Sudden Drop in Keyword Rankings
-
We launched http://www.manufacturedfun.com/ earlier this year and had been ranking 1 & 2 on Google SERPs for the keywords we optimized, but last week we experienced a sudden drop in rankings that pretty much took us off the radar.
For instance, 'popcorn machines' went as far back as page 5 and 'popcorn poppers' dropped even further to page 9.
We are currently working on fixing the numerous Duplicate Page Title and Duplicate Page Content errors identified by SEOmoz, but since we have had those for about 6 months and ranked well anyway, I wonder if there's something else that we are missing.
Any insight you can offer will be sincerely appreciated. Thank you!
-
Well I am just a pest control guy....
But I don't think I am the only one that has had this happen to them.. http://www.seomoz.org/q/one-keyword-rank-inexplicably-blasted-into-oblivion
-
In 12 years of doing this, I have never had a dramatic site drop like you said, for a couple of weeks, only to find its own way back again.
Maybe I have just been lucky, maybe my customers have, but one thing I can say, when they have had drops of this degree, it has been down to a problem that needed fixing.
Don't forget, Google is releasing algorithm updates all the time then tells us after 2 months what they did, unless it's something like a Panda refresh which happens ever 6 weeks or so.
Hope it's noting much, but leave no stone unturned.
Andy
-
This is certainly reassuring. I'll look into the link portfolio just in case. And since this drop in rankings just happened a few days ago, maybe it is Google testing as you mention.
Thanks for sharing, I appreciate it!
-
We have a tool to track rankings, but I've been monitoring it manually too and have sometimes seen the usual 'good rankings' as you mention.
Thank you for taking the time to look into it. Hopefully it is just a temporary fluctuation and not a permanent drop.
-
I'd certainly look at cleaning up the duplicate titles and content. Add cononicals if you have multiple URLs referencing the same material.
What does your link portfolio look like? Anchor text distribution?
If you don't see any huge red flags then take a breathe while google puts you under water. There is constant flux in the serps. Sometimes drops in rank are simply google testing. I've had sites drop out for a week or two at a time then rebound to where they were previously.
-
How are you going about tracking your rankings? Right now via a manual review I see you at the bottom of page one for popcorn machines.
Keep in mind rankings do fluctuate by week, day, and sometimes even hour.
-
I think you have answered your own question there with the duplication problems. However, check webmaster tools for link warnings as well.
Sounds like an algorithm update has caught up with you though and with so many, could still be Panda, or a Page Quality one - or one of many others.
Andy
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
-
Company name ranking
Hi all, I hope somebody can share their thoughts on the below. A web designer launched my client's new website and I have been tasked with the SEO. I was approached with an immediate problem, www.clientswebsite.co.uk was ranking 9th for their company name after being indexed by Google. The search results above www.clientswebsite.co.uk were related to my client but not all, for example a direct competitor was also ranking. I have been working on the SEO for 2-3 weeks and I just managed to get to 3rd position for the company name, and then www.clientswebsite.co.uk disappeared from page 1! And now instead, an irelevant sub page is now ranking for the company name on page 2 (a contact page). I have checked and the home page is still indexed (did a site: check). The only problem software picks up is a redirect chain (http://homepage -> http://www.homepage -> https://homepage) the web developers said it wouldn't impact rankings (when I asked them to edit the htaccess file to fix it) I've listed below the SEO tasks I completed whilst attempting to rank the company name: I set up analytics and webmaster tools, in which I set up preferred domain (www) Added a sitemap Edited meta data making sure company name was included I contacted the websites above www.clientswebsite.co.uk that were relevant and asked them to place a link linking to their new website, I was successful with a couple of these. I placed www.clientswebsite.co.uk on all of their social media profiles I reformatted headers on their home page, making sure the H1 included my client's company name I found 2 extra versions of my client's home page (not exact copies, but very similar content) that had been published, so I decided to 301 redirect these to the correct home page Activated SSL and forced to HTTPS I would really appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts here, whether it be explanations or possible solutions Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Internal Link Rank Flow
I've read in many articles that pages can "pass" rank to other pages internally. Is anyone aware of any well done internal linking case studies which confirm this? If my homepage has the strongest Page Authority, would linking to another page deeper into my website from my homepage boost my rank for the deeper page in Google (more so than linking to the deep page from a page with lower page authority)?
