gone (rank 100-200) I really don't know what to do. We didn't receive a manual action, and the last algo update was nothing big to cause such a drastic change. Meanwhile our competition (multiple sites) are gaining in ranks and nothing happened to them (most of them have even less content and not even SSL) Negative SEO is out of question, I check all links via ahrefs every other day. Any help is appreciated Thanks
Search Behavior | | s-s0 -
Page ranking in .com but not in .co.uk
Hi there, I tried to search the Q&A but couldn't find any answers to my issue. We have a page that is ranking #2 for the term "translation memory" in google.com, but it doesn't show in Google.co.uk. This has been like this for weeks now. We are not targeting any specific country in GWT. Does anyone know a possible explanation for this? Thank you.
Search Behavior | | SDLOnlineChannel0 -
Local vs Global Search Results Yield Very Different Rankings Lately
When I monitor my website's rankings, I always do it from Canada (direct connection) and from the USA (using a VPN in Arizona). I've been monitoring rankings this way for the last 3 years. Most of the time, I got similar results (-5 / +5) from both location. My website is a ".com" and targets an international audience. Lately (is it since Panda 22?), I've seen dramatic differences in rankings from both locations. Some keywords will rank in the top 10 on Google.com (from the USA) while they will appear on page 3, 4, 5 and even lower on Google.ca (from Canada). The thing is, the top 10 results on Google.ca are not even from canadian websites. Fact of the matter, there are even some results from India websites (.in) in the top 10! I understand that Google.ca will give advantage to websites from Canada (or targeting the canadian market / .ca domain name) over international / US websites but there's never been such a huge difference in rankings until lately. Has anybody else experienced this? What are your thoughts?
Search Behavior | | sbrault740 -
Blog posts not getting indexed and being outranked by scrapper sites.
Our Google traffic has dropped significantly over the last year and now we're struggling to even get our blog posts indexed. It's been extremely discouraging and we're trying to do what ever we can to fix it. I've included a screenshot of our Google traffic as well as Pages Indexed according to WebmasterTools. http://i.imgur.com/Wu1D8.jpg The Problem Our blog posts are frequently not getting indexed. Many times they are outranked by low authority scraper sites, our Twitter/FB account, etc. Sometimes our homepage will rank instead of the blog post. Sometimes we'll break a news story, get tons of quality backlinks, and still be nowhere in Google. Pretty much the only Google traffic we see is from existing posts. Still 3,200 pages indexed when we have only 1,600 posts. I guess this isn't really a problem... just waiting for the meta noindex to take effect. More details We've seen no duplicate content or other warnings from WebmasterTools. We've been constantly acquiring quality backlinks from credible sites. We deleted the useless content and fixed the canonical issues that were a result of switching servers. History Our site is a news/entertainment blog. The traffic usually has spikes depending on what's going on in the news. Nov 1, 2011 - Site kept maxing out at 30k+ visits so we switched servers. Jan 30, 2012 - Hired a writer so we could focus on other aspects of the site. Apr 19, 2012 - Noticed our posts weren't getting indexed like they used to. Suspected our writer was spinning articles but couldn't find any evidence. 90% of our blog posts were nowhere to be found in Google. Scrapper sites would outrank us for our own stories... even our Twitter account was ranking ahead of us. IF our story would show up in Google it would usually be the home page instead of the blog post. Sep 2012 - Finally got more serious about addressing the problem. Noticed a couple potentially big problems and started making changes. Canonical Issues non-www site didn't redirect to www. It showed 2 different link profiles according to OpenSiteExplorer and 0 backlinks according to Webmaster Tools. Wordpress shortlinks weren't redirecting to the actual permalink. For instance http://www.domain.com/?p=123 and http://www.domain.com/post-example were both getting indexed. For every post there were 4 different versions that Google had to choose from. http://domain.com/?p=123, http://www.domain.com/?p=123, http://domain.com/post-example, and http://www.domain.com/post-example I figured the canonical issues must have happened when we switched servers which was the reason for the drop in WebmasterTools indexed pages and increase in Not Selected pages. FIXED (Sep 15): One we fixed the canonical issue the Indexed Pages went back up however the Not Selected is still the same. Duplicate Content When we first created our site we wanted to have tons of images for each musician/athlete/actor/etc. so we uploaded about 5-10 for each person. We created a blog post for each image with no writing and the exact same post titles. As a result there were TONS of low-quality, similar posts, with virtually identical permalinks. e.g. http://www.domain.com/james-smith1, http://www.domain.com/james-smith2, http://www.domain.com/james-smith3, etc. A crawl on Sep 26 showed over 550 duplicate content warnings. FIXED (Oct 1): We deleted/301 redirected the useless pages (they weren't getting traffic anyways) and by the next crawl the number was almost to 0... which it's at now. We also had TONS of tags (since there're constantly new names in the media) that were getting indexed so we had meta robots noindex them. Questions: Why aren't a majority of our posts getting indexed? Were we penalized or just stuck because of a filter? How long should it take for meta robots to noindex the tags pages? (I did it on Sep 25 but they are still there) If a site is scraping our content (same title, image, excert) but linking to us, should we contact them and tell them to remove it? Is there anything else we need to do start getting our blog posts indexed like they used to? Should we try contacting Google to re-evaluate our site? Sorry, that was a LOT of writing. If anyone wants the URL please let me know so I can PM it to you. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Wu1D8.jpg
Search Behavior | | gfreeman230 -
Why would my Bounce Rate drop from 40% to 2% over 3 days without making any major changes to my site www.hiltonhead.com?
Our Wordpress site has had an historical bounce rate of 40% for the last 3 years but last Thursday it dropped to 17%, Friday to 7% and now is running at 2%. The pageviews per visit have also increased from 3 to almost 6. Thanks
Search Behavior | | CorkyGifford0 -
My impression drop drastically in the past two days.
My impression drop drastically in the past two days. What could be the cause for it. My website is http://4pmdesign.com Thank you in advance.
Search Behavior | | 4pm0 -
Why are my SERPs fluctuating 60+/- on a weekly basis?
I have a blog that's gone from not indexed, to indexed and ranked around 85 on 3 target key phrases. With a bit of SEO the blog jumped to around 11th on those 3 key phases in a week or so. Now, the following week, it has bombed back to 76th. Why the dramatic fluctuations?
Search Behavior | | ksracer0 -
Problems with my bounce rate for my site
Hi on my site Weight Loss Hypnotherapy site i have a bonce rate off 55.1 where up to now 60 people have stayed on the site for less than one sec and i would like to know how to combat this and how to keep people on the site for longer. I have tried playing around with the content but i am thinking about adding images to make the page look better but would like the advice from others. many thanks for your help.
Search Behavior | | ClaireH-1848860
