Google India Rankings Drop Suddenly
-
Keyword: indian wedding planner
page:www.hukamievent.com/indian-wedding-planner.php
It didn't drop, it just disappeared. No, I didn't do anything to be penalized at all and I am still in there index. I know this question has been asked many times here, while I apply all the suggestions given to other people with similar problem, here's a quick question I need to ask, I made following changes recently, could either of these be the reason for ranking decline?
- In google webmasters' tools, I had changed geographic target from - india, to- nothing, few weeks ago. could this be the reason.
- Around 2 weeks ago I paid someone to submit articles to 500 article directories, same article spun many times, he did the job in around 6 days and got back to me with a list of around 150 submissions with as many backlinks, all with same anchor text, "indian wedding planner", one of my targeted keywords. Before the submissions I was on page 9, yes that was nine, and just after the submission I was at page 2 position 1, within a matter few days.
- I saw my the targeted page improve in ranking and jump on to page one position 10, for a short while, before it disappeared. is this something they call "google dance"?
- My website is fluctuating on google SERP for many other keywords too, in most cases, my ranking fell.
P.S.:With the same keyword,"indian wedding planner" my rankings in google US improved, I am on position 6 page 1.
please enlighten fellow mozzers!
-
I know Keri, but by the time this gentleman came to me for SEO, he already had those links. Besides, he hired a few people, some data entry guys with not even a basic understanding of SEO, who would drop blog comments left, right and center.
AND they would open random profiles on facebook and post on their wall. Each guy would post on 1000 walls dail, yes, they have a daily target; recently facebook restricted them in many ways.
I have been telling him against doing it but he wouldn't budge an inch. His argument is, people are "liking" his site, they at least come to his website once which is giving a boost to his Alexa ranking..and these people who apparently "like" the website are friends of people whose wall he is posting(read spamming) on.
Yes, I told him these people are not targeted visitors, besides, in the long run search engines too will raise their eyebrows.
I have been trying hard to convince him to direct those efforts in the right way. Now, I will show him this post, hope it will help.
Keri, I also belong to "moz school of thought" when it comes to all things SEO, and I am working hard on some really great quality content, would you (or anyone reading this) be so kind to suggest me some people/websites who would love to link to/ share this content. Or any ideas on how I can find such authoritative sources in "wedding planning" niche? Any blog where I can guest post?
Thanks for your time.
-
Hi Keri,
I changed the geographic target because this website provides free content to help Indian people plan their wedding along with providing information about Indian wedding customs.There are many Indians in countries like US, Canada etc. who would love this content. There are many Non-resident Indians who like to organize there wedding in India.
As for, The IP in question, I had a chat with the hosting company technical support and they said,this IP is that of a dedicated server for some other site that my client owns.And the URL is a temporary URL. I didn't understand it completely but at least I am sure no one is copying me.
By the way, what exactly do you see? can you take a screen capture? when I open that URL it gives me a 404.
And hey, thanks a ton for pointing out.
-
Thanks Justin,
I will try and keep more patience. I almost asked how long does google dance but I happened to look at your comment above and realized you already answered that..
"See what happens over the next few weeks and see if your ranking decreases or increases."
I don't think the changes I made, "set target" and "article submission", would bring me down 7 pages down, I guess it's Panda.
So,as you advised, I am waiting and watching.
-
You've got a bunch of low-quality links, even before these additional 150 links from two weeks ago. The Facebook likes and shares seem a bit off. SEOmoz has a Facebook page for our fans with almost 27,000 fans, yet your page has over 40,000 likes and a couple of thousand shares.
The top inlinks (by page authority) that I'm seeing are from sites that are totally not related to weddings, and many of them are full of comment spam and have links that are no followed. You really don't have a strong link profile that shows to Google that people who are authorities about weddings, wedding planning, venues, event planning, etc. find value in your site.
I'd stop the spun article submission and the comment dropping, and spend your time on money in making sure that you have content that is valuable, then share that content with people in a related industry.
-
Hi Amit,
Out of curiosity, if your page is targeting Indian wedding planning, why did you change the geographic target from India to nothing?
I'm going to sidestep the article submission and spun content for the moment and let someone else chime in on that.
I noticed that this IP is in Google with apparently the same page http://64.37.52.67/indian-wedding-planner.php. Is that you, or someone copying your site?
-
Greetings Champion!
Fear not, you showed up to me on Page 8, for Google India.
Possibly you could have taken a Panda update hit. Practice patience and see what happens over the next few weeks and see if your ranking decreases or increases. Either that or the changes you made affected your rankings and Google moved you down.
With both assumptions you need to wait and see what exactly happens. If you continue to dance Google is trying to find a place for you, if you sit at that spot, then you need to figure out what brought you down and change it.
Good luck on your quest for page one!
Justin Smith
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
-
My ranking drop after migrating to https
Hey, I have migrated my website from http to https. But, all my ranking is dropped from first page to 3 or 4 page or some keywords are disappeared. I have redirected all my urls to https and done everything properly. Please help me. My website is justinterio.com
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore1 -
My Alexa ranking dropped after a 301 redirect is that bad?
I had all of my non www pages redirect to the www versions. My alexa ranking dropped and keeps dropping after I did this. I'm guessing its because its tracking the non www version. Does anyone know if this is correct and should I worry?
Technical SEO | | CandleCam0 -
Google Sitelinks
Hello, Good afternoon. I am having a site issue with Sitelinks. For some reason when I search Google for the brand I represent "California Olive Ranch" Sitelinks are not being generated. When I search for "Cal Olive Ranch" our site links are being generated. Our domain is Californiaoliveranch.com. Is there a way to tell Google to to change the site links to match our domain and brand name? Is this something that can be done in Google Webmasters? Thank you very much for your help. Adam P
Technical SEO | | apost40 -
Ranking overseas
I have a well established website that I market as the busness being based in London, how hard would it be for me to start ranking for phrases in America? (An increasing amount of our work is being carried out in America.) What exactly would it entail? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Rankings drop in UK and AU but not US
After the last Panda update on Jan. 22 my rankings dropped significantly in the AU and UK but not in the US. We operate in UK and AU and not the US so if anything the rankings should be the opposite (which also obviously would be preferred) Any ideas for why this would occur?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?
I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not. The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in. Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.
Technical SEO | | Romana0 -
Penalized by google. How to find out?
Our webpage performs very bad on some keywords relating to one product. At the SeoMoz-ranking page i can se we are number 9 but we have the highest (higher than our competitors) rating in almost every category (at least 25 of 30) on the keyword difficulty report. How do i find out why this is so, or if we have been penalized by google?On other search-engines (yahoo, bing etc) we are number one! And we have the highest pagerank among the competitors...
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10