When rankings dip what's the best diagnostic procedure?
-
Bonjourno from 10 degrees C lighly raining Wetherby UK
Every so often SEO feels like a game of snakes & ladders. One minute your rankings go up and then then within the click of a mouse they drop back down. Like a Greek play you begin to feel our mortal lives as SEO pundits is controlled by the Google Gods.
A case in point is illustrated here in this graph:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/lincoln-drop_zpseeb04690.jpgNow if i want to explain why the rapid dip has occured for target term "Lincoln Solicitors" here's is what i'd do:
1. Go to webmaster tools and check for crawl errors
2. See if a Google algo change has changed the rules of engagment
3. Check another site administrator hasnt tinkered with the original layout
But i wonder what process do other SEO practitioners follow to explain to a disgruntled client - "Why have my rankings that i pay you to look after nose dived?"
Any insights welcome:-)
-
I would check where those 500-errors originate from. Your website does not handle errors well do - i.e. the link to "/About-Us/Partner-Profiles/Partner-Profiles/Anna-Mosey.aspx" throws a 500 and should really be 404's or 410's.
When I do the search (from South Africa), the search term is on page 1, 4th position.
I would perhaps have a look at validating HTML as well - found it quite strange that the anchor-texts in the have so much trailing whitespace.
-
Well, firstly we can do a simple check against dates of known algorithm updates and see if that matches the drop.
So, you have a good rank on 17th July and have dropped at the next rank check on the 26th July.
Panda 3.9 hit on July 24th so there is every chance the site was flagged in this update so that would be my first port of call to see if this seems a likely case.
It's very hard without a link, but start with the dates and if you find something that seems like it could be the case then review the page to see if it is weak, or a near internal duplicate or some such.
I have checked the 14th result for that search term and the page is pretty weak, I am not sure if this is your client but if it is (first two letters of url are www.bm) then these are very weak pages with little to no unique content beyond the address so this is a page created pretty much entirely for search engines so is typical panda fodder.
So, to resolve? Make this page better along with other similar ones and if that is the case, then it should help resolve matters.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
N.B - Looked into webmanster tools and found this:
http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/server-errors-langleys_zps10c62870.jpgWould i be right in suggesting this has played a significant part in ranking demotion?
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
-
How google bot see's two the same rel canonicals?
Hi, I have a website where all the original URL's have a rel canonical back to themselves. This is kinda like a fail safe mode. It is because if a parameter occurs, then the URL with the parameter will have a canonical back to the original URL. For example this url: https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ has this canonical: https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ which is the same since it's an original URL This url https://www.example.com/something/page/1/?parameter has this canonical https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ like i said before, parameters have a rel canonical back to their original url's. SO: https://www.example.com/something/page/1/?parameter and this https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ both have the same canonical which is this https://www.example.com/something/page/1/ Im telling you all that because when roger bot tried to crawl my website, it gave back duplicates. This happened because it was reading the canonical (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/) of the original url (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/) and the canonical (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/) of the url with the parameter (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/?parameter) and saw that both were point to the same canonical (https://www.example.com/something/page/1/)... So, i would like to know if google bot treats canonicals the same way. Because if it does then im full of duplicates 😄 thanks.
Technical SEO | | dos06590 -
New theme adds ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to all URL's as part of cache. How does this affect SEO
New theme I am working in ads ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to every URL. Theme developer says its a server setting issue. GoDaddy support says its part of cache an becoming prevalent in new themes. How does this impact SEO?
Technical SEO | | DML-Tampa0 -
Why can't I rank for my brand name?
We are soon to launch a new company in New Zealand called Zing. I have been tasked with the challenge of ranking as highly as possible for anything to do with Zing before launch in February. Zing is in the financial industry so my colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to make a small blog (very small with literally one post) that reviewed other financial lenders. This sight stayed online for a couple of months before it was replaced. The official website is still yet to launch, so as an in between, I asked that we make a splash page with a small competition on it (see here at zing.co.nz). I would have preferred there were more keywords on the website but this was not achieved. I am still pushing for this and am hoping to get a few pages on there in the near future. Instead of getting the keywords on the splash page, I was given permission to start a subdomain, (blog.zing.co.nz). This contains many more common search terms and although its not quite doing the job I would like, the rankings for Zing have started to increase. At the moment, we are ranking number 1 for a few brand related keywords such as zing loans. This is why I feel something is wrong, because we rank number 1 for over 10 similar terms but yet we DO NOT EVEN APPEAR on the search engines at all for Zing. Have we been penalized? Do you have any suggestions at all? Do you think we could have been penalized for the first average blog? Maybe I messed up the swap over? Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Startupfactory0 -
If Google's index contains multiple URLs for my homepage, does that mean the canonical tag is not working?
I have a site which is using canonical tags on all pages, however not all duplicate versions of the homepage are 301'd due to a limitation in the hosting platform. So some site visitors get www.example.com/default.aspx while others just get www.example.com. I can see the correct canonical tag on the source code of both versions of this homepage, but when I search Google for the specific URL "www.example.com/default.aspx" I see that they've indexed that specific URL as well as the "clean" one. Is this a concern... shouldn't Google only show me the clean URL?
Technical SEO | | JMagary0 -
Which carries more weight Google page rank or Alexa Rank?
And how come do I see websites with Google PR of Zero and Alexa Page Rank in the top Thousands rank?
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Moz Reporting Incorrect 404's
Hi Guys SEOMoz is telling me that we have 191 404 errors f. I have checked this with several other crawlers and this not the case. For example, http://www.opticalexpress.co.uk/eyecare/corporate-savings.html%0D%0A2027 But correct links its http://www.opticalexpress.co.uk/eyecare/corporate-savings.html which is fine... We have no record of these links so why is it appending these characters at the end of the URL which is causing the 404's....
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
I'm getting a Duplicate Content error in my Pro Dashboard for 2 versions of my Homepage. What is the best way to handle this issue?
Hi SEOMoz,I am trying to fix the final issues in my site crawl. One that confuses me is this canonical homepage URL fix. It says I have duplicate content on the following pages:http://www.accupos.com/http://www.accupos.com/index.phpWhat would be the best way to fix this problem? (...the first URL has a higher page authority by 10 points and 100+ more inbound links).Respectfully Yours,Derek M.
Technical SEO | | DerekM880 -
Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?
We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using. If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed? In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered? This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company. Is it worth it?
Technical SEO | | PGRob0