Huge drop for main branded keyword
-
The past week the main branded keyword for a site i am working on has dropped from the top three on Google US to page 7! It is still ranking in the top three on Google in other areas. I recently redirected /index.php to / using .htaccess. Could this have caused a problem?
If not, what else could have caused such a huge drop?
-
Can an EMD update remove SERPS for all keywords, or just the exact matches? We recently lost all our foreign language domain serps, roughly on the 4/5th
-
Quite a lot of traffic lands on the listings pages so im reluctant to set them to noindex. There are only approx. 4,000 listings pages. I'm trying to find where these other pages that are being indexed are coming from.
-
If most of your organic search traffic lands on your homepage, you might want to consider setting all the listing pages to noindex. That'll get the duplicate content out of Google's index.
-
The duplicate content is a problem as a lot of teh listings are pulled in via XML from agent sites. I've been trying to find a way to make it all more unique without editing each listing manually.
-
Thanks for this.
What is the best way to find where all of these links are coming from? The only place i can see is the search results page. I have set this 'noindex, follow'. Should i set it to 'noindex, nofollow"?
-
Good point. All those sub-pages (listing pages) have content that is duplicated across multiple other sites, too.
-
I don't think anyone has mentioned this but your number of internal links is borderline nuts. I found about 190,000 internal pages.
If you remove those internal links and Google this:
"www.phuketproperty.com" -site:www.phuketproperty.com
You'll see that your site has 13,000-ish backlinks. Take a look at the highest ranked ones. They're mostly all cheap/low quality inbound links. You don't have a huge backlink profile based on the tremendous size of your site.
To put it in perspective
www.microsoft.com has 688,000 internal links and 28 million incoming links.
www.century21.com has 11 million internal links and almost 50 million incoming links.
www.phuket.com has 5530 internal links and 287,000 incoming links.
Internal links are not usually 10x incoming links. That could be part of it. You have 13,000 not-quality inbound links. And 200k indexed pages.
-
Thanks for your help. It looks like I'll just have to keep doing what i am doing and hope it bounces back quite quickly.
-
Generally speaking, you want to remove bad links while building good, new ones.
-
Before i took over the site the owners had taken on the service of some link building company. The links the company added where just added in to any wiki type site they could find. it seems that they only used four different types of key words when they were doing it. I have managed to remove over 600 of these links and the site was just starting to rank well for a variety of keywords, then all of a sudden this week the site has dropped back for its main keyword.
Do you think the best strategy is to keep removing the bad links? Apparently the site ranked better before these links were built.
-
I was thinking the same thing, you got hit with the EMD update recently especially if it happened this week.
-
Sounds like you got hit by the EMD update: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214115/Google-Warns-of-Upcoming-Exact-Match-Domain-Algorithm-Change
-
I doubt a 301 redirect from index.php to / would have done that.
An EMD issue could be the reason, as could an automated penalty (Penguin, Panda, anchor text over-optimization, etc.). If we had your URL and keyword, it would be easier to make specific suggestions.
-
Hi
Can you provide me your keyword which dropped and URL of your site?
I think if index.php contains backlinks and you have 301 redirected then some % of link-juice may be loss but it does not have huge affect as you said. Have you contain EMD?? After EMD algorithm updates by Google it may be possible your domain was affected by this update.
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 would you research on what keywords to rank?
Do you guys mind sharing your steps on what you do on your research? Semrush does not have my countries google so Sadly i have to skip that. I been using open site explore to check out on my competitors to see what they are ranking. Any more suggestions?
