Why sudden change in rankings?
-
I have been working on a domain for site which has only been up for a few months. I have mainly been working on building trust and authority for the site, with only a few links to my keyword phrases, which I was saving for the end, and concentrating on good quality non-spammy type links.
It was progressing nicely until last weekend when I went from the first page on Google to the 3rd and 4th pages.
Was there some kind of update?
-
I did slack off the link pace, waiting to see what would happen when it was digested but thought itmight stay up there as the phrase I'm competing for is quite niche oriented.
-
I think Andy explained it pretty well.
New sites do tend to get a temporal boost, as well as new links (I believe Rand did a great post on SEOMoz about temporal links but I can't seem to find it). The issue may be that you didn't keep up the link pace, so it went back down to where it should be for the time being.
If it is a fairly competitive term that you are talking about I wouldn't be that surprised, as 2-3 months usually won't be enough for a brand new site/domain to rank for the bigger phrases. Give it a few more months of steady link/content building and you should see some positive results.
I'm sure most SEO people here can share a story where they had the temporary boost and crossed their fingers hoping that maybe it isn't temporary only to see it go down a few pages.
-
Just about every site when starting out gets an initial boost - I have seen this dozens of times. You appear quite highly ranked for a while and then suddenly drop.
This is nothing more than Google putting the site where it really belongs. I wouldn't worry about it at all, but this is quite common. If you think about it, Google placing a site first page in just a few short months is pretty much unheard of.
I can't imagine that the addition of links at this early stage would be responsible for the drop as the site is still young.
Just keep concentrating on good (non reciprocal) links from trusted sites and keep the content flowing.
Regards,
Andy
-
For the most part, yes.
-
Are the directories links that your competition ahead of you has as well?
-
Yes, some directory links but they were there before the drop. No paid content, no duplicate content, no canonicalization issues.
-
Were the links you have obtained already directory or paid links? Usually a drop in ranking will mean that Google has penalized you for paid links or duplicate content (especially after the recent Panda update). Make sure that your pages are canonicalized correctly also.
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
-
Sudden traffic down after mobile site
Hi to all. I have a huge problem about my web site traffic. We published our mobile site version under mobile domain in m.etilercerrental.com. And we published mobile site sitemap under main site such as sitemap-mobile.xml and notify google from webmaster tools. After a while whole site traffic gone down so badly. Almost 60% gone down which doesnt make sense. Mobile sitemap is hosted under desktop site. And we didnt add any link to switch sites between mobile and desktop version. We automaticly redirect between desktop and mobile versiyons by detecting useragent. One another this is we have announcement section in dekstop version but we dont have it in mobile. But we are not making any redirection to mobile site when user visits the announcement section even by mobile phone. Because we are not displaying it in mobile version.
Technical SEO | | gkhnrtk
One last this is we are making redirections automatically and not asking user preference such as showing a link in the bottom of page to switch sites betwenn mobile and pc version. While developing mobile site we followed instructions in this https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/?hl=tr For find the details I would like to give you some site urls. Site Url : http://www.etilercarrental.com/
Sitemap Xml : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap.xml
Mobile Sitemap Xml : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap-mobile.xml0 -
Google is changing the title
Hi! Lately i have seen that Google changed the page titles for some clients, not all... its about 30% of them. For example, the title looks likes this after the Google change: Company name: SEO and Pay per click management But in on that page it looks like this: SEO and Pay per click management - Company name Does anyone know why?
Technical SEO | | DanielNordahl1 -
Keywords Ranking Dropped
Hi All, One of my website http://www.greenhomepest.com/ were ranking on Google first page for the keywords as mentioned below: pest control in Scottsdale
Technical SEO | | RuchiPardal
pest control in Mesa
pest control in Gilbert
pest control in Tempe
pest control in Peoria
pest control in Queen Creek
pest control in Glendale
pest control phoenix
pest control arizona
pest control az
pest control phoenix az
Pest Control in Chandler But some days before all keywords are disappeared from top 100.I tried to find out the reason but not succeed. Can you please help me to find out the exact reason behind this??0 -
Ranking in more than one country
Hi, I have a website http://goo.gl/IrJz4 and currently it was ranking well in Google US serps. And now i want to rank well it india too. Does doing more links will bring the results or do i need to do any on page seo ? Please advice me.
Technical SEO | | Dexx220 -
Duplicate content by category name change
Hello friends, I have several problems with my website related with duplicate content. When we changed any family name, for example "biodiversidad" to "cajas nido y biodiversidad", it creates a duplicate content because: mydomain.com/biodiversidad and mydomain.com/cajas-nido-y-biodiversidad have the same content. This happens every tame I change the names of the categories or families. To avoid this, the first thing that comes to my mid is a 301 redirect from the old to the new url, but I wonder if this can be done more automatically otherwise, maybe a script? Any suggestion? Thank you
Technical SEO | | pasape0 -
Sudden ranking drop, no manual action
Sort of a strange situation I'm having and I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts. Here's what has happened... Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected. I immediately figured that this was some sort of keyword-specific penalty that I had incurred. I had done a bit of link building over the weekend (two or three directory type sites and a bio link from a site I contribute to). I also changed some anchor text on another site to match my homepage's title tag (which just so happened to be the exact phrase match I had dropped in) - I assumed this was what got me. I was slowly beginning to climb up the rankings and just got a bit impatient/overzealous. Changed the anchor text back to what it originally was and submitted a reconsideration request on Tuesday. This morning, I get the automated response in Webmaster Tools that no manual action had been taken. So my question is, would this drop have been an automated deal? If that's the case, then it's going to be mighty hard to pinpoint what I did wrong, since there's no way to know when I did whatever it was to cause the drop. Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions to regain my modest original placement?
Technical SEO | | sandlappercreative0 -
Ranking via partial match
If I wanted to rank for "red hot widgets" and my domain was redhot.com, would it be better to obtain backlinks (via "red hot widgets" anchor text) pointing to: A) redhot.com (homepage) or B) redhot.com/widgets Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | martyc0