Several Keywords Dropped Completely
-
On December 14th one of my sites dropped completely for multiple keywords. I cannot figure out why this happened. I have been adding content more in the past few months than ever before...
www.howtomac.com is the website
I am attaching a few webmasters screenshots so you can see the drop.
Any help is much appreciated.
-
You want your "Branded" name to be the highest anchor text. The trip wire for individual keywords isn't known by many. We do our best to guess. But I'd say 50% is very high, and I'd shoot for around 30% to be safe. Again, it's a guess at what that limit is.
-
I have a similar issue with a clients site - http://www.tshirtsubway.com it was 2nd page for the keyword t shirts.
Then it totally disappeared just for this one keyword. All the other ranking are fine its just this one keyword that has totally vanished.
Contacted Google abut it via webmaster tools but not sure whats happening here.
Maybe to many in coming links under that word ?
-
Hi Thomas,
I appreciate your response.
I did not add any links at that time. Yes, the site has had very rapid movement to the top so your theory about the site being tested in the SERPs makes sense
Thank you!
Wes
-
Did you add any specific links at that time?
Have you had rapid movement to the top? If you moved to the top quickly then it could just be Google testing your site with the old results. I have seen them do this on several occasions. You get moving, hit the first page, stay for a week or a month then drop down about 30 spots or more.
If you didn't do any specific link building at that time, then keep your current pace going and wait to see if it rebounds next month.
-
There are far too many factors at play here to really be able to pin any one thing down, but I do have a couple observations for you:
-
I only looked at the two keywords you cited in your screenshots "how to mac" and "imovie" and really, for how competitive these keywords are you had no business ranking for them in the first place with a DA of 13, even with an exact match domain. Is your site pretty new? It's possible you were getting a test drive in the SERPs (Dr. Pete talked about this phenomenon here).
-
I didn't look at more than two articles, but the ones I did look at seemed a little thin on content. Great topics, great images, but I'm guessing there were only about 100 - 150 words in them. I have no idea if that has anything to do with your ranking troubles, but just from a user value standpoint these articles could be a little more meaty.
-
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
-
Homepage not ranking main keywords - structure error?
Dear, Moz community We have an issue. We have a classified advertisement website. Our website is built like this**homepage (**Optimized for main keyword, has latest listings from all categories ) - category 1 (we did not want to add alteration of the keyword we want to rank homepage, as we thought this would "compete" with homepage) - category 2 - category 3 - **category **4 The listing URLs look like this www.example.com/categoryname/listingname Now the issue is that the homepage is not ranking at all for the main keywords. When we used URL structure like this "example.com/main-keyword-listing-id" homepage was ranking (other sites). Now with new site we used the best practice and added url's as described above (/categoryname/listingid).This caused our homepage not to rank at all for the main keywords.What did we do wrong? We want our homepage to rank for the main keyword and categories for theirs. Should we 1. Change the category 1 name to main keyword (maybe some long tail) so we have the main keyword in URLs? So at least one of the main categories has the main keyword in the listing URLs2. Should we change the category listing urls all back to /main-keyword-listing-id? We thought that this was a bit spammy, so that´s why we used categories. _This means that all listings have same URL name and not best for ranking cateogries_3. Just link back to homepage internally with the main keyword and google should catch that? _Currently in menu you go to homepage clicking HOME but we can add for example our main keyword there - Latest car advertisements _I would be happy of any feedback.
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Sudden Drop in Indexed Pages and Images under Sitemap
Hello! Just a couple days back, realised that under the Google Webmaster Tool > Sitemap, my website www.bibliotek.co has a sudden drop in indexed pages and images. Previously, it was almost fully indexed. However, I checked and the Google Index > Index Status, it is still fully indexed Any reason why and how do I resolve? Any help is very much appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Bibliotek1230 -
Sudden drop in rankings over 7 days
Hello fellow SEOs, I am having a few issues with one of the sites I manage. The site in question has dropped for a number of terms in the last 7 days, including: logo design - dropped 2 places, now 19th logo design uk - dropped 2 places, now 8th logo designer - dropped 3 places, now 20th bespoke logo design - dropped 3 places, now 10th I'm worry that the site might drop for more terms if I just leave it alone. I haven't made any changes to the site but I have noticed that our number of inbound links has increased by 58% in the last 7 days. I have put the site through OSE and used the spam analysis tool. There's only one domain linking to my client that has an orange spam flag but this link isn't newly acquired. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | UE-Web0 -
How important is keyword usage in the URL?
