Half my ranks have gone missing
-
I have a site that was rankly very highly for gaming walkthrough phrases. I was ranking #3 for the phrase skyward sword walkthrough
Then it began to drop, despite me building more links (non spammy links) through guest blogs and emailing people requesting they just link to it from their site.
I went in and added more text to the page and it went up a few places but is now gone from the first 5-10 pages.
This has also happened to all of my walkthrough related ranks. My other ranks are still there but these accounted for a large portion of my traffic and is very odd.
My on-page grade is near if not perfect
Some insight would be nice
-
As of today, my page is now ranking 5th on page 1. It is just bouncing all over the place.
-
Can you tell what day the drop happened?
-
If that is the case, why would this page be penalized? Ive never bought links, the on-page isn't totally
spammy, backlink profile isn't all exact match and is a good mix of anchor text and image links. All of the links are legitimately created.
This page for instance was one of my highest viewed pages, has a low BR, high time on site, etc. So its tailored to what people want when searching for this phrase
If I am penalized then it is absolutely beyond me on why I would be.
-
I write it all. No messages of concern
-
Do you have any messages in your WMT?
If you look at your analytics traffic sorted by organic traffic can you tell what day the drop happened?
Is your content completely written by you or do you get it from another source?
-
yes unless you have a major penalty you will always showup for "domainname.com" in quotes in search.
search for your exact meta description in quotes and your site is supposed to show up at the top
-
Are you sure?
It shows up for
"skyward sword walkthrough" "legendzelda.net"
I will cut back on the phrase walkthrough, but I find it hard to believe that using it in the way I am would cause the page to be penalized. And my other walkthrough pages do not use it like that so it doesn't make sense either.
Is there anything else you can see on the page that would cause this?
-
that page is penalized. even for very specific searches it doesn't come up which means it has been ranking suppressed for the keyword phrase "skyward sword walkthrough"
If it has happened to your other walkthrough related pages look at the use of overusing "walkthrough" on your site anchor texts and on page density
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
-
Can 'Jump link'/'Anchor tag' urls rank in Google for keywords?
E.g. www.website.com/page/#keyword-anchor-text Where the part after the # is a section of the page you can jump to, and the title of that section is a secondary keyword you want the page to rank for?
Algorithm Updates | | rwat0 -
By Using interstitial (popups) on the webiste, will google penalize ranks for desktop and mobile both ?
We have implemented interstitials (pop-ups) on a website (Business Articles Website). The popups are basically used for getting leads from the website (using Signup popups). Before Popup implementation the traffic was steady, After the implementation, the traffic started to decay after a couple of weeks and due to the drop we disabled the popup from the website and initiated a force crawl and within next few weeks, we observed traffic gaining back to its normal trend. Within these timelines drop in desktop traffic was more and mobile traffic remain steady. As per Google guidelines, interstitials are more likely to be affected on mobile than desktop. But in our case, desktop traffic was hit more than mobile. So we carried out this experiment for 3 months. And we observed traffic decay and regain. Is interstitials the only culprit here (as the drop is only in desktop) or Can there be some other reasons as well for the traffic drop? bF7hc
Algorithm Updates | | iQuanti1 -
Can someone explain the attached rankings?
I just don't understand how we can have a long list of 1's and 2's in google, but in Yahoo and Bing, some are close, some are in the 20's and some are not even in the top 50. Is there something that Yahoo and Bing care about, that google doesn't? I know about the meta language being more important for Yahoo and Bing than Google, so I added that. There's nothing I can do about the domain age, which I know is important to Yahoo and Bing. Is there anything else? thanks, Ruben [URL]]([URL=http://imgur.com/Vem594l][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Vem594l.jpg[/IMG][/URL]) [IMG]](http://i.imgur.com/Vem594l.jpg[/IMG])
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Why do in-site search result pages rank better than my product pages?
