Losing Positions
-
HELP!!!
after implementing some changes suggested by SEOMoz Pro the only changed is that i lost some very very very dear positions. I had expected that my website would raise in position due to the changes but in fact it lost some.
I live in the netherlands so i use Google NL and Bing NL for rank tracking.
For some specific keywords like: kamperen bij de boer, boerderijcampings, boerencampings, Vekabo Campings, minicampings, kampeerartikelen, boerencamping frankrijk
i only lost positions and thus visitors. Some of the keywords lost about 9 positions.
What am i doing wrong? I do everything SEOMoz suggested including changing 301 titles on my website due to titletags with more then 70 characters and the only thing that happens is losing positions? Duplicate content is no longer an issue. No errors were found what so ever and still in stead of improving the rankings the declined.
Who can help me because this is not what i expected from this program.
-
Hi Jamo,
Thanks for the detailed explanation of what is happening on your site. Let's start at the beginning. You say your rankings recently dropped. There could be several obvious explanations.
1. Changed title tags. Title tags are one of the most important on-page ranking factors. If you changed your title tags too much, you might have lost some rankings there. Generally, the first few words of a title tag are the most important - the closer a word is to the beginning the more weight it carries. So if you changed a lot of words at the beginning of you titles, you may have gotten yourself in trouble. On the other hand, if you mostly changed words at the end of the title tags, this probably did little harm.
2. An algorithm change. It's possible Google Panda or the Page Layout update threw an algorithmic penalty at you. As others have mentioned, if this is the case, the only solution is to fix your layout, wait several weeks and hope for the best. Oh, and read this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/donna-on-big-adsense-earners
3. Something else? Unfortunately, any change you made on-site, changes in your backlink profile and changes in the algorithm, or a combination of these factors could have caused your site to drop. We've seen a lot of turbulence in the SERPs the past year and Google is really shaking things up.
Sometimes you can't figure it out, no matter what you do. In this case, it's best to move forward and continue to build a site worth visiting. Sometimes you can't fix what went wrong, but you can always build something better.
-
My link profile is updated on regular basis. All the camping sites on my website have to link to me in order to obtain their own page on my website. This way i "naturally" build a great link asset. Unfortunatly Google decided that this way of linking is not always best for your ranking but i can see no other way of doing this for the campingsites.
i also make sure i get non-reciptorial links and article links to my site.
When i look at my competitors i see them having way more links then i do but they always have had that since the start of my site in 2007.
for my searchword: kamperen bij de boer i now rank nr 2 in Google NL but in Google Com i rank number 1 (maybe due to the .nl or .com extention of the site). But the number one in the netherlands for that term does not even include it in it's title, content, header, h1,h2,h3,h4 or even links and alt descriptions. So why i that now ranked 1?? i can only come to the conclusing that it must be because my website was penalised due to something stupid google made up recently.
On the webmasters forum i asked about the recent google update and i got these 2 answers:
- To be honest, looking at your website and just the physical space taken up by adverts is more than the content on the page.This looks bad but its even worse when the adds that appear are just text adds.You use 3 add blocks.Remove the top one and keep the 2nd and 3rd. Remember, you only get a "click" from one advert being hit, so you are not loosing anything, you still have the adds appearing.The big difference is that the user is not now sown a page of adverts that confuses them.
- Combination of ad placement and site design is on the brink of being deceptive. I wouldn't know at first glance which link is an ad and which one not.
What do you think i should do?
my sites adres is: http://www.kamperen-bij-de-boer.com
maybe you don't understand the language written on the site but you sure can see the site. Maybe look into which resolution would be best to test?
hope to hear from you again
-
I can see your reason for impatience!
Unfortunately there is no definite amount of time to wait before deciding something hasn't worked, though if Google has deep crawled your site since the changes and your still suffering, it may be time to look elsewhere.
There may be other factors in play.
Hows your link profile looking?
Has anything else change in recent weeks?
Have your competitors upped they're game on the run up to summer?
-
Thanks for the quick reply.
I read the link you seggested and it stated that websites that use a normal amount of ads in comparison to text above the fold will not be affected. I think i use a normal amount of it and changed so accordingly. Normally i use 1
of text, then a table with picture and adsense then more content.
i changed this to 2
of text and then the table with picture and adsenses.
Would this be helpfull?
