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
-
Is there a way to tell if you were doing everything perfectly on the SEO front what your average SERP position and page views could be?
If you had optimised everything 100% on your website (keywords, links, everything), is there some tool or some way to figure out what your average SERP position could be and what volume of traffic you could be getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnnaKot0 -
If I 301 redirect a sub-page that is #1, will I risk losing SERP?
I have a site that for some reason Google decided to rank one of our articles #1 for a fairly competitive term. The article is kind of a BS blog post and I want to 301 it to our page about the topic as that's designed for conversion. If I do this, will we risk losing the ranking? If so, what are other options? Can I change the content of the ranked page to something closer to our landing page? Any advice is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dk80 -
Will I lose Link Juice when implementing a Reverse Proxy?
My company is looking at consolidating 5 websites that it has running on magento, wordpress, drupal and a few other platforms on to the same domain. Currently they're all on subdomains but we'd like to consolidate the subdomains to folders for UX and SEO potential. Currently they look like this: shop.example.com blog.example.com uk.example.com us.example.com After the reverse proxy they'll look like this: example.com/uk/ example.com/us/ example.com/us/shop example.com/us/blog I'm curious to know how much link juice will be lost in this switch. I've read a lot about site migration (especially the Moz example). A lot of these guides/case studies just mention using a bunch of 301's but it seems they'd probably be using reveres proxies as well. My questions are: Is a reverse proxy equal to or worse/better than a 301? Should I combine reverse proxy with a 301 or rel canonical tag? When implementing a reverse proxy will I lose link juice = ranking? Thanks so much! Jacob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacob.young.cricut0 -
Page position dropped on Google
Hey Guys, My web designer has recommended this forum to use, the reason being: my google position has been dropped from page 1 to page 10 in the last week. The site is weloveschoolsigns.co.uk, but our main business site is textstyles.co.uk the school signs are a product of text styles. I have been told off my SEO company, that because I have changed the school logo to the text styles logo, Google have penalised me for it, and dropped us from page 1 for numerous keywords, to page 10 or more. They have also said that duplicate content within the school site http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/school-signs-made-easy/ has also a contributed to the drop in positions. (this content is not on the textstyles site) Lastly they said, that having the same telephone number is a definate no no. They said that I have been penalised, because google see the above as trying to monopolise on the market. I don’t know if all this is true, as the SEO is way above my head, but they have quoted me £1250 to repair all the errors, when the site only cost £750. They have also mentioned that because of the above changes, the main text styles site will also be punished. Any thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated as I don't know whether to pay them to crack on, or accept the new positions. Either way I'm very confused. Thanks Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TextStylesUK0 -
My websites position has dropped, any ideas why?
Hi, First off im new here, so hello to everyone. Now to the reason why I have joined. I am currently trying to rank for 2 terms: **UK Bank Holidays 2013 (Term 1) **and Bank Holidays 2013 (Term 2) The page which im trying to rank these terms on is: http://www.followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays Now some background history: On the 29th Dec 2013, term 1 was 5th and term 2 was 7th - rankings achieved through guest blogging. Last night I changed the h1 tag from 'Bank Holidays 2013' to 'UK Bank Holidays 2013'. Re-worded the meta description to try and increase the CTR. And removed the term 'Bank Holiday' from the end of each sub-heading - Ex: 'New Year's Day Bank Holiday' to 'New Year's Day' - I did this because I felt it was to much so in total 'Bank Holiday' term had been removed from 5 sub-headings. Ok, so I went into WMT and resubmitted for indexing, over night the page got reindexed - the term 'UK Bank Holidays 2013' stayed at the same position (5) BUT the 'Bank Holidays 2013' term dropped into hell at roughly position 250. I'm thinking of changing everything back and crossing my fingers that term which dropped comes back BUT maybe im being to rash and it might jump back as the page stands. I did a grade test using SEOMOZ and both terms generate a grade of 'A'. Has anyone got any ideas? Sorry if the thread is a bit messy im currently crying all over the keyboard as im typing. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | followuk0 -
Don't want to lose page rank, what's the best way to restructure a url other than a 301 redirect?
Currently in the process of redesigning a site. What i want to know, is what is the best way for me to restructure the url w/out it losing its value (page rank) other than a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marig0 -
How to best migrate / rebrand our organisation without losing the SEO on our current website?
I searched the current questions and found similar questions but nothing as specific as what I wanted, so... We are a graphic design school in Melbourne Australia. We have a website - www.graphicschool.com.au - that ranks fairly well in Google for our particular search terms. We have rebranded the organisation and want to change the website domain name to the new branding - www.grenadi.vic.edu.au - but obviously do not want to lose our hard earned SEO and rankings. We only have two strategies so far, and are not sure what the pros and cons to either strategy are, or whether there is a better way. The two ideas we have are: Option 1) Just swap the domain name. We were thinking about swapping the domain name and setting up 301 redirects to tell Google that the old page that ranked well is now this page 'x' on the new site. I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links. Option 2) Build a second website. This idea is that we would build a second website with our new domain name and branding and build up that site until it ranks as highly as the first site and then start to remove the first site. We're planning on completely redeveloping the current website anyway and changing and adding lots more content as well so this option is not out of the question. Any help, thoughts, suggestions or further options would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to discuss. Can I also please suggest that a new category is added under 'The SEO Process' - something like 'rebranding / migration' Cheers, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0