After optimising for SEO my ranking went down...
-
Hello,
My website was ranking for over 100 keywords but was not really optimised properly.
For example, the page title was much too long, it was segmented like this:
"keyword - Category - domain "
I followed recommandations in SEOMOZ and I removed the domain and category from the long page titles to only leave the keyword and updated the H1 to reflect also the keyword.
We dropped in ranking since even though we did not change anything, only made things more SEO optimised.
I don't understand how it made us drop in ranking??
David
-
Thank you Mike,
Very appreaciated
-
Hi David.
Okay, unfortunately this is around the time of some major Google tweaks, making it possibly harder to figure our what went wrong, as we need to try to rule out Penguin/Panda issues (feel free to take a screengrab or csv download from GA with a chart, so I can cross-check against Google's updates, and see if any of the big drop-off dates tally with major algo changes for you, as this could help rule Pegnuin in/out).
I have had a quick look at your site, and done a couple of quick Google queries, and found the following (I am NOT saying this is the cause, but this is something that should definitely be looked into).
-
LOTS (circa 1,900) of pages indexed in Google, with pretty much duplicates of your homepage title tag (I will private message you a link, rather than publishing here)
-
Possible canonicalisation issues (need to check).
David, I have triggered a crawl test of your domain, and will cast me eye over the findings when it is finished, and let you know if I see anything that may be useful.
I am leaving the office soon (especially as it is sunny! VERY rare for Bristol!), but I will check to see if the results of the crawl test are ready tomorrow, and fire you a reply once I know.
Cheers David,
Mike.
-
-
Mike,
Thank you for your comment.
The changes were made during March 2012, since then I have been checking the SEOMOZ ranking tool and have been pulling my hair out of my head.
From April to June we lost about 40% of traffic.
Each month we had much more declined keywords than improved ones.
The drop off started immediately after the updates were made.
Here are the monthly visits for non branded keywords:
Feb: 542
March: 510
April: 436
May:426
June: 288
Cheers
-
Hmmmm, and, was this change made in isolation, or were other on-page changes also made?
When you say the rankings have been going down for around 4 months, do you know what sort of date the decline started? - I ask as it may be wise to broaded the net a little in looking at the cause of this.
I am not saying the title tag changes didn't cause it, just that it would be wise to not restrict ones research... for example, did the decline start around the time of any major Google updates? (Panda/Penguin refreshes, etc).
Also, do you know how long the gap was between changing the title tags, and the drop-off becoming apparent?
So really, 3 questions:
-
Do you remember the date you made the changes
-
Do you remember how long until the drop-off was seen
-
What date did your traffic start to go down (checking Google Analytics data could show you this, switching to a 6 month view).
Sorry to answer with more questions, but I wouldn't want to put forward an opinion of what could have caused this without all the facts!
Thanks,
Mike.
-
-
Here is an example:
The title:
|
"Data centre & server room energy audits - Energy efficient design of data centres & computer rooms"
was renaimed "Data centre & server room energy audits - Energy saving computer rooms"
|
and
|
|
"Data centre Consultancy and independent advice - Data centre solutions : [Our Company Name]" was renaimed
| "Building a data centre - independent advice" |
etc. to a total of 76 page titles.
Then the pages started dropping in Google.
|
|
-
Good question.
I did not change the URL structure, I do plan on doing it as the URLs are not SEO friendly.
I will send an example.
-
Just to check the obvious, you didn't change any URL structure (of the pages) did you?
How much optimisation did you carry out on the pages, please show an example, as it is possible to 'over optimise', especially these days.
Thanks,
Mike.
-
It has been decreasing for the past 4 months consistently. I will put together some sample and post them. Thanks
-
For how long you are experiencing this drop? I mean the time frame. Some times the rankings tends to drop if there are some minor or major meta details or site update, its natural. If the meta details that you have updated perfectly suits your site/ business and the link profile of your site is good then it will not take much time to re gain the old rankings. It will be better if you provide a sample of your past and present title meta details.
Thanks,
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
-
SEO: High intent organic revenue down in Europe
Our team is stumped and we are hoping some of you might have some insight! We are seeing a drop in Europe organic revenue and we can't seem to figure out what the core cause of the problem is. What's interesting, the high intent traffic is increasing across the business, as is organic-attributed revenue. And in Europe specifically, other channels appear to be doing just fine. This seems to be a Europe high-intent SEO problem. What we have established: Revenue was at a peak in Q4 2017 and Q1 2018 Revenue dips in mid-late Q2 2018 and again in Q4 2018 where it has stayed low since Organic traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down, purchases have gone down Paid search traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down slightly, submissions have gone up Currency changes are minimal We cannot find any site load issues What we know happened during this time frame (January 2018 onward): Updates to the website (homepage layout, some text changes) end of April 2018 GDPR end of May 2018 Google Analytics stops being able to track Firefox Europe is a key market for us and we cant figure out what might be causing this to happen - again, only in Europe - beyond GDPR and the changes we've made on our site is there anything else major that we're missing that could be causing this? Or does anyone have any insights as to where we should look? Thank you in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | RS-Marketing0 -
Increase of non-relevant back-links drop page ranking?
