Huge Ranking drop without touching the page
-
I was ranked #5 for the keyword "Become a Sportscaster" - had been in the top 10 for months, then all of a sudden dropped to #46. I haven't touched this page in a few months, so I don't think I messed anything up.
Any thoughts on why such a dramatic drop would happen?
Brian Clapp
Founder, SportsTVJobs.com
-
will do thanks!
-
Hi Brian,
I believe the recently introduced SEOmoz Ranking process is currently in Beta (I am in the Beta group) and Casey did specifically ask for feedback on any apparent anomalies during the Beta testing phase.
Just caught up with Casey and the answer will be slightly different depending on whether you are a member of the Beta or not, so just a correction to my original comment:
- If you are not in the Beta then you should email support [at] seomoz.org
- If you are a member of the Rankings Beta and forgot - email the Beta team!
This being the case, it would probably be a good idea to email him direct to bring the issue to his attention.
Sha
-
appreciate the response dvtruong - I worked with Angie for many years, back when I was the news director at Fox Sports Northwest - great lady. Anyway back to SEO - we've started getting more links for cnn.com, a bunch of edu's and some other big sports sites - so I hope to see our overall numbers increase. Quality content is our main priority so glad to see we are on the right track, we only lauched in NOvember last year so I know its a slow ramp..
thanks again for the insight.
Brian
p.s. we're in seattle too.
-
Someone else reported a similar issue with their SEOmoz ranking report. I would suggest contacting the Help Desk so they can investigate the issue. It seems like a bug.
-
interesting ryan thanks - I actually was referring to the ranking from my SEOMOZ crawl this past week... so no operator error. According to my ranking report I dropped from 5 to 46 last week and then from 46 to 48 this week.
guess its an seomoz reporting issue if you still see it ranked 5th.
-
I was ranked #5 for the keyword "Become a Sportscaster" - had been in the top 10 for months, then all of a sudden dropped to #46
I called a friend who works at Google and he restored your ranking to the #5 spot.
Ok, I am teasing but only a bit. I took a look and in Google.com I see you ranked #5 for the term "Become a Sportscaster". Perhaps when you checked the term was slightly altered. An extra space, a missing space, adding a plural, etc. can all change the search results.
-
It could be a lot of things. Google makes changes to their ranking algorithm about 400 times a year, so they may have turned a knob that happened to affect your site a lot.
I checked out your site and it looks like it has a lot of quality content so I don't think the Panda Update would have been a factor. I liked the Angie Mentink interview - I know her well since I'm in Seattle.
I would not worry too much about one single phrase because it is probably driving a very small percentage of your overall traffic. How is your organic search traffic overall? That is much more important than a single phrase since 70% of search traffic are from long tail searches. I would recommend continuing to pump out remarkable content that people want to share and you should be in good shape in the long run. It looks like your site has 58 linking domains according to Open Site Explorer. Increasing this number over time should help with more competitive phrases.
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
-
A huge spike in traffic, mainely from social and organic
Hi there, We see this huge spike in traffic to our home page for almost a week now. When I check the source I see a crazy spike in Facebook traffic (25,630% change!!), Twitter and organic. The spike in traffic is to our home page alone. The bounce rate is much higher than avg. and time on page is shorter. Also, no. of new visitors to the site is higher than average. The traffic is obviously low quality and is hurting our site's statistics. Any ideas as to why this is happening? Many thanks in advance, Gal
Reporting & Analytics | | tomedess0 -
New e-commerce launched, drop in traffic
One of our clients launched a new e-commerce site and there was a significant (60%) drop in traffic in Google Analytics following the launch. We are about 10 days into the new site, and our suspicion is that the move has caused a decrease in their site authority which has lowered their search position. The old site had the store at sitename.com/store. The new site has a Shopify store at shop.sitename.com. There were very few external followed links to the store pages, so we thought that there would be little effect for overall site traffic by moving the store to a subdomain. Any recommendations for next steps on diagnosing the problem and working towards a solution?
Reporting & Analytics | | DesignHammer0 -
Does Lightbox Gallery Clicks Count Positively Toward Page Rank?
When a user clicks through a lightbox gallery, are these counted as a click through for page rank? I am using WonderPlugin Grid Gallery on multiple pages with multiple galleries. I do not want these clicks to be wasted. Please advise. Regards, Clever Name SEO www.clevernameseo.com
Reporting & Analytics | | cindymariesilva0 -
How to safely exclude search result pages from Google's index?
Hello everyone,
Reporting & Analytics | | llamb
I'm wondering what's the best way to prevent/block search result pages from being indexed by Google. The way search works on my site is that search form generates URLs like:
/index.php?blah-blah-search-results-blah I wanted to block everything of that sort, but how do I do it without blocking /index.php ? Thanks in advance and have a great day everyone!0 -
Have i got a manual action on rankings?
Hi guys, so recently Google released the 'manual actions' tab under 'search traffic' in Google webmaster tools. Recently hit by panda i checked this and got: " Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole." However was this not the message before saying it was not a complete manual ban, just affecting a few bad links? I was hit badly in the rankings but still have some good terms and traffic is not that bad still from organic non-brand. I have fixed many of the bad links (horrible articles submissions that went out of control in 2009) - do i do a reconsideratikn request? i have disavowed the bad links that are left 3 weeks ago? so do i wait to see if disavow works or do a reconsideration request?I was sure this was like the message sent out before which meant it wasn't that bad for your site, just a few links ignored? Any advice much appreciated, thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | pauledwards0 -
SERPS showing wrong page
Hi there, searching Google UK for the term 'wireless alarms' returns the following page at position 39'ish - http://www.compoundsecurity.co.uk/security-information/gsm-gprs-alarm-systems The page that should be returned for that search is - http://www.compoundsecurity.co.uk/security-equipment The page being returned by Google at present is not optimised in any way for 'wireless alarms' but the page it should be showing is optimised for that term and the Moz grading tool agrees. The correct page also has a higher PA and 533 inbound links and the page being displayed has a lower PA and only 3 links. Could some kind soul tell me what i am doing wrong please? Thank you Si
Reporting & Analytics | | DaddySmurf0 -
Does anyone know what's happened to google analytics -> traffic sources -> SEO -> queries many of my accounts are showing a drop to zero in the laste few days
Howdy mozzers It's in the question title really. Zero impressions showing for the last few days on. Multiple accounts Any thought out there
Reporting & Analytics | | Big_Partnership0 -
Woes in organic ranking... Post Penguin issue?
Hello all, First post here. Site:http://www.symbolphoto.com I'd done a ton of work to get my SEO where it needs to be, however, after looking at my traffic post April 15-22nd, it's gone completely downhill. I don't rank organically, which i'd like for one single term 'b*ston wedding photographer'. What am i missing? I'm assuming Penguin may be a part of this, but i haven't participated in any link schemes... am i being penalized and if so, is it evident why? Help is much appreciated! replace * with o.
Reporting & Analytics | | symbolphoto0