Major Ranking Drop
-
My site bestdslrreview dot net was ranking number one for Canon T3i. I was amazed considering my competition. Canon T3i was at number 3 to 5 usually for US traffic.. Canon 7d review was ranking number 2 and Canon 7D was on page one.
Canon 7D keywords dropped about 10 places but Canon T3i Review dropped about 50. and same for Canon T3i.
I worry about a number of things, including thin affiliate site but I don't know, my articles are original. I also worry about to many links with my keywords in anchor text.
My on page results from SEOMOZ look great to me. This drop was my main reasons for going ahead and signing up. Hoping I could find out what happened.
The site is only about six months old. I waited probably three months before doing any significant link building.
The good thing is, I was ranking high from Black Thursday until a few days before Christmas. It can't be someone else just started doing SEO as I fell far too fall. Some kind of penalty. I had Google do this to another of my sites once though and after a couple of months it bounced back for most of my keywords. A site very much like this one.
Is this just the Google Dance?
Thanks
-
Oh I laughed about blaming it on the kids but personally, I think it is more likely the dog. haha
-
I don't THINK I have a think content issue. But I'll re-write those features just to be on the safe side.
I think I built too many links too fast, thousands of them and then stopped. I wont do that again. I think it is a sudden decrease in link velocity. I've have struggled with link velocity a lot and finally, I think I understand why it is important to continue with it.
You touched on it. To me it could look unnatural but like I said a small site could be popular and get lots of links. Another SEO expert told me that is true but if the backlink velocity drops to fast it could be that Google takes that as a signal the page is no longer popular as well as the possible natural linking problems.
I will continue with my blog network, slower but better quality than the others I built. However, I will also work on the duplicate content issue. I have lots of content with no links just to help with the thin but now I realize that a page could still be thin too. Will make things a bit better if I do that too.
As always, I'm all ears.
-
I dont mean that duplicate content on same site is ok, only that you want be penelized for it. But only one version of the duplicate content will rank. meaning you wont get any credit for it. they will pick a version to rank, using a canonical you can hint to the search engines what version that should be.
what the penalty you want to avoid is thin content. meaning what is left on the page after you take away advertizing and duplicate content found elsewhere on the web, then if what is left is not substantual and usefull, then it is thin content. Duplicate content wont hurt you in itself, it wont help you, but thin content will hurt you.
-
Yes, I made them no-index follow. I've now removed the no-follow on category and tags but that's the way it was before. the drop.
As for the duplicate content, only the bullet text is duplicate. That's 105 words out of 890. That's 13% and it is too high for me. I'll re-write that and resolve that just to be on the safe side. Its really two of the bullets that are causing it. But I'll change them all, looks like I got lazy there. I'll check the other articles on the site as well to make sure I didn't do that on those.
The duplicate content issue is as clear as mud. Now I know that Goggle says they don't penalize a site for duplicate content on other sites. Of course, that doesn't hold true for autoblogs. But that doesn't seem to be true when one considers backlinks. I'm uncertain. You seem very knowledgeable and I'm sure you are. What you basing the statement that onsite duplicate content will not hurt you. I'm pretty sure I've read on Google site itself that they HATE that. The reason they do is because of having the same page show up in the SERPs more than once. And I clearly had that going on before.
Yeah, It was Matt Cutts, I just couldn't remember his last name.
I'm really having trouble with this issue and based on what I've seen around the web, I'm not alone. I've got one fairly large site with over 1500 indexed pages. Google Web Tools showed a LOT of pages with duplicate titles and it took me forever to get those to disappear. Finally they did after I removed the index for categories and tags.
I'm having a lot of trouble with canonical URLs. I know I'm not alone. i've read much and understand little. I learned the most for an SEOmoz help link.
If I understand it, the intent is to tell SE where the main article is. I turned the canonical option back on in SEO platinum but then turned it off again. I'll show you why. It gave me two different links in the header. One for my category and one for my article. That seems counter productive to me and exactly what I don't want to happen.
Thanks for all of your help.
I probably shouldn't have marked your message Good answer as that made the thread answered. LOL oh well, I'll know next time. I don't want to take up all of your time.
Thanks very much for the help.
