Whats happening with Google UK?
-
Within the last week we have had a handful of our rankings drop dramatically down the SERPS. About 15% but this an estimate and has not been fully investigated yet.
Whilst looking into possible scenarios that could be causing this i wanted to check what the SERPS looked like for the terms that we are still holding position on.
Typing "extending dining tables" into Google UK today i was amazed at what i found...
Ranking in position 1 and 2 is a massive UK furniture store.
But isnt that the same landing page being returned for both positions??It appears to be a navigation problem within the site category tags causing duplicate content. However they have been rewarded with the top two positons subsequently pushing our website onto page two.
I find it so frustrating that we listen to Googles best practices when it comes to pagination issues yet this is how our hard work is rewarded!
Anyone else have any thoughts about this?
-
Pleasure. Shout if I can help!
-
Fantastic. Thank you very much. Interestingly this website is hosted on a different platform to our others, so I wonder whether this has something to do with the config. We'll set up 301s for w. and ww. as a short term fix and look at the config going forward.
Many thanks again.
-
Hey, I think I have spotted something:
Google this:
portland clic-clac sofa bed
& Closely Check the result:
http://ww.franceshunt.co.uk/live/sofa-beds/portland-clic-clac-sofa-bed.html
ww not www
Also, we have another version of that page indexed:
v 1.
info:ww.franceshunt.co.uk/live/sofa-beds/portland-clic-clac-sofa-bed.htmlv 2.
info:www.franceshunt.co.uk/live/sofa-beds/portland-clic-clac-sofa-bed.htmlSo, you have something whack going on with your sub domains.
Digging a bit deeper:
site:franceshunt.co.uk/live/sofa-beds/portland-clic-clac-sofa-bed.html
This shows that we have not only some ww. & www. results we also have pages being returned on
w.
ww.
www.
www.w.These are all the clic clac sofa bed pages so that most likely explains that one away and could well be at the root of your other problems.
I quickly checked the obvious and you do a 301 from franceshunt.co.uk to www.franceshunt.co.uk but if we do a general indexation query
site:franceshunt.co.uk
We see all kinds of weirdness and for the homepage alone (again, checking very quickly we have indexed and can resolve that page on
So.... not to hard to assume you may have lost a little bit of trust here through duplicate version of the page.
It obviously needs a bit more digging around but this should be easily fixed with a 301 for all these variations to www. and a double check across the board and on your internal linking to figure out just how this has happened and why it resolves on those wacky sub domains.
I didn't find a:
if-we-create-duplicate-versions-of-the-site-do-we-get-more-serp-share.franceshunt.co.uk but.... it resolves so it seems the site will resolve on any sub domain so we have two main issues
1. The virtual host is wrongly configured to allow it rank on anything.franceshunt.co.uk - a competitor could use this to harm you!
2. There are variations indexed that you need to take care of and a (*). rule for anything other than www. should 301 to the www. version of the page and that should, given a bit of time for reindexation etc, do the job (or at least help, who's to say we don't have multiple issues here).
Hope it helps and please let me know how it works out!
Marcus
-
First of all, thanks very much for taking the time to have a look for us and offer your opinions Marcus, much appreciated.
We are certainly going to be experimenting with the canonical tag in this way moving forward. We've never experienced problems with user interaction within the site since Google decided to start ranking the "show all" version of the pages instead so we've never really worried too much about it until now.
The worst hit was another non-competitive term "clic clac sofa bed" - we grew it steadily from 10th position back in feb and this was 3rd last week (!) and is no longer ranking at all! The page that was ranking is: http://www.franceshunt.co.uk/live/sofa-beds/
When this campaign began back in the old days of yore we were still using free directorys for optimisation of deep pages. Ive read alot about these being slowly de-indexed by Google so was wondering if this was having an adverse impact on some of the "weaker" pages. As you can see though there has been no off-site optmisation towards this page its a pretty new term (only added to campaign in feb) so im discounting that theory - for now!
-
Hey
First up, you have rel = next & prev on the paginated pages so that's good but I would also use the rel=canonical to the view all page as described here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
The view all page in this category is not huge and loads nice and quickly so I cant see any reason not to 'help' google and give them the indication that this is where you want all rankings for those pages to be concentrated.
As always, experimentation is needed but I see things like this:
-
You have a view all page and that is the desired page to display and Google prefers it all by itself
-
You have a rel=next & rel=prev set up that is really for when you want to display individual component pages rather than the main page
-
The search query you are referencing has no intent that makes it more specific to one of the paginated pages so the ideal landing page is the view all page
So, remove the rel=next & rel=prev and canonical it to the view all page and see how you get on. Allow it to reindex, record the results and make an decision based on that information.
As a disclaimer, this may not make any difference with the ranking as it seems they are not indexing your paginated pages AND if we do an info query on the main category page it shows details for the show all page. That said, this is the correct way to do it unless you would rather show the individual pages so I would still make the change.
I think when it comes down to it, Harveys just have like 5 x as many linking domains as you and you both have fairly natural looking anchor text (at the most cursory of views) so they are just outranking you here. I have not digged into the other results between you and them and a drop from 3 to 11 is a bit more than the usual flutters - is there anything else that has had a similar drop?
-
-
Thanks Marcus!
Our site is http://www.franceshunt.co.uk/
We have asked a couple of questions before on Moz as to how best to solve the pagination issues within our site.
Google seems to prefer to rank the "show all" version of the targeted landing pages.
