Have you used the Addthis Widget and had your rankings drop
-
Just wondering what experience people have of this widget? I added it to a site I look after late last week and we took an noise dive over the weekend. Any thoughts / comments are appreciated!
-
I have it on several sites. For most of them it has been there since AddThis was new. We added it to a couple sites a few months ago.
No problems at all.
I think that it is a very good service. We get lots of traffic back and some of our pages have received thousands of actions.
-
Hi Rodney
There are two ways to look into this, Correlation and Causation.
Some Correlation seems to be there from what you've said, with the widget being added about the same time as your rankings dropped (though would likely need longer for the pages concerned to get re-crawled and any effect to be seen in the SERPS).
However I'd be extremely surprised if there was any Causation. I've never experienced or heard of this particular AddThis widget or a similar social sharing widget to cause a websites' rankings to drop.
Likely nothing more than coincidence with the timing.
Have a look for any other correlations, check back over the past two or three weeks and if you've made any other changes or acquired any suspect links, look into those to see if they may have caused a drop in your rankings.
Hope that helps,
Regards
Simon
-
I find it actually works quite well, if I gain some facebook / twitter exposure it actually has a positive effect on rankings.
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
-
Then why my site is not ranking
My website's DA and PAs are good compare with my competitors. Then why my site is not ranking.
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
Rankings after manual penalty removal
I've just started working on a ecommerce website that was hit by Penguin 2.0 in May (It was ranking 2nd for it's major keyword at the time) and it hasn't been indexing for that keyword since After a lot of link removal, the reconsideration request was accepted and the manual penalty had been removed. Rankings haven't really improved and that specific keyword has not been reindexed The site does have a lot of not found errors (It was 5.5k but recently taken down to 4k) but it was still ranking before the penalty. Is there anything you believe I'm missing? Is it the onsite errors that are flagging the site as unreliable? I thought it would still appear for the keyword if that was the case
Technical SEO | | Sandeep_Matharu0 -
Struggling to get indexed and ranked
I am working on a brand new website and really struggling to get the site indexed and listed for it's business name! I don't normally struggle and have got clients ranked for much more challenging keywords so I'm a bit stuck! The site is a new domain and has been live for about two months. The business previously used an old domain and this has been correctly 301'd to the new domain. There is no duplicate content with any other website when checked through Copyscape.com Webmaster Tools has been set-up and verified and this shows the site is being crawled but in Google site:www.website.com.au shows no pages as being indexed. Google Places has been set-up and verified, the site has also been added to local citation sites. There are also a few incoming links from other sources. Robots.txt is fine and has been checked. Business name mentioned in the title tag, footer and throughout the site. Does anyone have any ideas how I might be able to get ranked or is it just a waiting game? Or have I missed out something really obvious?? My last step is doing a crawl test to see if this brings up anything I have missed. Thanks Karen
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Why my ranking on google just disappeared
I have my website ranked on page one probably in top 6, but all of a sudden around 3-4 months before my website just disappeared for that keyword. Any suggestions? Keyword: Brass rod, brass rods webpage url: www.jayjalaramext.com/brass-rods/ and the website itself www.jayjalaramext.com Is it over optimized? or optimized more often which lead to bad history? or any panda or penguing effect ? Waiting for the suggestions.
Technical SEO | | HirenKhambhayta0 -
Sudden SERP drop?
I'm wondering why my mainpage of my site just disappeared from google while a post from my site ranks at #11 on google. I currently only have 1 .edu backlink to it and the anchor text is my url site : http://www.domain.c0m What is the meaning of this? I checked my on page optimization and I got an A. The only problem I saw with my site was keyword stuffing on the homepage because my posts contain the keyword and its listed 26 times on the homepage but that shouldn't be the problem.
Technical SEO | | 6786486312640 -
Bing rank drop off for multiple sites
Hi Mozzers, Seeing some wacky stuff going on on some sites I manage. In more than a few, the ranking on bing has dropped basically overnight from page one spots to not being found on the first 100 positions. Anyone else seeing similar results? Some of the sites are fairly new, some have been around for ages, some are wordpress, some are not. I've been searching for some news of a big change on bing, but keep reading about bing dropping the thin sites during black friday. In one example, I had the site set up in BWT for a while, and had a look at the data. The reports show that the pages are crawled, the index summary shows pages indexed, and there seems to be no crawl errors, but rankings are absolutely gone. Also, I can't see the sites in bing if I search "site:example.com" in bing. Here's 2 examples, the first would make sense since it's pretty thin as I havent added much content yet: http://homewindowtint.org but this one doesn't make sense to me. Sure there's a few errors, but to be dropped like a rock seems weird http://www.ahmedandsukaram.com
Technical SEO | | rosstaylor0 -
Anyone having issues using Keyword Analysis and Rank tracking lately?
Seems it works once, maybe, then replies with a message that it can't complete the process when trying another keyword. _Cindy Barnard
Technical SEO | | CeCeBar0 -
PageRank Dropped?
The Symptoms About a year ago, our site EZWatch-Security-Cameras.com had a PageRank of 5. Several months ago it sunk to a 4 and we were a little worried, but it wasn't anything to really sweat over. At the end of january we noticed it had dropped again to a PR3, again we were a little more worried. When the farmer update hit we suddenly dropped to a PR1 but our traffic wasn't seriously affected, and in march most of the pages regained their PageRank. I noticed this morning that our homepage rank has once again dropped to a PR1. I am waiting to see if there has been any significant drop in traffic, but I haven't spotted anything that stands out significant, aside from an increase in the average cost for our paid search account of about 5%. The Problems We've Spotted Keep in mind that our current website is fairly old (2005) and we are ready to launch a new one. Our current website is running on X-Cart, and we have a few modules added on. Problem 1 - One such module handles a custom kit builder, this area has not been restricted by crawlers and it could be generating a large amount of needless page crawls. Problem 2 - Another module allows "SEO friendly URL's" according to the developer, but what actually happens is a visitor could type in any-url-they-like-for-product-id**-p-11111.html**, where the underlined section is any character string (or lack of), followed by either a product or category indicator and the id for said item. This causes a massive amount of virtual page duplications, and the module is encrypted so we aren't able to modify it to include rel="canonical" tags. Obviously this causes massive amounts of seemingly duplicate content. Problem 3 - In addition to the regular URL duplication, we also recently acquired the domain EZWatch.com (our brand name, easier to remember). That domain name responds with the content from our regular website, and it will be the primary domain name when we change shopping carts. With the second domain name the content could also be considered a duplication. The Solutions We're Working On The website we use was designed in 2005, and we believe that it's reached the end of its useful life. Over the past several months we have been working on an entirely new shopping cart platform, designed from the ground up to be more efficient operationally-speaking, and to provide more SEO control. The new site will be ready to launch within days, and we will start using the new Domain name at the same time. We are planning on doing page-to-page301 redirects for all pages with at least 1 visit within the past 180+ days, according to our Google Analytics reports. We are also including rel="canonical" on all pages. We will also be restricting dynamic sections of our website via the robots.txt file. So What More Can We Do? With your collective SEO experience, what other factors could also be contributing to this decline?
Technical SEO | | EZWatchPro0