Design features as a ranking factor?
-
i created a new design of my website, very clean and highly orientated towards conversion. its a far better looking site than the old one but the navigation is almost the same. a few days after i uploaded the new site we were ranked number 1 on the biggest keyphrase in my industry.
Does google crawl design feature, maybe with something like conversion heat mapping software and include that as a ranking factor?
love your thoughts on this one.
-
Uhhh, Corey,
You said you have always paid in the past for SEO, I know SuperlativeB and I sent invoices, did you not get invoices from Alan or Simon??? Odd, they usually send first.
-
thanks guys, really helpful. i am new to all of this as i have always paid for my SEO work but as a budding entrepreneur i can only see understanding it myself as a advantage for future ventures. i dont believe i have increased rankings just to be a fresh result because i have been hovering around the top 5 for months.
i asked this question because as the web advances, i can only see it as a good thing that SE's start to use new technologies to see what users see. the bit about conversion rate optimisation that confuses me a bit is my site converts more people quicker, with less distractions. this means a lower bounce rate but also means less time on site and less pages visited. this is why i think over time as CRO grows more poplular. SE"s may need to look at other ways to crawl design aspects of websites.
thanks again guys
-
The pointer that I saw as the key information in that post was that quality raters use Firefox web browser. So make sure your site is looking proper in firefox.
"I said no secrets, but I guess this is a little bit of inside information. Google raters are instructed to use Firefox, along with the web developer add-on. Do with that as you will."
-
Three good answers including yours Robert, lots of great help and pointers here for Corey
-
Thanks Alan. A good addition to the answer by yourself there.
-
Simon and Alan are correct here, but there was a recent post by Dr. Pete that also sheds a bit of light on this. Quality Raters.
This is an interesting post and I have looked back at it several times. That said, when you redesigned the site, if you took off ads, got rid of superfluous information, etc. You likely improved the way the algorithm looks at it, too. As Simon said, if you improved the ability of the spiders to crawl it, that helped. As Alan said, if it is just a freshness factor it could drop again soon. So, keep it fresh and keep it simple.
By the way, this was a great question and followed by two good answers.
-
Simon is correct, there is no such factor I have heard of. What i do suspect is that you had somthing in your old design holding you back. some unknown factor that was not liked by the SE's, putting up your new design has rid you of it.
Plus there is also the QDF factor, Query deserves freshness. where search results like to inclued a few sites that have new content along with the normal high ranking sites. in this case you can exspect to drop again, sorry
Between these points nad what Simon has suggested i think it can be eplained
-
Hi Corey
Kind of. Search Engines don't crawl design features as such, however the ability to easily crawl pages within a website is believed to be a factor, as are other factors such as page speed.
Regarding 'conversion heat mapping', I doubt it. The closest factor that I'm aware of is Engagement, as in how visitors interact with a website; do they spend time reading pages or bounce straight off, do visitors visit many pages on a website such as going through a research and purchase cycle, or do they not stick around for long.
So there are ranking factors here to take into account such as those mentioned above. Check out 'The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors' which is also included in a blog post here on SEOmoz.
