Dropped off cliff for a partic keyword & can't find out why
-
At the beginning of Dec we ranked consistently in the top 3 for the keyword 'Suffolk' for the site www.suffolktouristguide.com (apge rank 4, thousands of quality inboud links, site age 5 years +). Since then we've been falling off a cliff and today aren't even in the top 50 for this search term, but most of our othr search terms are unaffected. Our SEOMoz grade remains A for 'Suffolk' and we haven't changed anything in that time that could have had such a material effect (knowingly at least). A similar issue happened to my other site www.suffolkhotelsguide.com back in April and it hasn't recovered despite grade A's on the homepage and key pages. We've checked internal broken links, page download times, external links (used the disavow tool and reconsideration request and got back 'We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google'); etc etc Any thoughts on what I can try next? All suggestions appreciated as I am completely stuck (& have spent a fortune on 'SEO experts' to no effect).
-
Hi Sarah,
You're welcome! I was glad to have information to share. I have been so impressed with this forum and loving the help I am receiving. It's amazing!
Good luck to you. I hope everything works out.
-
Thanks very much Gina - I spent a few hours yesterday working through the responses to your q and will carry on today working through it all. Like you I feel that we run good sites - relevant, topical, up to date content with no spamming, black hats or bought links, so I feel very aggrieved that this has happened after 5 years of hard work getting the sites to rank highly organically. Google is going to put some good businesses out of business at this rate.
I do appreciate your comments and thanks for taking the time to reply to my post. The feedback you received is gold dust so I'll work my way through it!
-
Hi Sarah,
Our company experienced a similar situation in the past week. I posted a question about it and have received a lot of quality responses that you may find helpful. Posted December 29:<a name="question-1"></a>
sudden disappearance from visibility on Google
I'm so sorry this is also happening to you. It's a challenging situation at best and devastating at worst.Wishing you luck in recovering your position!
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
-
Hotel SEO, 3-pack & Search Console: How to get the right data and how to improve CTR?
Hey guys, I've been working with some hotels and I feel like there are some specific issues which need special solutions.
Algorithm Updates | | Maggiathor
Maybe some of you also work for hotels and face similar problems. Question 1: Google "forces" 3-packs impressions to OTAs like booking.com via Hotel Ads. You basically have a big blue "book now" button and a small little website button. This ends up basically leading to CTRs below 1% despite a 1-3 Position. Is there any way to improve the organic CTR? Of course we use hotel ads, but they offer bad analytics AND we basically pay for our SEO-Performance. Question 2: Search console doesn't specify wether or not a impression comes from 3-Pack or the rest of the organic results, which basically leads to a average position which says nothing. It's hard to evaluate the performance of meta-titles and texts, because the ctr is also mixed. What would be a better way to get this data or do you think google will change this in some time (new search console doesn't offer this). Question 3: Hotel Rankings are dominated by OTAs, Meta-Searchers and BIg Chains. Has anyone experience in SEO for smaller, family owned Hotels? Any tricks how to get a steady traffic source outside of brand results? Hope there are some travel experts in here 🙂0 -
Keyword optimisation: Google's eyes before users' eyes?
Hi all, So the default and ultimate suggestion about how to rank a page high is to get favoured by users, so by the Google. But if write content in favour of users, it may miss out the keywords or will not have much keyword density and variety of keywords to get in to Google's eyes. Then we may appear around 3rd page; then how do we get into top slots? I can see some top results without even a single mention of the keyword they are ranking for. How that would be possible? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Fred Google Update & Ecommerce Sites
Hi I've seen a couple areas of our site drop in average rankings for some areas since the 'Fred' update. We don't have ads on our site, but I'm wondering if it's 'thin' content - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ We are an ecommerce site and we have some content on our category pages - which is a bit more generic about the section/products within that section - but how can it not be if it's a category page with products on? I am working on adding topic based content/user guides etc to be more helpful for customers, but I'd love some advice on generating traffic to category pages. Is it better to rank these other topic/user guide pages instead of the category page & then hope the customer clicks through to products? Advice welcome 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Traffic, CTR AND AdSense eCPM Down ... Keyword Rankings Unchanged
Since the last week in March, one of our sites with ~ 1 million high quality page-views per month has had a 25% drop in traffic, CTR drop from 4% to 3%, and AdSense eCPM has dropped from $8 to $5 ... however, all of our keyword rankings have remained unchanged. Also, it is an extremely consistent niche with no drop in relevant searches ... The only thing that we KNOW for sure has changed is the removal of the separator and indentation from the Google search ads to our #1 ranking positions. Could such a simple alteration in the Google search results UI have such a significant impact on our numbers? Is anyone else experiencing a similar revenue drop without a rankings drop in the past two weeks? Besides punching up the titles to make our search results more appealing to users, is there really anything that can be done about Googles new paid results placement? Your thoughts and suggestions are invited. Thanks guys and gals 😉
Algorithm Updates | | Humanovation0 -
Keyword rich domains
Can you share your experience about Keyword rich domains; do they still hold same value as before?
Algorithm Updates | | ShashankGupta0 -
15% Drop in Traffic. Anyone have theories about the most recent update?
Analyzing our traffic, looks like we were hit site wide, with some article pages that don't have great engagement seeing more damage than others. We've been talking to other sites, and sites that have never seen any penalties and do everything right have also seen about 15-20% drop in traffic. The sites we know that weren't affected are brands (sites you would recognize by name). The only conclusion I can draw from everything (looking at mozcast metrics 'big 10' is that branded websites saw a boost. Does anyone else have any theories about what this most recent update was about?
Algorithm Updates | | nicole.healthline0 -
Why some results in SERP have a www. and some don't
Hello all, If this is posted twice, I didn't mean for it to be - but it looks like last time I tried to post this question it didn't post. This is my question: How come some results on Google's SERP page are shown with a "www" and some are not? Does this effect SEO at all? I am including a screen shot so you can see what I mean. The Geary Interactive result has a "www" in front of while ingenexdigital doesn't. R6GLL.png
Algorithm Updates | | digitalops0 -
If you rank first organically for a keyword, will you rank first for variations?
Hi everyone, Hoping that someone will be able to answer this question for us. If we rank first organically for a keyword, are we safe to assume that we'll rank first (or close to it) for variations of that keyword as well? E.g. If we rank first easily for "Hamilton Island", can we safely assume that we will rank well organically for close variations of that keyword such as "Hamilton Islands", "Hamiltonisland", "Hamilton Island Hotel" due to the fact that "Hamilton Island" is in those keywords? We're deciding which keywords to monitor in SEOmoz and we don't want to waste keywords on very similar terms if we don't have to. Really appreciate any responses! Cheers.
Algorithm Updates | | HamiltonIsland0