Hi community, Let's say there is a page with 50 back-links where 40 are non-relevant back-links and only 10 are relevant in-terms of content around the link, etc....Will these non-relevant back-links impact the ranking of the page by diluting the back-link profile? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
What is the impact of HTTP/2 on SEO ?
I think it's good for the user experience and speeds up websites, especially if your site has a lot of requests. But i'm not sure if there are other side effects, and if there's an impact on SEO or technical configuration. Most of my websites are built with Wordpress, some with Joomla.
Algorithm Updates | | Croco_Web_Solutions1 -
Is My SEO Strategy Doomed?
Hi Mozzers, Second time poster here and still a major rookie with SEO. I run the website http://OrangeOctop.us/, it provides winning tips for video games such as FIFA, NBA 2K, NHL. All of the tips are written by experts and professional gamers. The site has been trying to rank for the term "NHL 14 Tips". To give you some more background info, the actual game, NHL 14, does not come out for another two weeks. I was just being proactive with trying to rank for a term that will be popular in the future. My Wordpress category page, http://orangeoctop.us/nhl14-tips/, ranked as high as #5 for "NHL 14 Tips", but it seems that as it gets closer to the game's release date, I get pushed further down the google rankings. In the most recent Moz crawl, my site just dropped 11 spots. Any recommendations would be appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | orangeoctop.us0 -
Infographic rankings has nose dived? Anyone else experienced this recently?
I posted an infographic back in April, 2012 on my company blog.
Algorithm Updates | | adamlcasey
I added embed code at the bottom, so people could embed on their websites (not many did that I can tell) I also submitted it to a number of Infographic directories and got links back from around 5-6 of them. The title of the Infographic is exact match long tail search term.(6 words) By July it had hit Position 6 in Google.co.uk, where it stayed in the top 10 until December fluctuating between positions 6-9. I haven't done anything else to the post and yet since December it has started to trickle down the rankings, in the past 3 weeks it dropped from 15th on Feb 3rd to 93rd on Feb 17th, then bounced back up to 33rd on the 25th of Feb and has now fallen again to 89th yesterday. Is this normal or have I been hit with a penalty of some sort? Not sure if this matters but I have the word infographic at the end of my title?? Also when I run it through OSE I don't see some of the backlinks that I can see from GWT.0 -
URL SEO
Hi All I am completely new to SEO and I have a question about URL's which I would like advise on. We are about to launch an immigration consultancy website which caters for several countries. For the example below we are targeting the keyword "UK Visit Visa", which URL would be better from an SEO prospective? 1. www.example.com/uk/visit-visa
Algorithm Updates | | Fuad_YK
2. www.example.com/uk/uk-visit-visa Thanks, Fuad0 -
Does the browers type affect rankings?
This may be a rooky question so apologies in advance if it is! A client of mine has asked why his site's rank is different when he searches for it from his iPhone or computer (where he uses IE) and also on Bing. Obviously I know that there will be differences between Bing and Google so I can explain that to him. But he seems to be implying that the different browsers are affecting the results on his iPhone and computer. I've tried this myself using Firefox and IE and on Firefox the site ranks page 1 but on IE it ranks page 3 (both using Google). Is this likely to do with the browser having information about my past search habits or is it actually the browser affecting the SERP? Again, sorry if this is a stupid question! Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | WillCreate0 -
Google said that low-quality pages on your site may affect rankings on other parts
One of my sites got hit pretty hard during the latest Google update. It lost about 30-40% of its US traffic and the future does not look bright considering that Google plans a worldwide roll-out. Problem is, my site is a six year old heavy linked, popular Wordpress blog. I do not know why the article believes that it is low quality. The only reason I came up with is the statement that low-quality pages on a site may affect other pages (think it was in the Wired article). If that is so, would you recommend blocking and de-indexing of Wordpress tag, archive and category pages from the Google index? Or would you suggest to wait a bit more before doing something that drastically. Or do you have another idea what I could to do? I invite you to take a look at the site www.ghacks.net
Algorithm Updates | | badabing0