-
i noticed to made them follow that is good becqause linkjuice can still flow back out.
but you that fact that a page is not indexed does not change the flow of LJ to it.I fyou have 2 duplicates then use a canonical tag, or get rid of one of them things
like tag pages with shippets of other pages, are ok, at worst they wont rank, they
will not hurt you. its duplicate content from other sites that is the problem.As a rule blocking from robots is a last resort. i would concentrate on the duplicate
content from other pages, you need to add enouth original conent to make the page usefull.As Matt Cutts said, take away advertisments, content that is avaiable elsewhere, and what is left,
is it usefull and original?I wouldent bother with the tags in the sitemaps, category pages yes, bing for one say that
they only want the main pages in the site map, not every page, but having said that I asked
Duane Forrester from Bing and he said for a small site listing all pages is not a problem.We have alll been in panic mode when we lose rankings, I am a computer programmer
and when things are not working I start to believe anything and everything is responcible,
I will uninstall things, delete thing, blame my kids, assume i have a virus, but when i settle
down i usually find its somthing simple. -
As users build links to a website or URL, we see that pattern emerge and can
track the time over which links are built. Fast growth can indicate
popularity. Normally links build in a similar fashion across all websites, with
spikes potentially indicating popularity. When we compare that data against the
other signals we track, we get a truer picture of if that popularity is real or
not. Machines can build links quickly, but if we know the source of the links
is a common location or service that is “less than organic”, we’ll discount the
value of the links. -
I'm really glad you brought up the no no-index issue.
Most of that was probably created after the drop and I'll tell you why I did it to hopefully learn why I shouldn't do it.
I no-index privacy policy and disclaimer earnings type pages. I do that because I don't want those pages to dilute my money pages. Is that a mistake?
I also went in and usually do it from the beginning and set tag and categories to no index. I'm not sure when I did that on this site but I think it was after the drop. I'm not sure. The reason I do it is that seems to create duplicate listings in the SERPs. Or I thought it was afraid of duplicate content. Is my thinking wrong on that? I see the same pages/articles listed when I do site:domain.com and sometimes I get two listings for the same page on page one of Google. One for the article and one for the tag or category. I use SEO Platinum to accomplish this I also removed categories and tags from my sitemap using the xml sitemap generator plugin.
On the scripts, now that is something totally new to me. I'm pretty sure I did that after the drop. When I did site:domain.com I saw a lot of them listed. My robots.txt file looks like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://bestdslrreview.net/sitemap.xml
This is likely what is causing the no index on the scrips/plugins. So I should remove those to lines? I'm going to go ahead and do that since I was never sure that they should have been there in the first place.
Also I do not include categories and tags in my sitemap, should I start including those in the sitemap?
Thanks very much for the help. Sometimes I over think when I don't know exactly what the answers are.
-
Thank you. I think it will come back too but the too many links issue.....
I have always wondered about that and I seem to get different advise.
I forgot his name, the Goggle guy, Matt ??? most of you will know... He wrote a post indicating you can't link too many times. That is what most of the people that say you can't build to many links to fast base their advice on. But to me, I've always wondered if it makes since to have 2000 links to a site with five articles. Then I reason people could love a site with only a few pages, I'm sure that happens naturally at times?
If you're right, then I've made it worse because I've been building more links but aiming at higher PR sites when I do it. I've got a lot of links from PR 0 sites but in open site explorer it appears I have a pretty good natural looking distribution of links across different PR sites so I'm not at all sure.
I'm all ears if you and others have more to say to help me with this issue.
-
There is a fewe pages with no index, They see to have content i cant see why you would no index them, like this one
/tag/canon-7d/
You have also no indexed a few scripts, I beleive this is a mistake, because a search engine knows that the scripts are being used, but does not know what you are doing with them, and may lead to a lack of trust.Thhere are a few other technical issues, but not what would lead to a huge drop in ranking.
You do have a fair bit of duplicate content, the reviews are on other pages, if you wrote the reviews i would not worry, search engines usealy know why is copying and who is the creater.
If you are getting this content from elsewhere, you need to add enouth content to each page so that it apears original.
-
So you are saying you have been only building links for 3 months, but looking at OSE the Canon TSi page has 425 linking domains and canon 7D 751 linking domains?? This is way too many for that time frame IMHO. I would say you have tripped a filter. Wait 60 days and see if it comes back up... it should do.