Regards
Simon
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
-
Seem to have dropped completely out of the rankings
Hello there, I have a site that seems to have totally dropped out of the rankings i.e. it is now not even ranking for the name, at which it has been number 2 forever! In Moz Pro it is at 0% visibility and no keywords being ranked. No big changes in terms of the site, the pages appear to be being indexed and as far as I'm aware no dodgy backlinks. The only change lately is that we have linked it to Google Console, added 2 content pages and done a Google Adwords campaign. These pages have been used as the landing pages for this campaign - could that have had this effect? Could this be a RAG (Random Act of Google) or something else??? The site is homefarmlogs.co.uk. The is also a homefarmlogs.com - could this be causing a problem??? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Best wishes, Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frog-Marketing1 -
Rankings Continue To Drop
Hi there I'm at wits end trying to stop the slow bleed in our rankings to our store URL's that started mid March 2017 and continues through to today. I'd appreciate some pointers and hope this will throw up a challenge to someone out there. Here is the background: 1. We run an e-commerce store on Shopify with a blog. The recent ranking decline has been almost entirely on the store URL's (catalogue and product pages) while at the same time we have seen steady growth in search volumes in the blog - this makes me think we are seeing a Penguin4 penalty of some type, because the impact is confined to the store URLs. 2. We received a linked based manual penalty back in 2014 and this was successfully removed within 3 months. We have quite a large disavow file as a result. 3. Shortly after launch of Penguin 4.0 in Sept/Oct 2016 we saw a really nice boost in traffic and ascribed this to being under a previous Penguin algo penalty, now removed. 4. Come March 2017 we see a small but steady weekly drop in rankings for our store URL's only, this steady drop continues through to today and over time has become significant. Approximately a 50% decline in visitor numbers to store URL's only as of today, since March. All of this despite: a. Initially I thought this was a Panda issue (because it seemed to coincide with Panda releases in March and May) so the entire website has been rewritten (during June and July) with thin content removed across the store and the blog. Remaining content has been given a serious content boost, being very careful to watch for over-optimisation, and for keyword cannibalisation. I think I've got this right. There are also no crawl issues being highlighted by Moz Pro or SEMRush site audits. b. Recently discovered, only last week in fact. A very low domain website, trust score (0 and 0) had been copying our blog articles steadily on a weekly basis, starting Oct 2016 (yes same time as Penguin4) and only caught last week (my fault for missing this). These articles were copied verbatim with all links and so generated nearly 400 spammy backlinks to our store URLs (about 30% of all the links we have). I've had all these articles removed from the spammy site via DMCA so none of those links exist anymore (as of 8/14/17). I've also disavowed this domain with Google. Could these spam links be the issue, and Google is still needing to crawl this site to see the links are no longer there? I'm not sure because my understanding is that Penguin4 would have devalued these links to start? c. A general review of links and anchor text. I've used Moz Pro and SEMRush backlink audit (linked to Google Search Console) and have removed all toxic links by contacting web masters and using Google disavow. This included removing any links that I think are causing over optimised anchor text. After disavow, according to SEMRush, we have no toxic backlinks left and only 50 out of 1200 links with "Money" anchor text. This exercise was completed two days ago when the last disavow file was uploaded. However I don't believe there was an issue here before as toxic links were < 1% of all links and exact match "money" anchor text in the region of 5%. d. One potential problem with our backlinks is that we have quite a few high domain/high trust links to our scholarship page with anchor text "official website". The net result is that our "Other" anchor text category is just over 50% of total links - these are mainly educational institutions with .edu domains. e. A review of internal linking. We had some what I would refer to as SEO links, linking all product and collection pages across the store, through a tagging type system. This was removed two days ago as it was probably unnecessary for user experience. Other than this I have two concerns remaining with our internal linking structure. The first is that we have quite a big static navigation on the left margin of our store collection pages. This is not faceted navigation, but static. The second is that we've internally linked from almost every blog to our "key" money page in the store, however with varied and non-money anchor text. f. There is nothing in Google Search Console indicating a problem, no manual actions, no significant HTML improvements, and Google has indexed over 90% of URL's compared to the sitemap. All broken links have been fixed - there were a lot before but all fixed as of three weeks ago. g. Checking site speed in GA. Speed has remained constant over the period and we have put in some fixes to improve it. Site speed has not got worse and scores average in Googles speed checker. That's about it. It's possible that with the recent changes made with respect to b, c, e and f above I just need to wait a couple more weeks for Google to catch up, and would appreciate thoughts on this. However I'd also like some thoughts on the static navigation on our collection pages, plus importantly on linking from blog articles to mostly a single money page in the store - of all that remains I think this is potentially a problem. Our website is located at www.thekewlshop.com Many thanks for your help. Charles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | charlesfitz0 -