Technical SEO | | andrewwatson921 -
Ranking Drop and Google Disavow Requests
My website, www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk has fallen dramatically for the top industry search terms (nile cruise, nile cruises) over the last 12 months from previous page one rankings to page three which has very badly affected us financially. I found, using Linkdetox, that we had thousands of back-links for non-related anchor-text, mainly porn terms, viagra, etc. I have submitted a Disavow file and request about a week ago and wondered firstly if the enormous amount of these links would have helped cause the drop to page three and secondly if the Disavow request will eventually help the website return to better rankings? Thanks,Colin
Technical SEO | | GratefulFred0 -
Why is my business website site dropping down the ranking
Hi, i have a business site which is dropping down the ratings and I would like your help in understanding why. I know a business site is different from other sites such as news sites and blogs where the front page changes all the time. I would like to know what is the best way to get google to visit the site on a regular basis, should i have a page that changes all the time or should i keep changing all the pages on the site. One of the important pages was always number one in google and now we are number 11 http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy any help and advice on how to combat dropping in the rankings would be a great help
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Rankings of Subdomains vs. Main Domain
Here's a puzzler... Our main domain (www.ides.com) doesn't appear in Google (but does on Bing and other engines). We think this is due to duplicate content which we're fixing. However our website's subdomains continue to appear prominently in SERPs, even on Google - here are some examples: IDES Prospector = prospector.ides.com IDES = support.ides.com Cycolac FR15 = catalog.ides.com Why would Google penalize a main domain and its subdomains?
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Will removing the main nav from the homepage penalize the site?
I have a client who offers residential and commercial services. We are dividing up the site into two sections that distinguish between these services and the clients. On the homepage, we ask site visitors to first choose from the Commercial or Residential services. I don't want to have any main navigation options on the homepage because they will change depending on whether you select the commercial option or the residential. Will this hurt the site in terms of SEO? Are there any suggestions of how to structure the home nav so it is not confusing to the visitor, but won't hurt the optimization of the site? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | WebsightDesign0 -
Bing rank drop off for multiple sites
Hi Mozzers, Seeing some wacky stuff going on on some sites I manage. In more than a few, the ranking on bing has dropped basically overnight from page one spots to not being found on the first 100 positions. Anyone else seeing similar results? Some of the sites are fairly new, some have been around for ages, some are wordpress, some are not. I've been searching for some news of a big change on bing, but keep reading about bing dropping the thin sites during black friday. In one example, I had the site set up in BWT for a while, and had a look at the data. The reports show that the pages are crawled, the index summary shows pages indexed, and there seems to be no crawl errors, but rankings are absolutely gone. Also, I can't see the sites in bing if I search "site:example.com" in bing. Here's 2 examples, the first would make sense since it's pretty thin as I havent added much content yet: http://homewindowtint.org but this one doesn't make sense to me. Sure there's a few errors, but to be dropped like a rock seems weird http://www.ahmedandsukaram.com
Technical SEO | | rosstaylor0 -
Severe rank drop due to overwritten robots.txt
Hi, Last week we made a change to drupal core for an update to our website. We accidentally overwrote our good robots.txt that blocked hundreds of pages with the default drupal robots.txt. Several hours after that happened (and we didn't catch the mistake) our rankings dropped from mostly first, second place in Google organic to bottom and mid first page. Basically I believe we flooded the index with very low quality pages at once and threw a red flag and we got de-ranked. We have since fixed the robots.txt and have been re-crawled but have not seen a return in rank. Would this be a safe assumption of what happened? I haven't seen any other sites getting hit in the retail vertical yet in regards to any Panda 2.3 type of update. Will we see a return in our results anytime soon? Thanks, Justin
Technical SEO | | BrettKrasnove0 -
Front page dropped to PR1 - thoughts?
The front page of our site dropped in late March from PR4 to PR1. Yes, I know toolbar PR isn't terribly reliable, isn't much of an indicator of overall SEO, etc. - however, upper management will want to know what happened and what is being done to fix it. Of course, the answer is obvious: go build links. But what might the cause be? As I mentioned in a past Q&A, the site is entirely encrypted and as a result may be causing us to leak some juice (http backlinks of course make up the vast majority of our links). We're planning to fix this once the site is ported over to a CMS, but that's still months off. Other than that, what might be the problem? Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0