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
-
How would you push up a page that is already ranking in the top 20?
One of our pages is currently ranking around the 11th position in Google. According to MOZ page grader its page optimization score is an A. I've manually checked the on page optimization and it's done properly. Our page speed is in the 20s according to google page speed insight tool and when I look at one of our top competitors their scores are in the 60s. So that may be an issue. Our DA is 70 and our top competitor's DA is 85. However we have more backlinks and social shares for our page. So do you think our page speed may be working against us? What else would you check or consider optimizing? I'm just trying to come up with other possible causes that would be working against us. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | eddys_kap1 -
Page Rank Lost After Website Transfer
Hello, I recently transferred a website from Ruby on Rails to Wordpress in order to help with the site's responsiveness. I kept all of the URLs the exact same, but when I transferred it only the homepage and one other page kept their page ranks, all of the others have lost theirs completely. Almost every page on the site was at least a PR 2, and now their not ranked, and not ranking in the top of search engines like they were before. I am not quite sure what might have caused this, like I said, I kept the URLs all the exact same and its strange that 2 pages were not effected. I crawled the site with Screaming From and all of the pages that lost their page rank have a status as "Moved Permanently". They are the exact same URL, but they are listed without www. in front, could this have something to do with it? The website is www.goenergylink.com, and you will see that the homepage and "Residential" page still have their page rank, but none of the others do. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | mcmckenna10 -
Need help in understanding why my site does not rank well for our best content?
Hi, We are a technology site from India (Digit.in) and we create a lot of original product review content (http://www.digit.in/mobile-phones/nokia-lumia-830-review-24655.html) but don't seem to rank even in the first 4 pages on Google results. Please let me know the reason for this and how to get this fixed. Thanks Arun
On-Page Optimization | | 9dot90 -
Why I am ranking for irrelevant keywords
My website is e-commerce and used to rank for all industry related keywords like buy widgets, cheap widgets, online widgets in top10. And suddenly my website was hacked and to resolve this hacking issue i have re-write all my dynamic urls into static pages after that new pages are indexed and ranking well. But after few months i have notice few changes in keywords ranking going down. But suddenly after Google Algo (EMD/Panda) update on Sept 27 i lost all my positions. And then according to Google guidelines i have worked on over optimization and low quality pages. I have removed all tones of low quality pages from SERP and simultaneously worked on url re-write. But i have notice small percent of changes in keyword positions like when Google Algo (EMD/Panda) is rolled out i lost my keyword positions from 1st page to 200 page and after working on over optimization and low quality pages the keywords are came back to 100 pages. Recently i have notice that my web pages ranking for irrelevant keywords. For example, let's say i used to rank for home page for these keywords; buy widgets, cheap widgets, online widgets but now am ranking for different inner pages say (guide pages). Can any one suggest me whats wrong..
On-Page Optimization | | BipSum0 -
Can you change meta description at any time without loosing rankings?
I'm wondering if it is possible to change the meta description of a page on your site at any time without it affecting rankings on google? Is it only changing how my SERP looks? Or could bad things happen to changing your meta description? Appreciate all opinions on this one, thank you guys!
On-Page Optimization | | danielpett0 -
Why is this page ranking highest?
I've just used Open Site Explorer to compare some sites whose (unpaid) Google ranking I aspire to. They all have higher authority than my site, but the top ranking site out of the 3 I've looked at has the lowest Page Authority, hardly and links (when the others have hundreds), lowest page rank and lowest page trust. In fact, when you look at the top ranking page (ranks #1), it does not even have the search term in it as a complete phrase. One thing I do notice is that it does have 100,000s of linking root domains from one linking root domain. So how can it rank number one on Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Beemer0 -
AB Testing - Organic Rank
Hello, Currently We are running an A/B test on a few pages, the footer and the header on our site. I was wondering what is the proper way to do an a/b test so that our google rankings won’t fall and that Google will only index one version at this time? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Tonyd230 -
Rankings
The rankings have been in a pending status for several day. Is there a problem with the software? We are in the middle of our test month and need to be able to evaluate the software to decide if we will continue. Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | Barb1230