Drop in Mobile & Tablet Rankings
We have pretty strong rankings and have done since we launched our business in 2004. Over the past two months, we have seen a strong growth in rankings after a bit of a drip last year, however over the past week we have seen a significant drop off in organic traffic. Further analysis has shown that this is coming from mobile/tablet traffic, as the desktop traffic has been fairly consistent. There does appear to be a drop (across all main keywords) on mobile/tablet, but again there is no noticeable drop in desktop rankings. I am obviously aware Google treats these differently, but we can find no obvious reasons why this might have occurred. It is almost as if some sort of penalty has been applied on mobile/tablet only. There are no warnings or obvious problems in webmaster tools and our mobile/tablet site is mobile optimised. At a bit of a loss and would appreciate a bit of guidance in where you think we should start to understand what is causing this and how we should go about correcting it. Thanks in advance for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
January 2016: Massive Rankings Fluctuations
Hi guys. For past 2.5-3 weeks We've been experiencing lots of changes in our rankings, unfortunately, mostly going down. Our website is regexseo.com. I Know there was a January 12 "core update" in Google Algorithms, but there is no any specific information I can find. Now, here is what doesn't make sense to me and it's the same reason I'm worried if we are doing something wrong (or not doing something right? 🙂 - we've been rankings for "web design houston" in positions 2-4 for years, and recently after months of work we finally got to positions 4-6 on "seo houston". But during last two weeks we got down to beginning of the second page 😢 Our backlink profile is growing, traffic to website is growing over all and stable to main landing pages (+/- 5%), new content is being released/updated every week, nothing stupid or drastic is being done. All the metric tools are saying we are "supposed" to do really good. Now, while we are going down, our competitors have some fluctuation (+/-2 positions, but not anything close to what we are experiencing). Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK2 -
Page Rank Worse After Optimization
For a long time, we had terrible on page SEO. No keyword targeting, no meta titles or descriptions. Just a brief 2-4 sentence product description and shipping information. Strangely, we weren't ranking too bad. For one product, we were ranking on page 1 of Google for a certain keyword. My goal to reach the top of page 1 would be easy (or so I thought). I have now optimized this page to rank better for the same keyword. I have a 276 word description with detailed specifications and shipping information. I have a strong title and meta description with keywords and modifers. I have also included a video demonstration, additional photos and an PDF of the owners manual. In my eyes, the page is 100% better than it ever was. In the eyes of MOZ, it's better also. I've got an A with the On-Page Grader. Why is this page now ranking on page 8 of Google? What have I done wrong? What can I do to correct it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dkeipper0 -
3 Pages Ranking Beside Each Other | How do I consolidate so one ranks better?
An ecommerce website I own called backyardGamez.com sells outdoor games, for example cornhole boards, bags, etc. One such product is a cornhole board carrying case. If you search the above phrase, my site has three pages that rank on the first page. The term isn't high volume, so I'm assuming that is part of the reason. Is this a good, normal thing or does this mean I have inadvertently broken up my ranking power from one powerful page to 3 OK pages? Does anyone know how I can take two of these pages and use them to make the 3rd page more powerful? For example, I would prefer 1 page ranks higher on page 1 in the serps and the other two fall a bit from supporting the other. Thanks, Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Soft-Lite0 -
Trouble ranking
I have a site that got messed over pretty hard by a BigCommerce issue. They used to rank but then Big Commerce had a glitch that set every page on the site to a https which was auto set, by their system, to not be indexed. This caused the entire site to go missing. It was then fixed by me, only to have the same glitch happen again. I again fixed it, and BigCommerce released a patch to resolve the issue. They admitted blame to my client and said it can take a while to resolve. It has been a few months now, and google is slowly recrawling the site. It has about half the pages indexed. The pages that are indexed do not rank at all. I was wondering if you guys see any major flags that would cause this or if it is still related to the big commerce glitch. link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Social Media - big ranks it seems from it
Hi there, one of our big competitors is ranking first for a huge key term. We were wondering how they did it, so i went through normal processes: Age of domain - reasonable. Unique content - a little but the ranking page has pretty much none - meaning panda update isn't applying here, Back-links - nothing special really, not enough to be above everyone in my opinion. Then i had a look at social media shares, over 2,000 mainly as facebook shares. So i went on their facebook profile and it does not seem like they are spamming content on there. Are these shares from users sharing the link? if so can i find out how many per post? i imagine there is a team setup to share this content when it is published on their facebook page? It just seems so very unfair they are ranking number one like this, the content in their site is poor, it's not a relevant domain either. So much for panda update eh? Any thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0