Massive 40-50 page drop for primary keyphrase, no apparent reason, + map listing weirdness
-
Hi. I manage the site http://physiowinnipeg.com, which has had some interesting yo-yo effects lately, culminating in a 40-50 page drop as of last Friday.
The phrase in question: physiotherapy winnipeg
Background:
-
The site has ranked on the first page for this keyphrase since about May
-
There was the occasional blip where the homepage would disappear from rankings altogether for a day or two, and then return back to its regular listing
- This would coincide with a sudden increase in organic places listings (our site would hit the top of the local map listings, but the homepage would vanish)
- Other pages would still appear for the target phrase, just not the homepage
- About a month ago, the organic places listing settled, and the homepage permanently vanished
- Other pages still ranked high, and we commanded many of the listings on the first 10 pages of Google, first page included
- The homepage would still appear for some other searches
- We had been affected by the Google Places --> Google+ Local transition, so I was of the opinion that we needed to wait it out a bit to see if it, like the other issues related to the transition, would work itself out
-
This time around, it worked itself out again, just today -- but we are now ranked slightly lower on the first page and our Google local listing has disappeared (again)
-
Our other pages are still (currently) absent from the first few pages, for this keyphrase
-
The main differences I noticed here, aside from the much longer timeframe of our drop, was that other pages disappeared as well, and that the homepage was actually found, between page 38 and 50, depending on the day
According to SEO Moz and other tools, the site is doing pretty much everything right. I should note, however, that there is a service we use for educational content called Patientsites that loads in the subdomain http://education.physiowinnipeg.com -- and this site has pulled many warnings in SEO Moz (around 10,000, actually, mostly long URL related), as well as a few errors. I'm not sure if this is a part of the problem, but I am considering having the content of the subdomain blocked via robots.txt and Webmaster Tools.
Has anyone else experienced anything similar, or have any insight? This weirdness has gone on too long.
Thanks!
Bobby
-
-
I found Marie's comments very interesting. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be my problem.
I agree with Marie's advice not to do anything to respond to a perceived penalty. Doesn't look like your site is "penalized" but the swings are extreme.
-
Thanks Marie. I appreciate the response and the advice. That was my initial thought, as well, when it first started happening -- it seems to be getting worse though. Hence my concern. Have you hear of anyone else having a similar issue with the map and site listing never being on at the same time?
-
I've seen a number of sites recently that seem to drop out of the search rankings and then reappear (often at a higher position). I think Google is testing some things.
I did 3 searches on G.ca for your search term. The first time you were at the top of page 2, but there were only 3 organic listings and then map listings on page 1. The second time I didn't see you and the third time you were on page one just under the maps listings.
Google's definitely up to something. Don't go doing anything rash right now. This is unlikely to be because of a penalty.
-
Thanks, JustDucky. I suppose it could be an adjustment of those values, but as above, wouldn't you think the exact phrase would be affected -- and would that explain the map listing and page listing only having one active at a time?
-
Thanks for the suggestion, Elias.
I considered the EMD update, but I doubt it's the cause. That wouldn't explain the flip flopping of the organic map and site results, which I am pretty sure pre-dates that update. Also, we have always (and still do) come in at number 1 for the search term "physio winnipeg" -- if it were the EMD update, I would have expected that search to be affected as well.
-
My EMD site dropped from 12 (on last Saturday's MOZ report) to 41 (last night) to 32 a few minute ago for the EMD keyword. The site has also been affected by Panda (April & again recently) but, as Elia's response suggests, G is probably adjusting the EMD values.
-
Hi Bobby,
Have you looked at this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data
You could be experiencing the affect of the Exact Match Domain algorithm update.
Elias
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
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Hi. Has anyone seen a drop in their PA recently? We have over 40 clients and 80% dropped and it has been like this for the past 2 months. I wanted to check if other websites are also experiencing this drop or is it just us?
I'm specifically asking for drops happened in the last 2 months, because before that we had a normal trend. Some websites would go up in their PA rankings and some would drop. But seeing 80% of our clients drop like this is just weird. Just wanted to see if other market leaders are also having the same issue so I can stop attributing it something X-Filish! Our clients are all .EDUs if anyone was wondering. Also the maximum drop has been 4 points in a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AP_Search0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Is there a way to get a list of Total Indexed pages from Google Webmaster Tools?
I'm doing a detailed analysis of how Google sees and indexes our website and we have found that there are 240,256 pages in the index which is way too many. It's an e-commerce site that needs some tidying up. I'm working with an SEO specialist to set up URL parameters and put information in to the robots.txt file so the excess pages aren't indexed (we shouldn't have any more than around 3,00 - 4,000 pages) but we're struggling to find a way to get a list of these 240,256 pages as it would be helpful information in deciding what to put in the robots.txt file and which URL's we should ask Google to remove. Is there a way to get a list of the URL's indexed? We can't find it in the Google Webmaster Tools.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sparrowdog0 -
Local Listing Question
We will be starting local SEO efforts on a medical practice that has 4 locations & 15 doctors each location (so 60 listings total). I will submit each doctor & each location to InfoGroup, LocalEze, Axciom & Factual. Also, I will only submit each location (not doctors) to Google. The problem I'm seeing is the fact that each listing would have the same exact phone number - it all goes to one main routing center. What kind of problems could come of this? Do we need a separate phone numbers for each of the four locations (at the very least)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
Does a page on a site with high domain authority build page authority easier? i.e. less inbound links?
Is this also why people build backlinks to their BBB profiles, Yellowpages Profiles, etc. i.e. why do people build backlinks to other pages that link to them? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just build that backlink directly to your target?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0 -
Google swapped our website's long standing ranking home page for a less authoritative product page?
Our website has ranked for two variations of a keyword, one singular & the other plural in Google at #1 & #2 (for over a year). Keep in mind both links in serps were pointed to our home page. This year we targeted both variations of the keyword in PPC to a products landing page(still relevant to the keywords) within our website. After about 6 weeks, Google swapped out the long standing ranked home page links (p.a. 55) rank #1,2 with the ppc directed product page links (p.a. 01) and dropped us to #2 & #8 respectively in search results for the singular and plural version of the keyword. Would you consider this swapping of pages temporary, if the volume of traffic slowed on our product page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JingShack0