Why has my keyword dropped and risen so much in only 7 days?
-
Sorry if this question is really obvious (or unanswerable) but my client asked me for an explanation and as a relative SEO 'noob' I couldn't really answer them.
The client's site http://www.solentlep.org.uk/ dropped 29 places for the keyword LEP last week (all the other keywords had small rises and falls) and then this week has jumped back up the same 29 places. I made no changes to the site in the 7 period (as I hadn't worked out what to change) and although everything is fine now I'd still like to let the client know what caused the blip, or is it one of those things that 'nobody knows'.
-
Thanks Mark.
-
Thanks Mark
-
Make sure you check out Dr. Pete's post on the blog here - it's not just you experiencing it
-
As the other people already responded, there is a lot of fluctuation in the SERPs on a regular basis.
A few things come to mind
- Google could be trying out different landing pages for the term - it may be your homepage was blocked and so they showed an inner page, but much further down.
- This fluctuation seems to be happening every few months, where the site gets downgraded temporarily and then recovers - see the attached image
- Have you been having site connectivity issues - any messages in webmaster tools?
Hope this helps,
Mark
-
I also have notices sporadic jumps in search traffic, not just daily but hourly. One keyword keeps going back and forth 3-5 search position.
-
im getting a lot of daily movement on a couple of my sites. up and down all the time, not seen the rankings change so frequently before.
-
I can't answer this, but exactly the same thing has happened to me, last week... over 100 keywords improved significantly, now... roughly 100 keywords have plummeted and are no longer in the 'Top 50' - nothing has changed, we've never used spammy link practices, we just rely on insightful news and good PR.
I have to say, I'm worried.
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
-
Steady, but continous Google traffic drop. Help?
I am facing a steady, but deteriorating Google traffic drop and i am struggling to find the real reasons. The site is in the video entertainment niche. Here is some data regarding the site in general: Site redesign happened around June We are not doing a lot of off-site and link building in 2013, besides social activities and content distribution to partner sites (top links from OSE are gained long time ago) GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) No manual actions from Google or penalty notifications Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic Removal of old content during August Top keywords are dropping (may be caused by category pages removal and flattening site structure) Robots file disallows only search-generated pages No sitemap errors or warnings 2K of duplicate meta-titles and descs Thank you and appreciate your help. wyOyoA9
Technical SEO | | dimicos1 -
Huge drop in ranking, but only for a single search term
Hello All, We've just noticed a huge drop in ranking for one of our key search terms. On January 9th we dropped from page 1 (Google UK) to page 7 - out of the top 50 completely! Nothing has changed on the page for a number of months, and rankings for other search terms seem unaffected. Has anyone else been affected recently in a similar manor? Sorry if this sounds a little vague - but we're struggling to understand how this might have happened. It seems very odd that only this particular search term would be affected so dramatically. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Safelincs0 -
Keyword targeting & differentiation between similar keywords
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around keyword targeting when two keywords are very similar. Here's my dilemma, lets just I sell ACE brand Widgets I'm doing well with “ACE Widgets” queries but not “ACE” How do I fix this since “ACE” is already all throughout the results page & supposedly anchor text is playing a less and less significant role in link relevancy so just getting links with “ACE” as the anchor text wouldn't really help (I wouldn't think) Just a little confused. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0 -
One Page - Targeting Multiple Low Searched Keywords.
Hi, First "Question" on SEOmoz, A client has requested me to have all the traffic going to the main/home page. In total its 25 Keywords and competition is pretty low, lets say "Builder In City", all the keywords are the sames except for the citys. "Builder In London" "Builder in Birmingham" Builder in Cardiff" .. and so on. Will it be ok and do-able to target 1 homepage with 25 keywords and expect decent results.
Technical SEO | | Prestige-SEO0 -
What keywords should i be using to promote my site
Hi i am looking to promote my home page which is a lifestyle magazine www.in2town.co.uk and i am not sure what keywords i should be using to promote it. I am doing ok for the keyword lifestyle magazine but i am struggling on what other keywords i should be using to get people to the home page of the magazine. The magazine is nearly finished and we still have a couple of finishing touches to do but the basics of the magazine is as follows holiday and travel news, soap gossip, celebrity gossip, product reviews, lingerie brands, gastric band hypnotherapy, health, fashion and beauty and holiday reviews. I want the home page to be the main page where everyone visits but i am not sure what i should be doing to accomplish this. Any ideas would be of a great help
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Sudden ranking drop, no manual action
Sort of a strange situation I'm having and I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts. Here's what has happened... Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected. I immediately figured that this was some sort of keyword-specific penalty that I had incurred. I had done a bit of link building over the weekend (two or three directory type sites and a bio link from a site I contribute to). I also changed some anchor text on another site to match my homepage's title tag (which just so happened to be the exact phrase match I had dropped in) - I assumed this was what got me. I was slowly beginning to climb up the rankings and just got a bit impatient/overzealous. Changed the anchor text back to what it originally was and submitted a reconsideration request on Tuesday. This morning, I get the automated response in Webmaster Tools that no manual action had been taken. So my question is, would this drop have been an automated deal? If that's the case, then it's going to be mighty hard to pinpoint what I did wrong, since there's no way to know when I did whatever it was to cause the drop. Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions to regain my modest original placement?
Technical SEO | | sandlappercreative0 -
Keyword domains
Hi everyone. Two questions regarding keyword domains (e.g. "widgets.com") If we have to choose a domain with an extra word, does it make a difference to have the added word before or after? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "widgets-now.com" Does it make a difference if the extra word is a generic vs a 'real' word? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "japanese-widgets.com" Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Technical SEO | | hectorpn0