Hi,
Technical SEO | | Whebb
We have a client who has engaged us recently for some SEO work and most of their website looks pretty good seo-wise already. Many of their site pages rank at the top or middle of page two for their targeted keywords. In many cases they are not using the targeted keyword in the URL and most pages could use some additional on-page clean up. My question is, is it worth it to re-write the URLs to include the targeted keyword and then do 301 redirects to send the old pages to the new ones in order to improve the ranking? Or should we just do the minor on page work in hopes that this will be enough to improve the rankings and push them on to the first page. Thanks.0 -
How to target long tail keywords
Apologies if this is already answered, I'm a newbie. I'm looking to determine how to target long tail keywords. I'm supporting a site that is new and with very small budgets in the very competitive life insurance market. If we devise a list of long tail keywords, should we then add those to the page titles, meta descriptions etc rather than the short tail ones that the site will never rank for anyway?
Technical SEO | | aoifep0 -
Keyword and URL
I have a client who has a popular name (like 'Joe Smith'). His blog URL has only his first name and the name of his company in it, like joe.company.com. His blog doesn't rank well at all in the first 3-4 Google SERPs. I was thinking of advising him to change the URL of his blog to joesmith.company.com, and having his webmaster do 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one. Do you think this is a good strategy, or would you recommend something else? I realize ranking isn't just about the URL, it's about links, etc. But I think making his URL more specific to his name could help. Any advice greatly appreciated! Jim
Technical SEO | | JamesAMartin0 -
Unsure of sudden dramatic drop for target keyword(s)
Even after studying the latest Panda algorithm, which frowns upon templated looks (kind of odd), I have been doing some thorough research trying to find out why a site I have been optimizing plummeted. It was hovering around 10, and fell to 37 in one to two weeks. After I read all about the Panda update, I assumed it was that. But the site falls in line and shouldn't be affected. I used that 3rd party duplicate content checker and the content checked out okay. I looked on my SEO Pro campaign and noticed that the on-page report got an A grade, hitting on all factors except having the keyword in the URL. So, I have a site that loads in good time and should be fairly well optimized, and falls in line from what I can tell with Google's guidelines, which I read through. So why the drop? I'm not saying this site is 100% perfect couldn't be any better, optimized to the hilt. It was designed a few years ago, but still, I am just having a hard time finding out why this site got slammed the way it did. www.spineandsportschiro.com Target Keyword(s) Roseville Chiropractor Roseville Chiropractic I welcome any on-page critiques, but mostly would like to know where to look or have some kind of insight to why the rankings dropped, so I can try and fix them the right way. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Boogily0 -
Domain Masking with New Keyword-Rich Domains
Hello, friends. We have an ecommerce site and we also own several keyword-rich domains but haven't done anything with them yet. Is there any value in using domain masking to point them to either product pages or special landing pages on our primary ecommerce site? Here's an example: Primary site is widgetzone.com Keyword rich URL is acmewidget.com (which is totally blank and isn't indexed) It could point to our category page for Acme Widgets: widgetzone.com/category/acme-widgets or it could point to a new landing page: widgetzone.com/acme-widgets My concern is that because the keyword-rich URL hasn't been utilized at all there's really no point in redirecting it. I'm of the mind that it's either going to be ineffective at best or a duplicate content issue at worst. What do you guys think? As a follow-up, if we don't redirect these domains, what should we do with them? Just try to sell them off rather than create totally new sites?
Technical SEO | | jbreeden0
