Aggressive Loss in Rankings
-
I recently launched a website and used local directories, web directories and guest blogging as a means of getting links to the site. Within 60 days the site was ranking on the first page for a highly competitive keyword. It was hovering on the first page for about two weeks before it plummeted in ranking to near 200. I am not finding any crawl errors or duplicate content issues on the site. Could my links have caused this massive decrease in rankings?
-
No problem, good luck with your link building and rankings.
Ally
-
Thanks Ally. This is the route I have been taking but may have been over aggressive in the use and anchor text on directories. It seems there are a lot of people that just got hit by Google.
-
It depends on a few factors. I would initially start and look at your competitors backlink profiles (in your case whoever hasn't lost their rankings and is still on the first page) and see if there are oppurtunities for you to try and get a link. I would look at the sites that you are trying guest post on as well and check their link profile to ensure there is nothing odd there.
Also ensure you are creating fresh content on your site and blog so people will naturally link to you.
Thanks,
Ally
-
This definitely help. We have been varying the anchor text on our links to show a more natural backlink profile but definitely focused a lot of the links on our target keyword (which is also the name of the site/domain). Have you seen/heard anyone be able to quickly get their rankings back if they are able to build a more natural link profile?
-
Hi,
I think the biggest indicator is to look at the types of links you were building. What was the quality of these directory sites and the blogs that you were posting on?
Over the last couple of weeks Google has been penalising sites that considers having gotten links from blog networks. You may have been affected by this. Also have you been blogging on your own blog? Have you actively created fresh content for your blog that others would like to link to themselves.
Havre you also been focusing on your brand name when link building? As just focusing on a competitive keyword shows clear signs to Google you are over optimising.
Try and build a more natural linking strategy and also ensure you are updating the content on your own blog.
I hope this helps,
Ally
-
The domain has never had a site on it. I agree that in a competitive space there will be movement but this is drastic. The site went from the first page to close to 200. That signals to me there is something wrong. Any ideas? Could it be some of the links that were built (i.e. web directories)? The site does show up for the www and non www version and I just signified to Google the preferred domain in WMT,
-
Was the site a never before registered domain? Or was it already well in existence prior? If it's the latter, it might have had a history that was passed along to you.
The other thing to consider is that if you are entering a competitive space, your competition might have stepped up their game too...
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
-
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
Ranking Above sub-domains
So I work for a company that has a very successful affiliate that operates under a third level domain name such as "region.company.com". Their SEO practices are very good and they rank highly in keyword searches. However "company.com" does not even though it is not a subdomain. Even after optimizing the company.com's pages etc, the regional sub domain ranks much higher for keywords and the main company fails to rank at all. Is Google discounting the main company's page? Is it a matter of trust or time? or is it something else? How can I get Google to prioritize the main company website rather than a lower level domain affiliate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resolute0 -
Ranking in SERPs but not using terms on website.
As far as I know, it's not normally possible for a website to rank for a keyword that is not mentioned on the website. I have seen a website that ranks very well for key terms and yet they are not mentioned anywhere on the website, I have run advanced search & checked using tools including cloak checker on my findings. How can this be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lee-murphy0 -
Rank Tracker Result Not Reflected In Google
I'm tracking keyword results in Rank Tracker, but I can't confirm the positions when I do a Google search for the tracked keywords. Does anybody know why RT says the site should be #23, but is not actually in Google? Is there a way to check Google results from different data centers? If I recall, Google allowed the option to view results from different cities, though I don't know if they still allow this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Rank drop in June
Since fixing a major duplicate content issue in Dec 2012, our traffic saw steady and dramatic growth through the summer. It has started to settle down now and rankings have started to decline. I have a bad feeling that something is wrong but for the life of me I cannot figure it out. Our Moz rank is pretty high but some of our biggest keywords have gone from #2 to #9 in a fairly short time period which makes me very nervous. I am not even sure where to look at this point. Any suggestions are welcomed as I am kind of at a loss now but worry I am missing something basic. www.threeguysgolf.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | astaelin0 -
301 redirect and improved ranking
I was wondering if a 301 redirect will improve my ranking. My subpages use to redirect to my homepage ( all the subpages of my site redirecting to my homepage) and my homepage use to have no redirect from non www.to www. ( other than thru google webmaster tools. I am sure why it was like this for my subpages... I was wondering if I can expect some improvements in ranking now that the redirect goes from the none www. to the www version of each subpage and not to the homepage. By the way what was the issue ( was I telling google ) by re-directing all my subpages to the homepage ? was I making google think that my subpages and my homepage were all the same ? was I sending all the link juice from the subpages to my homepage ? etc... Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Retaining rank when integrating with a larger site
Our client was just acquired by a larger company and they want to merge their 100-page website into the larger, parent company's 500+ page website. They currently have a strong ranking for a focused group of keywords and are worried about losing their ranking position for those important keywords. The keywords are roughly 80-90% of the focus of the old site, but will represent only 30-40% of the focus of the new site. Will this move hurt their rankings? What can we advise them to do to retain the value of their current ranking strength for the target keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DenisL0