So you're advising to be patient and wait for the changes to take affect? How long should i wait for something like that to take affect? It's been over 1 week that i made the changes and google visited my site again after the changes.
i'm realllllly unpatient as you can imagine. I make about 21K on adsenses each year. If my positions drop so will me earnings... That's why i am that unpatient...
-
If you have made quite a wide range of changes it may take a while for Google to index all of the new changes and allocate your new SERP. Be patient and hopefully things will look up.
I often see a small dip in my serps prior to gaining some good ground.
Could it be that you have been penalised in the layout update? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html
Your Q&A title reminds me of the R.E.M song "Losing my religion" (replace religion with positions...now sing...)
"That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight
Losing my positions
Trying to keep up with you"
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
-
Need some help understanding SEO - Please help before I lose [pull out] all my hair
I'm new to SEO, and am stubbornly trying to educate myself. I have a telescope shop in Canada, it's a small business that we run on the side. We're driving lots of traffic through FB and our outreach programs but I really want to increase our presence on search. We released a new website back in January and it killed some of our rankings. We're working our way back with a very specific set of efforts on regular SEO: Metadata and titles, although it seems that's not super relevant Building high quality backlinks and eliminating any spammy backlinks Rewriting product listings so that they are original content though I'm not sure how important this is in e-commerce Writing high quality articles and blog posts Working relevant keywords into our product pages and titles I understand that good SEO is about pushing on all the levers, and trying to make sure that your site is as valuable to the end user as possible. We're making some good progress, but I'm puzzled by the #1 shop in Canada. They don't put any apparent effort into SEO and they still rank #1 on every key product we compete with them on. I've worked with two separate, highly ranked and regarded SEO firms on this and neither has been able to tell my why this other site ranks so highly. Here's a specific example on a popular product that we both sell, the Celestron NexStar 8SE. Here’s the link to Telescope Canada’s page for their Celestron 8SE: https://telescopescanada.ca/products/celestron-nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope-11069 Here’s a link to the Celestron 8SE page from the manufacturer website: https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-8se-computerized-telescope Telescopes Canada has just copied and pasted. There is no original content aside from adding the shipping and return policy to the tab, and having some options for selecting accessories on the page. Here is our page: https://all-startelescope.com/products/celestron-nexstar-8se We have higher page authority, higher domain authority, and they keyword analyzer in moz says that our page is higher quality than the Telescopes Canada page. I can’t find a single metric on any tool (ubbersuggest, Moz, ahrefs, semrush) that says Telescopes Canada is a better site, or has a better NexStar 8SE product page. But they keep ranking ahead of us, and right at the top of google search. Our titles are good, our metadata is good (but I don’t think that’s been a serious ranking factor for about ten years). Our text is original, it’s relevant, we have healthy internal links to the page. According to Moz's page ranker it's 20 points higher than Telescope Canada's page. We have invensted in some excellent blog content, we’re adding new products to the website so that we rank for more keywords. All of those things are helping, but I fundamentally don’t understand why Telescopes Canada is #1 almost across the board on every key product in our market. There is something that I’m not seeing here. Can you see any metric, any tool in your toolbox that indicates why they rank at the top, or even higher than we do for in these search terms specific to that product: Celestron NexStar 8SE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nkennett
NexStar 8SE
Celestron NexStar 8SE Canada
NexStar 8SE Canada I have a feeling it's something technical that I'm missing, but I'm not sure how obvious it is with two 'professional' firms not finding it. I'd really appreciate any help or insight that you can offer.0 -
Trying to pinpoint why 1 keyword moved down 100 positions in 2 weeks. Help me speculate?
Hi there, One of my client's sites, a very large and successful ecommerce website with great SEO performance, has seen a significant drop in rankings in the past 2 weeks. The rankings have begun to somewhat stabilize today, except one particular keyword with a search volume of 74k has gone from 1 to 100. Here is what has taken place in 2 weeks, sitewide: I revised and improved upon title tags and meta descriptions to make them more user-friendly and contain more optimized terms. Following all of Google's best practices, as always. Google still appears to be indexing these changes (has anyone seen an initial drop in rankings while this takes place?) The site has seen a very significant increase in 404 errors due to one feature of the site breaking. We got a message about it in Webmaster Tools, and this appears to coincide with when overall rankings dropped. The development team is working quickly to get this resolved. As of today, I am seeing the highest page-load time than any other day in 2015. With regard to the particular page/keyword in question: The keyword is no longer "exact match" at the beginning of the title tag, but rather broken up throughout the title tag so the whole title sounds better for users. **Have you found that this type of change is sufficient for a keyword rank to move down ~100 positions?? **(Either way, I have asked the client to revise the title to start with the exact match keyword, once again.) Google has indexed the page 2 days ago, but is still displaying the old title tag in search results. I have not found any instances of internal or external links to this page being removed. With all this information, does anyone see anything that seems like it could have reasonably caused such a huge tank in rankings? Is this a blip in time? Is there anything I am not considering? Should I just be patient?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Losing Organic Traffic After A Redesign?
