Google rankings tanked....Now what?
-
We just experience a drop in Google rankings, some pretty harsh, across all of the keywords we have been ranking greater than 50. I’m a noob at SEO, but a technical noob so I started doing my home work. I’ve seen references to the “google dance” and “Honeymoon”, but this hit seems to have effected competitors too. Everyone seems re-ranked with several junk directories jumping up more than I think they should. Has anyone else seen this? Is this more Google algorithm adjustment or a natural settling based on our new SEO attempts? In either case, what should we do next? I know there is a holistic approach and everything is important however, we need bang for the buck at this point to before we start bleeding. One or two next steps?
Our industry is residential cleaning and the site is www.bitabliss.com
Here is a little history:
The site that’s been running for about 2 years. We initially put up a very basic “throw something up” site without much thought of SEO except for some basics and a long tail approach with a blog, FaceBook and Twitter. We launched an updated site on Feb 23. with new theme and this time some, “on page” work to better hit the basics. The site structure was kept the same and we added on some more localized content in hopes to take advantage of local searches. Also, enter SEOMoz to get us tracking things (Yay MOZ). Until yesterday, we had been doing pretty well in some of our target cites even with the more basic site. When we launched the new site focusing on page titles, descriptions and page content, and a few directory attempts. We started to see some incremental growth. It seemed to me that this kind of growth meant that we were doing the right things and doing a better job than some of the other sites. Any way, yesterday we got smacked down. This seems too harsh for a for the slow increases we have seen over the last month.Any thoughts you have would be great appreciated.
Thanks!
-Shawn
-
Certainly possibly that it was a small algo shift, but unless lots of other sites fell in the rankings, too, I'd say the fresh boost/loss is the more likely culprit in this case.
BTW - you might want to check out this slide deck for some ideas on growing content/links/inbound marketing: http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/inbound-marketing-for-startups-in-2011
-
In our case, new content comes in the form of blog posts, tweets and FaceBook updates. The goal is a minimum two blog posts per month with topics that are related to our business (tips hints, products) or community focused (events, current affairs, etc).
-
Rand,
Thanks! I had a feeling links were going to be going to be high on the list. I'll head that direction.That is one of things I see as a huge advantage the big franchise outfits have. Do you think there is anything to this "reshuffling" that I think I see? For several keywords where the big chains were near the top, we all seem to have been pushed down.
Thank you!
Shawn
-
adding new content, such as?
-
Links is a bit narrow - I'd say citations of any type. We've seen examples where having a site's name brand mentioned in a news article led to a flurry of crawling and higher rankings. It's also the case that adding new content to your site, making it a better converting site, improving usability, design, navigation, etc. can all have positive impacts on your ultimate goals and on SEO, too - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals
-
So lets say when you done optimizing your website the only way to move in ranks is getting new links?
-
No - definitely not. I'm saying that for competitive search results, having a good site and good content isn't enough. You need to show the engines that you're also an important, well-referenced resource and that means citations (links, tweets, shares, mentions, news articles, local citations, etc).
Links are important, but link building without the basics of a good site and business (which Bitabliss.com seems to have) is folly.
-
Rand so what you saying is that the most important part of SEO is a link building?
-
Hi Shawn - it looks to me like the biggest issue is lack of quality links. I think what may have happened is that your on-site efforts, relaunch and start of link building efforts gave you a short term boost that's now ending. I looked through your links at Yahoo! and with OpenSiteExplorer (the latter is usually slower in finding new ones), and there's only a very small number and from only a few sites.
I'd work on earning those citations from quality sources and over time, you'll likely regain some of those rankings. Many SEOs have, in the past, observed something akin to a "fresh boost" and I suspect that's what happened here.
BTW - this link building tip in particular might be useful - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local - in addition to the local links, you can likely get lots of good direct links, too.
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
-
Why my site is not ranking for any of the keywords?
We have a site for Property management software, we have done everything like set proper Title and descriptions, heading tags, robots tag is also ok, set schema and its ok with Google webmaster too also we are doing Social media promotion. can you please check our website and tell me what is the problem??
Technical SEO | | rootwaysinc0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
When do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster?
Hi, I was wondering when and how often do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster and do you submit individual pages or main URL only? I've googled it but i got confused more. I appreciate if you could help. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Rubix1 -
Google penalising my site? Ranking now outside top 50
Hey there, Was wondering if anyone could give me some advice/help on my current problems with my Google ranking. I used to be on page one this time last year (still am on yahoo and bing) but Google has pushed me out of the top 50. Since then I built a new site on wordpress with new content but it hasn't made any real difference. This is my site address: www.elvisimpersonator4u.co.uk I also have a separate blog here: www.thisiselvis.tv The blog did have some duplicate writing on it which I removed a few months back but it still hasn't improved my Google ranking. Would a 301 redirect fix this problem properly? I've done quite a lot of SEO on several pages on the new site to try and improve it but no luck so far. In fact I hope I haven't over optimised! No tools seem to indicate this though. I have no messages in webmaster tools so there's no obvious penalty, my web hosts keep saying I just need to buy more link builds and content writing from them but I've already done a lot of this and it's made no discernible difference. If someone could have a look and give me some advice I would be most grateful! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | devrox
Jim0 -
Can Google move up my ranking without caching it ?
Is it possible that my site was last cached in Google on 9 Oct (it was ranking 23 that time) and today on 29th oct its ranking position 3 for a kw though still showing cached on 9 oct. Its not cached since 9 oct, does that mean its not crawled since then? How can Google move up my ranking without caching it ?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Is there a way I can track Arabic keywords on the Arabic version of Google Qatar using SEOMOZ Rank checker?
I have a Qatari website in Arabic and I would like to know if it is possible to track the Arabic keywords using google.com.qa in Arabic using SEOMoz rank checker. When selecting the three search engines, I have no choice over the language. Only the country can be modified. Any solution?
Technical SEO | | mrlee1 -
Dismal content rankings
Hi, I realize this is a very broad question, but I am going to ask it anyways in the hopes that someone might have some insight. I have created a great deal of unique content for the site http://www.healthchoices.ca. You can select a video category from the top dropdown, then click on a video beside the provider box to see. The articles I've written are accessible by the View Article tab under each video. I have worked hard to make the articles informative and they are all unique with quotes from expert physicians. Even for strange health conditions that don't have a lot of competition - I don't see us appearing. Our search results are quite dismal for the amount of content we have. I guess I'm checking to see if anyone is able to point me in the right direction at all? If anything jumps out... Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0