Sudden SERP stop for main keyword.
-
Hey guys,
I have a website with about 30 Google indexed pages. Most of my pages are perfoming well for my keywords. My homepage recently started doing extremely well. Number 4 overall for a highly competitive keyword/niche. Then after a week it dropped completely off the map. It still shows for secondary and tertiary keywords. But my primary keyword does not rank anywhere. I checked as deep as 50 pages. It's been 3 weeks now. Any ideas of what might have happened? Is there really a sandbox? Could I maybe have been Panda slapped? Or do you think it is more likely just a technical/SEO issue. It just seems odd that it jumped so high and then disappeared??
-
two other possibilities. gwt says severe site health issue. robot.txt is blocking some important page. but is a .js file that website tonight claims is standard protocol and that it is just an image file. secondly i foolishly renamed my homepage and it caused a duplicate content issue. go daddyl/website tonight won't allow me to use a 301 redirect. but those wouldnt only happen to one particular keyword.
-
To be honest Diverse Anchor Text is always recommended but this can’t take you that down that it didn’t appear anywhere against a search term… there must be some other reason for it. I would suggest you to make some changes on content and recheck the on-page elements to see if there is anything missing.
Make the changes and wait for the next crawl… Also double check the GWT if it shows any error!
-
No spammy sites. Mainly article submissions and submitted it to alot of directories focusing primarily on the one word keyword. Could it be a lack of diverse anchor texts?
-
Ok, I genuinely doubt that only a week ago you keyword started to rank extremely well… and then dropped from the listings but it showers for secondary terms… did you make links from paid blog networks or spammy sites? If yes then you must build some more quality links targeting your main keyword.
Or you should also try making some changes within the content and on-page factors and see if it works for you… there can be lot of possibilities as this requires complete Audit of the website.
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
-
Keyword cannibalisation - Any way to find out who is eating who?
I have a question regarding some keywords in my site. For some reason, I am ranking for the wrong keyword in some SERPs or my top page is ranking instead. Example: graphic design is ranking for web design Is there any tool or way to figure out how, why or who is eating each other up so to speak? Would you have any advice or links to good sources on how to resolve this issue so that the correct page shows in search for it's particular keyword? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Kuruto0 -
Sudden decline in ranking
Hi SEO People, Rankings for one of my search keywords has declined over the last two weeks from place 2-4 down to 13-15 on Google NZ. It had sat at the place 2-4 level for months. Nothing has changed on any of the sites above/below ours, and nor have any changes been made to our site. All our other, similar, keyword rankings have either stayed unchanged or improved. Does anyone have any bright ideas?
Technical SEO | | chris.elevate0 -
Link to Articles for news sites in Google SERPs
I'm trying to figure out why when I search for "international news" or "world news", for example, some sites in the SERPs have links to news articles, while others don't. For "international news", result of Fox News and New York Times have links to articles, while CNN (the top result), only have sitelinks. I would appreciate any theories on why this happens. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | seoFan210 -
Https-pages still in the SERP's
Hi all, my problem is the following: our CMS (self-developed) produces https-versions of our "normal" web pages, which means duplicate content. Our it-department put the <noindex,nofollow>on the https pages, that was like 6 weeks ago.</noindex,nofollow> I check the number of indexed pages once a week and still see a lot of these https pages in the Google index. I know that I may hit different data center and that these numbers aren't 100% valid, but still... sometimes the number of indexed https even moves up. Any ideas/suggestions? Wait for a longer time? Or take the time and go to Webmaster Tools to kick them out of the index? Another question: for a nice query, one https page ranks No. 1. If I kick the page out of the index, do you think that the http page replaces the No. 1 position? Or will the ranking be lost? (sends some nice traffic :-))... thanx in advance 😉
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Multiple pages - Similar keywords
I'm working on a site with a parent page and two minor pages all dealing with the primary/root keyword "log siding" - How do I optimize all three pages without bastardization of the primary keyword? Parent page - keyword: half-log-siding and log-siding Child Pages (linking from the parent) cedar-log-siding and Pine-log-siding. They all feature "log-siding" and grade well for that keyword (as well as their own long-tail keywords), yet I think based on my rank tracking that Google is unhappy with the multiple pages all (seemingly focused) on log-siding. Any ideas how I can effectively target all the long-tail keywords within their respective landing pages and not draw a penalty from Google towards my parent page and the root keyword? Thanks, Bill
Technical SEO | | Marvo0 -
Google Dmoz description in SERPS
My dmoz description is not as KW rich as my sites normal description. IS there an advantage or disadvantage to either? If so, How do I prevent google from doing this?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610 -
Google dropping pages from SERPS
The website for my London based plumbing company has thousands of specifically tailored pages for the various services we provide to all the areas in London. It equates to approximately 6000 pages in total. When google has all these pages indexed, we tend to get a fair bit of traffic - as they cater pretty well for long tail searches. However, every once in a while Google will drop the vast majority of our indexed pages from SERPs for a few days or weeks at a time - for example at the moment Google is only indexing 613 whereas last week it was back at the normal ~6000. Why does this happen? We of course lose a lot of organic traffic when these pages don't displayed - what are we doing wrong? Website: www.pgs-plumbers.co.uk
Technical SEO | | guy_andrews0
