Single, high ranking pank disappears from Google?
-
Hi all,
The question I have concerns a high ranking page on my site that has disappeared from Google. It was in the top 5 for the target keyword and it currently ranks 3 on Bing.
I recently migrated my domain (one month ago), but it seems to have gone very well. No other pages have taken a hit like this. The 301 redirect is in place and working well. I've used the Moz Tools to see if anything is weird, but it all looks fine.
Oh, and yes, I did check Google Webmaster Tools - no messages and other related pages on my site are ranking on the second and third pages for the terms. Also, the site is consulting services - nothing dodgy.
Any ideas? Why just this one page? What are my options?
Thanks for any advice you may have.
John
-
Thanks for the update! I am glad it worked out for you.
-
Ultimately, what I had to to was go into GWT and request that the URL in question be added to the index. It reappeared today, three days after my request and three weeks after disappearing.
-
I hope you're right...it's been about a week. Thanks for the encouragement!
-
I think it will reappear in a few days anytime I have made changes like that Google will usually remove it for a few days and then re-list it. It is weird just that one page took a hit though.
-
I checked this. This page is a popular tutorial on a technical topic that was kicking ass in the rankings and has utterly disappeared. I did the backlinks check and honestly, Opensite Explorer is not very useful most of the time. Outdated and very incomplete. I checked GWT and Bing Webmaster Tools for backlinks and it came up with with relevant links I was really happy to have. Hundreds of good ones, nothing obviously spammy. I'm at a loss with this...very difficult to understand and hurting my site a lot.
-
They're good. I'm wondering if Google has a penalty in place, but can find no evidence of it. But other pages with similar content are ranking. It's good content, in fact one of my most popular pages. Weird.
-
The next thing I would do is check the backlinks to the page in Google Webmaster tools, Opensite explorer and Bing Tools. Are they of low quality? Lots of spam? Do you only have anchor links pointing to the website? I suspect that one of these are the case if everything else is well.
-
Everything is exactly the same. I was very careful and since it took the hit, I've triple checked. It's the same. Very curious.
-
^ This
Also make sure that your canonical tags (if you had any) aren't pointing to your old URL. Common issue if transferring over all content.
-
Did you greatly change the page's content, headers, titles etc . when you made the switch to the new domain? Did you keep a lot of the same internal linking as well? All of these are things that I would check into for the page. Also, make sure that the page is craw-able by a Google bot. These would all be first things that I would look at.
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
-
Highly ranked pages to new domain?
Hi everyone! We are ranked #1 for about 30 product pages at www.oldsite.com/product1 and we are wanting to move about 30 of those pages to a new site www.newsite.com/product1 (new domain and hosting - which we own). What is the best way to do this? I'm confused if you recreate those pages on the new domain vs. ftp move them, 301 re-directs, etc. Looking for the things we must do and the sequence to do it all, etc. Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamesmcd030 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Why Keyword Ranking Fluctuate?
Hi All, I have a shoes website and I am working on it from last four months. I am targeting four main keywords but I have some issues with ranking. First one is that keywords ranking fluctuate many time a day but they remain on the same page. Second one is that these keywords remain on the same page for 2 to 3 week and than suddenly they drop down in the ranking. Please help me regarding these issue. Waiting for replies. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cuttingseo0 -
Rankings going down down down
Hi guys, I know this is a little open ended, but any advice/ideas would be greatly appreciated. I launched a new site about 3 months ago (www.transfersandshuttles.co.za). I have had unique, useful articles written for it, and the site does provide a useful service. I have done a little link building and continue to do so. The site was making decent progress moving up the rankings for a few weeks, but now it just seems to get worse and worse.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cashchampion
I'm not looking for an entire site audit or strategy here, just if anything jumps out at you that seems very poor for seo, please let me know. Thanks so much,
Marc0 -
Rankings traffic percentages
Hi All, It seems that some keywords that are receiving a fairly high amount of monthly traffic such as 6000 hits are passing very little traffic to my website. for a few keywords recieving this amount of traffic my site ranks on page one. is there a breakdown of what percentage of traffic you should roughly get to your website depending on the rank for a certain keyword. example; position 1 send approximately % traffic to your site position 2 send approximately % traffic to your site etc thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza_19850 -
Who is beating you on Google (after Penguin)?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google. I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this.
The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories. 1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering. Now it is not the homepages that are beating me. In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do. 2) Nobodies. Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old. Has anybody else noticed this? I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web. Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO? If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building. But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.| Thanks!0 -
New Domain Name For Site That Ranks Highly on Key Terms
Here's my problem -- which is actually a pretty good problem to have. My client is a speciality service provider in an extremely competitive field. It charges 3 to 5 times what others do for providing a super-premium level of service. It doesn't have -- nor does it want -- many customers. I can't go into details, but let's just say the business model is a bit like the charity or premium newsletter publishing model. It is extremely hard to recruit new members -- but once recruited, members tend to stay for a long time at high price points. Personal referral is key. As result of my efforts over the last 90 days, the client's SEO results have skyrocketed. After a couple of false starts, we have focussed on key terms the target demographic is likely to search, rather than the generic terms others in the industry use. We have also had great success with a social media strategy -- since the few people likely to be interested in paying such high prices know like-minded folks. For the first time, my client is getting "walk in" prospects. They are delighted! But they are not really walk-ins. They have already found the site -- either through SERPs or Facebook or Twitter. Now we need to get to the next level. Here's the problem: the client's domain name sucks. It is short, but combines an acronym with one of the words in its long-version name. It uses the British spelling version of the long name fragment, even though most Canadians now use American spelling. And it is a .ca, rather than a dot.com So I think we have to bite the bullet and change to the long, dot com version of the name, which is available and has the additional benefit of having embedded within it a key search term. I am basically an editorial/content guy and not a tech guy. The IT guys at my firm are strongly encouraging me to make the change...in very "colorful" language. We can certainly do 301 redirects at the page level. But I would like some additional validation before proceeding. My questions are: how much link juice might we lose? I've seen the figure of 10% bandied around. Is it accurate? might we see a temporary dip in results? If so, how long would it last? what questions did I forget to ask? What additional info do you need to offer informed advice ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielFreedman0 -
Random Google?
In 2008 we performed an experiment which showed some seemingly random behaviour by Google (indexation, caching, pagerank distributiuon). Today I put the results together and analysed the data we had and got some strange results which hint at a possibility that Google purposely throws in a normal behaviour deviation here and there. Do you think Google randomises its algorithm to prevent reverse engineering and enable chance discoveries or is it all a big load balancing act which produces quasi-random behaviour?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0