Home page sudden drop in rank, but not others.
-
Over the weekend, I noticed "www.thematstore.com" drop out of the search results for "chair mats", where previously it was between 10-12 ranked. The other pages on the domain have remained the same in regards to rankings for their intended keywords.
The only thing I changed (on Nov 29th) is the title tag from "Chair Mats - Commercial Quality Chair Mats, Custom Made", to "Chair Mats - Best Custom Chair Mats, Commercial Quality".
I know there is a lot that needs to be done on the site, and the site architecture is a bit of a mess (I recommended building a new site)... but I was hoping to gradually fix these issues without gambling with a rank drop.
Not sure why the home page all of the sudden dropped out, any suggestions?
-
Thanks for the ideas guys. Good advice Jamo, and that's a great point Marie... I've seen this happen before, just puzzled me that the home page dropped out of site in my SERPs. It's always nice to discuss because of the uncertainties with SEO, thanks for your help.
-
If I were you I would do absolutely nothing for a couple of weeks.
When I search for chair mats I see you at #14. I also see you at #1 for best custom chair mats. Sometimes Google bounces you around a bit before promoting a site up higher.
There were no major algo updates that I'm aware of last week. (There was a Panda update Nov 21 but not since then).
I would say, Don't panic...sit back and see what happens.
-
Joe,
I think you should change the title back to what it was. This could go 2 ways. With the changed title it now drops but afterwards goes up higher then before, or you change it back and start off by testing with something else to help improve your rankings. The first version of your title: Chair Mats - Commercial Quality Chair Mats, Custom Made does contain the keywords twice (i would go for 1 but 2 might work for you) but has a nice coverage. The second version of your title has the second keyword more prominent in the title. This could result in drop because it is considered keyword stuffing by Google (not saying it is but it could be).
That is what i would do, change it back.
Your description: " Chair Mats of commercial quality. Build your Chair Mats on-line using our exclusive chair mat ordering system... any shape, any size. A+ BBB rating! <a class="attribute-value">"</a>
It contains your keyword 3 times in frequent order. I would remove at least 1.
You could also try changing your H1 tag:
Now you have this: Lifetime warranty on our most popular chair mats!
I would change this to: Chair Mats with a lifetime warranty on our most popular models.
I wouldn't change everything at once but change 1 or 2 things and wait on Google. See what happens and then change the next thing and the next.
Hope this helps you out a little.
Kind Regards
Jarno
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
-
Why is my home page ranking much higher than my collection page?
Hi everyone, Why is my client's home page ranking high for a certain keyword phrase rather than a collection page I have which is well optimised for this keyword? The collection page is on the 10th SERPs page. I did see there were keywords used in the footer of page and the keyword was also used in some intro text on the home page so I removed the keyword from these two places nearly 2 weeks ago and requested google to reindex both the collection page and home page and I've not seen any improvement of the collection page's ranking in SERPs. I also changed the meta description and meta title as the ctr was poor but there wasn''t that many impressions either. It is a competitive keyword organically so maybe the collection page's authority is just not good enough compared to the competitors hence why they are choosing the home page as it has higher page authority however this still is not helpful to searchers who land on home page. Does anyone have any ideas of what else I can do to get google to rank the ocllection page higher for the keyword instead of home page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TZ19820 -
Totally lost ranking for a targetted page - and dont understand why
I am trying to rank this page https://www.vitari.no/regnskapssystem/visma-net/ for keyword visma.net on google.no. At first it went really well, and I was on first page, ranking as number 8. Then it fell to second page. But then it totally dissapeared. If I go to google.no now and search for visma.net, its not on any of the pages, I have looked through them all. I have used moz and other seo tools to analyze, and try to understand what has happened. But I simply cant understand it. And I cant get rankings back. I've been fighting with this for a long time. However - other pages on the site is ranking for the same keyword. If anyone has an answer leading to me solving this, they will be my hero of the day!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | contenting0 -
Wrong pages ranking for key terms