Maybe this is a common SERP for a generic product type but I'm seeing it a lot more often. Here is an example SERP "rolling stools". The top 4 results are dynamic in-site search pages from Sears, ebay and Amazon (among others). I understand their influence and authority but why would a search return a dynamic in-site SERP instead of a solid product page. A better question would be - How do I get my in-site SERPs to rank or how do I get my client's page to rise above the #5 spot is currently ranks at? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BenRWoodard0 -
Measuring Author Rank
It's pretty clear that "AuthorRank" is going to be a big thing for SEO. Although the main principles seem to be pretty straightforward (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building) what I'm less clear about is how we can start to think about author influence as a measurable metric. Webmaster tools gives us Author Stats as an impact on the site's impressions/CTR, but how do we measure the influence of an individual author? Are those factors even defined? Will we get to a stage where authors can be given a Klout-like score for Google Authorship? If not that, how will it look? This will be a HUGE question to solve for future content development strategies, and is something I'm thinking a lot about right now. Best, Matt.
Algorithm Updates | | MattBarker3 -
Why is this site ranking 1st?
I'm a relative SEO newbie, so please go easy on me. I've been an SEOMOZ pro user for a few months and have used it to dramatically improve my organic rankings. However, for the life of me, I cannot determine why the site that currently ranks number one, does so. For the factors I can determine, they shouldn't be ranking where they are, but reality is different. Could someone please offer me some ideas? My target keyword is "photography classes edmonton" My site is www.bsop.ca and I'm targetting the Google Canada engine. Any and all assistance is appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | pburwell0 -
Videos increase ranking of products in SERPS from Ecommerce Website
Just noticed something I've never seen before..and I just wanted to see if anyone else experienced this. I work for a 15000+ item eccommerce website, and today I noticed that on a few brand searches, several individual product pages were coming up. This is actually unusual because most of our individual item pages (including these) aren't ranked well enough to show up well in a brand search (and don't try to target brand terms either), but a correlation here was that both items contained videos referenced within. These were not videos hosted on our YouTube brand page either..these were videos done by separate manufacturers - one was hosted on their site, one on ours. Google actually pulled the snapshot of the video to the SERP as well... even though it was embedded within other product copy. Has anyone else noticed any preferential treatment given to effectively random items on your eCommerce website because it was augmented by video? I can assure you there was nothing otherwise unique about these products and they're not really that sought after. Neither item or url was new, and neither were the videos within. Also, this was a Universal Google search, not one for videos. (Sorry, I'm not allowed to reference directly). Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Blenny0 -
Changing Wordpress Permalink Structure, 301s, and Possibility of Rank Loss?
I have to change the permalink structure in wordpress, as using /%postname%/ in conjunction with a couple thousand pages triggers verbose rewrite rules, which further triggers about 5,000 requests per page load. The permalink structure must change as wordpress development probably won't change this in the near future. Now, changing the permalink structure worries me quite a bit, as about 25% of my traffic is attributed to my blog posts -- the rest is covered through CMS-like-use of pages (75%). blog posts will change permalink/url structure, pages won't The website is very respected in my niche and has quite a few links going to most of my posts and pages, as well as the homepage I've noticed in the last year that anything I post starts ranking on page 1 of Google for very competitive kws in 1-3 days, often with top 3 rankings PR4 / decent Alexa / Moz ranks not too shabby either / quality content / decent social media linking (mainly Facebook) / no penalties I provided the factors as to not gloat, but rather to get the best answer from those who have fairly established websites and perhaps had to change their URLs and noticed some or no changes to their rankings. How long of a hit am I going to take / how much my posts might drop down in SERPs if I change the permalink structure, properly 301 them, and implement all changes in one swoop? Info for WordPress users Benefits of changing the permalink structure to /%post_id%/%postname%/ -- for example -- include: way faster load times, not having 5,000 requests per page load, avoiding verbose rewrite rules trigger, finally modify the site without worrying about crashing the website and using a local server to make changes on thousands of pages (the database backups, the ritual of changing the settings in the local database, changing the post/page, saving the local database, loading the locally saved db on live server, and crossing fingers and pray it works -- just takes so darn long.) Ahh..yes, huge time saver. ** this issue occurs when using WP as a CMS with several hundred pages + and using the /%postname%/ or /%category%//%postname%/ or /somethingstatic/%postname%/ -- IF USING the date based way /%year%/%postname%/ or /%post_id%/%postname%/ you should be fine.
Algorithm Updates | | pepsimoz0