Technical SEO | | poke10 -
What I am Doing Wrong with My Rank
Hi, I am doing something wrong but I don't understand what is the issue. The rank of my website for a particular keyword is by far lower than one of my competitors (they are in top 20 while I am not even in top 50 in google). I did all fixes recommended by MOZ, I have higher number of backlinks (natural built), relatively similar social media activities, bigger content but still I'm far away. Do you have any idea what is wrong? Best, Tony
Technical SEO | | Threeding.com0 -
Traffic Drop in 1 month!
Hi guys, ok, i'm at the end of my line with this one, my site www.golfclothingdirect.co.uk has taken a pounding since 4th April and i'm blowed if i can find a real reason for it. Traffic has been increasing slowly in line with budget, sales were picking up, and coming into season should have been better - 24th & 25th robot had an access issue - host contacted and said there had been a site issue, but resolved and now all A OK. Sales are terrible and traffic is grinding. All comments greatly taken on board! Thanks Mark
Technical SEO | | UrbanMark0 -
My keyword ranking suddenly went down in google.
Hi, Need urgently help, one of our website http://www.bannerbuzz.com keywords ranking is down suddenly since 6-11-2012, even we don't have done any changes on the website & we were on top on many keywords. We have done only one change recently is we have moved our website from shared server to dedicated server on last 21st October & we can see some traffic fluctuation after to redirecting from shared server to dedicated server, also website load time has been increase in Google Analytic, so it that reason to get rank down suddenly?, because all keywords has been down. We have also some affiliate sites like bannerbuzz.ca, bannerbuzz.co.uk & bannerbuzz.com.au which design and coding structure is as same as bannerbuzz.com, so is that a problem (Duplication issue)? We have tried to find out the solution for the same, but we didn't get any proper reason to get rank down suddenly. Can it happened due to dedicated server which we have moved recently or Google has changed anything in algorithm? Can we put website in Google reconsideration to know proper reason about the website? Following are the keywords on which we loose the ranking. Banners
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
Vinyl Banners
Custom Banners
Vinyl Lettering
Custom Signs
Car Decals We were on top for above all keywords. Your help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks,0 -
Major drop in visitor numbers?
Hi I have been working on the following site www.espares.co.nz - it is a parts location service . We have just done a massive redesign and addressed some major issues with duplicate content - which is a work in progress. What I am wondering is have we overlooked something as there has been a sudden drop off on the site visitors since 25 September with a drop of nearly 30% of organic search visits? Would appreciate feedback.
Technical SEO | | AllieMc0 -
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 -
Website Ranking Issue
Hi, We have been performing our own onsite of offsite SEO along with external assistance and have ranked well over the years with minimal impact from Google updates. Howevr the last so called Panda update has affected us heavily pushing our main phrase 'web design melbourne' from 2nd to 7th where we have been for almost 2 months now on Google.com.au irrespective of onsite or offsite work. We have been trying to find signs of any onsite, IP, duplicate content, titles or other issues that may be holding us back to no avail. The only flag that Google webmaster tools is showing is a number of bad internal site links, which I think is a glitch with the CMS we are using. Even the SEO MOZ tool gives us a higher ranking compared to most competitors on page 1 of Google.com.au for our main phrase. The biggest difference between us and competitors is we chose to target an internal page specific to the topic rather than our homepage. With this sadi we have also reduced our keyword density and content quantity inline with the other sites homepages. Can anyone help shed some light on this? and perhaps something obvious that we have missed, or where we should be looking? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | paulsid0