Hi, I wonder if anyone can help me. After a recent site relaunch caused a substantial loss of organic website traffic. http://www.health4mom.org/ the site went live 2 months ago(using the same url's as the previous one) unfortunately the organic traffic have dropped (-65%). I would appreciate if anyone can let me know why we lost organic traffic. Many thanks in advance. Antonio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
New URL Structure caused virtually All rankings to drop 5 to 10 positions in latest report ?.. Is this normal
Hi All, We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' ) and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago. We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions i.e from 3rd to 10th etc... Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells. I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?.. Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated... thanks Pete .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Website losing rank positions after https
Hi there.. we were having a good increase in rankings since using Moz and then we purchased an ssl certificate so our website would run under https... to make sure our website is only accessed through https, we have used a method on .htaccess (appache) to make sure the website is only reached through https, using: RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mszeer
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R,QSA] after doing this, from our last crawl perspective, we lost several positions that we were increasing.. what have we done wrong ? we have to fix this asap, please help us...0 -
Will I lose traffic from Google for re-directing a page?
I’m currently planning to a retire a discontinued product and put a 301 redirect to a related product (although not identical). The thing is, I’m still getting significant traffic from people searching for the old product by name. Would Google send this traffic to the new pages via the re-direct? Is Google likely to display the new page in place of the old page for similar queries or will it serve other content? I’d like to answer this question so that I can decide between the two following approaches: 1) Retiring the old page immediately and putting a 301 redirect to the new related pages. This will have the advantage of transferring the value of any link signals / referring traffic. Traffic will also land on the new pages directly without having to click through from another page. We would have a dynamic message telling users that the old product had been retired depending on whether they had visited out site before. 2) Keep the old product pages temporarily so that we don’t lose the traffic from the search engines. We would then change the old pages to advise users that the old product was now retired, but that we have other products that might solve their problems. When this organic traffic decreases over time, then we will proceed with the re-direct as above. I am worried though that the old product pages might outrank the new product pages. I’d really appreciate some advice with this. I’ve been reading lots of articles, but it seems like there are different opinions on this. I understand that I will lose between 10% - 15% of page rank as per the Matt Cutts video.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Homepage is losing rankings...need help!
Hi folks, Our company has been doing SEO for www.3dincites.com since October. Since the website hadn't been optimized at all, one of the first things we did was to add keyword-optimized page title and meta description to the homepage. The person who implemented didn't do it right the first time so we needed to change the page title again after a week or so. We also changed the preferred domain in GWT. Ever since those changes were implemented, the homepage has been decreasing in rankings for the the keywords we optimized it for. This is very surprising as the website has high-quality unique content and pretty solid backlinks. Moreover, the search traffic to other pages is through the roof (2K increase since October) so the client is happy, however, this decrease in rankings for the homepage (from 3d to 6th page for "3d IC technology" which is the main keyword) doesn't let me sleep well at nights. Any ideas why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoomzoom0 -
How do I Improve Google Local search position
Hi, I think its called local search position, what I'm referring to is when you do a search on a keyword and google lists not only the best matches but also usually the second match is a group of 3 businesses with telephone numbers, google reviews and at the bottom of the group it will say something like: "See results for <your keyword="">on a map. This is what I'm referring to. in anycase my question is if I click on the link to see more results on a map I'm listed as number 3, however on the search page before where the link is displayed which I just clicked on I'm not being listed and instead one business name is being listed three times, each of the listings uses the same address but a different telephone number, In addtion the business that is being listed three times is also listed in the results being returned above in this case position #1 for the keyword I have searched. I assume this has something to do with them also being listed in the group of local businesses below three time.. The business I'm interested in getting listed in this group of results is currently being listed page 2 position 5 for the keyword..</your> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.. Thanks in advance..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robdob11