Hi, I have a website that was rebuilt and redesigned earlier this year, and it's struggling to rank. The problem is that the wrong pages are ranking for the key terms. For example, there is a page for 'Loft Conversions Essex' but the page that's ranking is actually the FAQ page (which doesn't mention the word 'Essex' at all). I have been through all of the usual items, and none of them seem to apply: The landing pages have been properly optimised (not overly so), while the pages that rank only contain the terms within the menu (the link that goes to the actual landing page) We thought it may be a redirect issue since the site was a bit of a mess before the rebuild, so we removed all of the redirects and resubmitted the htaccess file but that hasn't helped Internal anchor text is relevant There aren't a huge number of external links to the old site pages, and many of these pages didn't exist at all so I don't think that's an issue Most of the pages were built at the same time so there's no real reason why one would have more authority than another There are no canonicals interfering with these pages I can't really canonical these since we do want the pages to rank, it's just that they're all ranking for the wrong thing (so the SERPs are a lot lower than they should be). Most of these pages are pretty new, as I said, so while we have tried smaller content changes I don't think a full refresh will really help. To make it even weirder, the pages that rank for each term change regularly but it's never the right page. Help! EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innermedia10 -
Dealing with Redirects and iFrames - getting "product login" pages to rank
One of our most popular products has a very authoritative product page, which is great for marketing purposes, but not so much for current users. When current users search for "product x login" or "product x sign in", instead of getting to the login page, they see the product page - it adds a couple of clicks to their experience, which is not what we want. One of the problems is that the actual login page has barely any content, and the content that it does carry is wrapped around <iframes>. Due to political and security reasons, the web team is reluctant to make any changes to the page, and one of their arguments is that the login page actually ranks #1 for a few other products (at our company, the majority of logins originate from the same domain). </iframes> To add to the challenge - queries that do return the login page as #1 result (for some of our other products) actually do not reference the sign-in domain, but our old domain, which is now a 301 redirect to the sign-in domain. To make that clear - **Google is displaying the origin domain in SERPs, instead of displaying the destination domain. ** The question is - how do we get this popular product's login page to rank higher than the product page for "login" / "sign in" queries? I'm not even sure where we should point links to at this point - the actual sign in domain or the origin domain? I have the redirect chains and domain authority for all of the pages involved, including a few of our major competitors (who follow the same login format), and will be happy to share it privately with a Moz expert. I'd prefer not to make any more information publicly available, so please reach out via private message if you think you can help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leosaraceni0 -
How can we improve rankings for category pages
Hi Everyone, I have a dog breeder site I'm working on and I was wondering if I could get some tips and ideas on things to do to help the "category" pages rank better in search engines. Let's say I have "xyz" breed category page which has listings of all dog breeders who offer that particular breed, in this case "xyz". I have certain breeder profile listings which rank higher for those terms that the category page should be ranking for. So I'm guessing Google thinks those breeder profile pages are more relevant for those terms. Especially if well optimized. I know thin content may be my problem here, but one of our competitors dominates the rankings for relevant keywords with no content on their category pages. What do you all suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rsanchez0 -
Rankings dropped - Why?
At the end of November a client site dropped significantly in the rankings. The drop effected almost all the keyphrases we monitor. Historically the homepage has always ranked higher than the sub-pages - however now it seems Google is no longer ranking the home page, and instead ranking the sub-pages, just far far lower down. Any ideas what could cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
How Bad is it to Not Have a Home Page?
The site I'm currently developing is far different than any other project I've every worked on in that search traffic is likely to represent only a very small percentage of the total traffic. Because of this, I want to make sure I optimize the site for the people clicking from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc more so than the BIG G. I can't for the life of me think of a reason to have a home page other than for SEO purposes. I'd much rather throw the user directly into the experience than have him be distracted by a home page. At the same time, I'd like to salvage any search engine traffic that I can. My plan is to 301 redirect chucklebot.com/ to /funny-memes/SOME_RANDOM_IMAGE and then put the content of the current home page at /about. Does that kill any possibility of the site ranking well? Or can the subpages (eg /meme-generator) still rank well if they are properly optimized? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickGriffith0 -
Search results all going to home page
I'm an author, and after doing a search for one of my books I realized that no matter what was searched, the user was getting lead to the homepage. please see the attached picture. How do I fix this and is this hurting my SEO? Capture.JPG Capture1.JPG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0