Impressions and search queries help
-
Hello,
In the past month alone, my website www.shiftins.com has had a significant drop, about 50%, in my overall impressions and search queries (info from Google WMT). Now my target keywords have maintained their rankings but it looks like my site has dropped off the map for every other search term. I have not received any unnatural link warnings or anything of that sort so I don't think I have been penalized. Does anyone have an idea of what might have caused the decline and is there a solution to restore my prior status?
-
IMHO It's not likely, just an algo change.
-
You have been extremely helpful Bryan Thank you very much. So you don't think my site has been penalized?
-
Yes this should help, I would focus on earning new links by creating real value to your audience/users...
What are they searching for and what is the quickest way to deliver this message. As long as you are adding value and building a clean link profile you should rank again.
-
Thank you this is what I suspected since only non target keywords went down. So do you think if I start changing my anchor text and start building new links using only branded anchors to dilute my exact match, that i will be able to regain my search queries or is this also an over all link quality penalty?
-
First you must diagnose you anchor links. Are most of them linking in using exact keyword phrases? or are they mostly linking in with your Brand Name/URL?
A natural linking profile is 50% brand keyword phrases and your URL, 25% Diverse anchor text (ie. how to "keyword"), 25% Exact keyword.
If you linking ratio is not like this it might be the cause for your problem. To fix this you will need to contact all the sites that are linking to yoursand ask them to change the anchored link to your brand name.
Hope this helps.
-
Thanks do you have any recommendations for how to recover?
-
There was a Penguin (http://mozcast.com/events) update on Oct 5th. THis update was targeting sites with low quality links and search engine manipulative link profiles.
-
Thanks for the response. It happened 10/06/12 and has continued to the present. There have not been any additional changes besides the addition of a video (around 10/16) and of course a few new links. Is there any other insight you may have?
-
It all depends on when you lost your rankings and if there were any recent changes that may have caused the drop.
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
-
Help Needed regarding DA and PA..
Hey there guys, I need help regarding the DA & PA on my site Criccraze From the previous few weeks, the DA PA of my website has gone down. Any fruitful suggestions from anyone, please? I would be heartily thankful.
Algorithm Updates | | Jashii80 -
404s in Google Search Console and javascript
The end of April, we made the switch from http to https and I was prepared for a surge in crawl errors while Google sorted out our site. However, I wasn't prepared for the surge in impossibly incorrect URLs and partial URLs that I've seen since then. I have learned that as Googlebot grows up, he'she's now attempting to read more javascript and will occasionally try to parse out and "read" a URL in a string of javascript code where no URL is actually present. So, I've "marked as fixed" hundreds of bits like /TRo39,
Algorithm Updates | | LizMicik
category/cig
etc., etc.... But they are also returning hundreds of otherwise correct URLs with a .html extension when our CMS system generates URLs with a .uts extension like this: https://www.thompsoncigar.com/thumbnail/CIGARS/90-RATED-CIGARS/FULL-CIGARS/9012/c/9007/pc/8335.html
when it should be:
https://www.thompsoncigar.com/thumbnail/CIGARS/90-RATED-CIGARS/FULL-CIGARS/9012/c/9007/pc/8335.uts Worst of all, when I look at them in GSC and check the "linked from" tab it shows they are linked from themselves, so I can't backtrack and find a common source of the error. Is anyone else experiencing this? Got any suggestions on how to stop it from happening in the future? Last month it was 50 URLs, this month 150, so I can't keep creating redirects and hoping it goes away. Thanks for any and all suggestions!
Liz Micik0 -
New visual search results - what is this and how do we optimize for it?
Hi all, This morning as I am doing some keyword research for a new client, I typed in the phrase and Google returned both the listings as well as a vertical photo bar. I've never seen this before. Is this new? Is it common and I've just missed it? I presume this means we need to really have our photo alt tags 'ducks in a row' but I'm also wondering if this points to an increased importance on visual content? Image attached. Thanks, YINd14d
Algorithm Updates | | EricOliver0 -
Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed
Hi,
Algorithm Updates | | mlm12
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page. We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust. We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH! I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below... I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory). We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains), - this makes up 80% of our links. As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this. We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if possible, hence my questions. We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow? For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too? Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing? For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do? For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed). How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you? We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure). When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this). What would you do if this was you? Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)? Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect? Thanks for your input and advice. We appreciate it.0 -
Do search engines always pay heed to no index instructions?
Hi, I am currently working on a site that relies solely on it's images to attract traffic. My concern is that search engines will index our images, make them available through image searches and therefore allow our potential visitors to bypass our website completely. I know that there are a number of methods available such as disallowing images in robots.txt or using "noimageindex" tags in the HTML etc. but do search engines always pay attention to these requests? Does anyone have any experience with no indexing images? Or are there any methods that are guaranteed to work? Thanks in Advance.
Algorithm Updates | | BallyhooLtd0 -
My Site PR lost to PR4 ! I worked as per SEOmoz Suggestion - No Traffic Drop, Organic Search is good and higher than referral or Direct Traffic !
My Site PR5 lost to PR4 ! I worked as per SEOmoz Suggestion - No Traffic Drop, Organic Search is good and higher than referral or Direct Traffic ! What might be the problem ? Nov 29-2012 my site was hacked very badly and google Blacklisted me for the first time and if you see now " it says, Past 90 days nearly 19 times my site was acted as medium to spread virus" Even thought we checked our FTP, Cpanel or Home Directory - Everything seems good. My domain which was hosted - has other domains in the same network and some are porn - those sites are injecting malicious code ! May be that's the reason or please give me some idea how to improve it !
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
Help, I am in Local Search Results!
I do not know what to do with this... and could use a bit of advice on this issue: "Doing things right", resulted in great organic rankings and a bonus by showing top of local search results for our area. Sounds great... until Google decides it was time to mix things up a little. I do not know if this applies to all types of businesses, but for ours it means that you will no longer get any organic page 1 listing if you are a local business that (un)luckily ranks in local results too. One day G will include local results on a keyword, the next they won't... making our SEOMoz Campaign rankings weekly a true yo-yo of "50 keywords declined by >48 and >49 places", and "30 keywords improved by <47 and <49". It turned this feature in campaigns completely useless for me (ever since SEOMoz decided to include the local result light bulb that is) Some traffic dropped from 240 a day for one keyword, to 30 now for that same keyword. Frustrated? You bet. I do not understand why Google seems to create a war with local businesses. Should we get out of Local results or does anyone have any ideas, suggestions? Thanks a bunch guys!
Algorithm Updates | | Discountvc3 -
Addicted to SEO: Please Help!
Hello. My name is Justin. And I am an addict. I have recently starting dabbling around with SEO about five months ago. And I have found myself wanting more and more. I feel like I needed to come to this group of other addicts and admit it to you. I am constantly checking my ranking in Google. I am obsessed with my keywords. And I will sell my soul for a PR8 in-bound link. I desperately want my site: www.findahealthcarejob.com to be the best in the universe and it has been a wonderful drug for me. This must stop. Please help me. What are some steps of your own 12-steps that help you detox from this addicting lifestyle? Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | findachristianjob0