So whilst we are optimising http://www.franceshunt.co.uk/dine/extending-dining-tables/
Google prefers to rank http://www.franceshunt.co.uk/dine/extending-dining-tables/?p=all
Which hasn't caused us any problems before, yet now im wondering if this could be part of the issue too. Please let us know what you think!
-
We were ranking third before the update for this term.
Surely brand exposure and social signals are related to their number one positioning, but whats with the second result?
This is the same landing page yet through a different navigational path. This is what im questioning here?
-
Hmmm, yeah, that kind of sucks. That is the same page, and like you say it just seems to be either tagged as either living room or dining room. Looking at them closely, they are vaguely different, not a lot in it, both just a weak category page.
Whilst this is an obvious example of something amiss here, they should not have the top two spots, I would not waste too much time worrying about it. I imagine this will be a short lived deal for them.
Can you drop a link to your site? Maybe we can better advise you on what you can control so you can try to win back some footing here?
-
The update went in favour of companies with good brand exposure, so it is possible that Harvey's link profile is a mix of brand and keyword anchor text.
Your also notice they have 9,000+ facebook fans, in order to obtain that they must activity work on social media, so your also looking at social signals being built another thing Google is now focusing on.
But I don't really see that keyword being that competitive, you should be able to push through SERP's
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
-
Do Google Fonts Slow Down Your Site?
Hi Guys,
Web Design | | jeeyer
I just did a webpage speed test on http://www.webpagetest.org to see how our site is performing.
I noticed that an exteral URL called fonts.gstatic.com has a "huge" impact on our sites loading time. See a screen here: http://monosnap.com/image/z6drzC2ELoJ48d1rM0Tmtuszl3pFpH#
An overview can be seen here: http://monosnap.com/image/9hofUpr5Ld8D7mi7zyaJmGFIGhpBsY# All our scores are green and A (finally!) but I was a bit concerned when I saw the outcome of the pagespeedtest regarding the fonts.
When I load a page on my pc I indeed notice that the text content is usally quite slow in showing up, pops up afer a few seconds. Is this a know problem and Is this something I need to fix? If so what is the best approach? Looking forward on your thoughts!
Joost1 -
Trying to rank on top 3 in Google.co.uk for a moderate competitive keyword by having a .dk domain
Do you think I should switch my domain to a .com and use ccTLDs method for my other international domains ? The problem is that my .dk domain(norwell.dk) has a better SEO ranking that my .com domain (norwelloutdoorfitness.com) and also differs slightly in name. The primary keyword I want to rank is ' outdoor fitness' which is in the name of 'norwelloutdoorfitness.com', thus over the long-term providing better benefits. Let me know what you think. Thanks, Andrei
Web Design | | kkk92330 -
When Site:Domain Search Run on Google, SSL Error Appears on One URL, Will this Harm Ranking
Greetings MOZ Community: When a site:domain search is run on Google, a very strange URL appears in the search results. The URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com:2082/ The page displays a "the site's security certificate is not trusted." This only appears for one URL out of 400. Could this indicate a wider problem with the server's configuration? Is this something that needs to be corrected, and if so how? Our ranking has dropped a lot in the last few months. Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Does stock art photo attribution negatively impact SEO by leaking Google Page Rank?
Greetings: Companies such as Shutterstock often require that buyers place credit attribution on their web pages when photos you buy from them appear on these pages.. Shutterstock requests that credit attribution links such as these be added: Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com Do these links negatively impact SEO? Or do search engines view them as a positive? Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
How to create Google Section or Jump To Links
Hello all! i need create a jump to links on my site and when seach a keyword on google it will display jump to links http://techwyse.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/google-jump-to-links.jpg i same with that images please help me how to do it, and have any plugin on wordpress can do that google-jump-to-links.jpg
Web Design | | ITVSEO.COM0 -
Parameters - Google Web Master Tools
In Google Web Mastertools you can stipulate which paramters you want the Googlebots to ignore when crawling your site. This is common place on pages that add some form of parameterisaton to the end of the link when a web user filters the information on a page (eg. on a clothes website someone may filter the products so they only see 'blue' jumpers, rather than 'all') This is meant to be beneficial as it means Google trawls through less duplicate content. Having now set this up, what impact will this have on my search results, if any? Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting to shoot up to no.1, but will it benefit me in any way?
Web Design | | DHS_SH0 -
Having a new website build, what happens to my SEO work?
Hi, We are in the process of having a new website developed by a web agency. New domain, new business name etc... What is the best process to transfer from old domain to the new one? What happens to all my ranked URLs? What can re-directs do to help me? Will I loose all my link juice on highly ranked keyword domains? I ranked 1st for a brand now, wil lthis go? Any advice, help or hints would be great. Thanks Will
Web Design | | YNWA0 -
Competitor Rockets to #1 and I'm looking at keyword stuffing. Will Google catch up with it?
We have a competitor whose home page rocketed up to number one, page one, on our key search term after they did a website redesign. They even beat out the original retailer for that position, as they are resellers of the product (not affiliate sales, resale in the secondary market.) They are the first to knock the original seller out of the #1 position. In the past couple of years that I have been doing in-house SEO, they have never ranked on page one for the term. I ran their site through the SEOmoz page grader for the specific search term, loading their page that is ranking, and found that they grade a “B,” but have some alerts for keyword stuffing, (the search term is on the home page 30+ times,) and they have eleven tags on said page. Aside from the two things listed above, they have pretty good site architecture on this new site, and are pretty well branded, etc. Should I expect Google to catch the keyword stuffing and eleven tags, and possibly adjust their rank? Will their keyword stuffing come back to bite them?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0