Woah, my A-grade optimized pages that were on the first page have all vanished outside the top 50 in Google... is this Panda?
-
Yep as mentioned, I had some pages hit the top ten pretty quickly after ensuring they were A-grade for pretty uncompetitive keywords however, today, all bar 2 have just vanished from the top 50!
All were ranking in Google.co.uk and I know we were predicting the Panda update to hit soon but WOW!
My client is understandably a little upset, what on earch do I tell him and what should I do about it?
Cheers!
jT
-
Problem solved, well, more like diagnosed!
Although the pages were A grade optimised, filters on the page (i.e. sort by high price, low price, new products) were seen as duplicate pages as the CMS would take the static page and add some dynamic content for the filter. Rel Canonical has sorted it, but we shall see next time Google updates.
-
I've not heard of the spike lasting a couple of months before - more like a few days. Maybe the factor that you mentioned, that they are low-traffic keywords, played into this. Interesting.
-
Yea I suspect it was an initial spike.
I monitor rankings within SEOmoz pro, so my Google login isn't impacting.
-
I did some experiments with new websites and could bring them to first page but then the dropped quite a bit. Most likely it is some sort of spike which I've read about. It does happen sometime with some of our older websites too.
please make sure that you are not logged in in your google account it might change results. -
Yes they were new pages for an eCommerce site, some had products, others were just landing pages for longtail searches.
They managed to get into the top ten with no backlinks at all, which surprised me. They have been in that position for a couple of months.
-
A few questions:
Were the pages new pages? If so how long were they in the top 10 for? I'm wondering if Google was just taste-testing them to measure CTR etc.
What sort of content is on the pages? Has anything changed in terms of inbound links recently?
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 are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
On page links
Hi I am really intrigued by Bloomberg strategy. if you look at their article pages they are full with internal links done with what I assume to be an automated process (too many pages to be done manually). it seems to work for them. I would love to hear your opinions.
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-26/uber-said-close-to-raising-funding-at-up-to-40b-value.html0 -
Should i avoid using H2 to optimize my home page
Hi, my site is www.in2town.co.uk and i am looking at ranking for lifestyle magazine but i am a bit worried. The titles of the articles on the home page are h2, and i am just wondering if i should change this to h3 as it may get confusing for google. Can anyone let me know if i should keep the article titles as h2 or if i am right that they need to be changed to h3 or something else any help would be great
On-Page Optimization | | ClaireH-1848860 -
My text does not show up in Google
Hi there. I've got an urgent question I hope someone can help me with. I've made a website (www.tonyharrismakingcents.com.au) with a few content pages. I don't get a lot of traffic. All my pages are scrawled and I don't see any errors. However, when I copy an entire paragraph and Google it, it does not show up in the search results. This makes me believe that the pages are not scrawled correctly. Only when I search for the exact paragraph by putting it between "", the website shows up on the results page. What can be the reason for this? Thanks for your help..It's much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | csrinpractice0 -
How do I best SEO optimize a landing page that is mostly graphics?
I have a social networking website built on a SocialEngine platform. All of the pages (except the home page) are password protected for members only. My web designer wants the home page to be primarily graphics - not text. It looks nice, but with no substantial copy on the page, can I still get the page to rank well with just meta title, description and keywords (even when those keywords aren't actually on the page?) What's the best way to handle this? Kim
On-Page Optimization | | KimCalvert0 -
Page Title
My website was hacked last November and then again last week. Prior to the hacking we were at number one in Google.co.uk for our main search term "nile cruises' for years. After last November's hacking we dropped to about position 4 and after last week we are at position 7. Ima rebuilding the lost data and I am having to create new Title and Description meta data for each of the indexed pages. I am taking the opportunity to try and ensure my titles and descriptions are good and the correct length, etc but wondered about the best title format. I set our home page title over the weekend as: Nile Cruise | Leading ABTA & ATOL Bonded UK Nile Cruise Specialist I was going to try and cover 3 keyphrases in the title like this: Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains But I thought that might look a bit spammy because the 3 phrases are very similar. I wondered what anyone else might suggest? Thanks, Colin
On-Page Optimization | | NileCruises0 -
How would you optimize thousands of images?
The majority of our images are not optimized for search. Specifically, the alt text and image title are blank. The image filenames are also not using descriptive keywords. We publish content quite frequently and this issue will be addressed within the production work flow for all images moving forward. As for the images currently existing on our site, what are some ways to scale the optimization for thousands of images that need to be optimized for alt text, title and filename? We're thinking about mechanical turk, but the problem is that we are a business magazine and have a lot of head shots of entrepreneurs that the mainstream might not recognize. Any insights would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | inc.com0