Sudden Page Rank Drop for Weight Loss Camp
-
My site BalanceME.com has been performing really well and continually climbs more and more but in the last 7 days we have had a drop this last week. We went from #2 for weight loss camp to #6, and even further on other terms.
It is mid May and I cannot find any other explanation for the sudden drop. I am hoping someone could give me some sort if idea what could possibly be the answer. Recently we have had two press releases go out, target for keywords, and also installed images that navigate to new pages on the site. There have been few additions to the site, and nothing can explain the drop.
Other companies in our group have not had issues with recent drops, and we use the same practices with the other organizations.
Thank you for your time
-
We have bridge sites targeted to create content and give us good anchor text and backlinks to our site. In the past week or two we have had a serious drop in national rankings for some of the terms. It turns out the bridge sites were hacked:
weight-loss-camp-california.com
weight-loss-camp-massachusetts.com
They are still broken right now, but one of our developers is on it. This could have lead to the rankings drop. We are a white hat organization, so it was interesting to see a drop even if there was an algorithm change.
We check rankings in two ways, locally, and nationally. Locally we saw a SMALL drop in some targeted markets, but nationally we dropped from #2 to #5 almost over night. I do not understand why this happened... It has happened in the past, and we just waited it out and we actually returned to a better-than-before position.
-
What do you mean by bridge sites? Have you cleaned up this hack? If you can give us a few more details, we can help you figure out if this may be contributing to your problem.
-
Still dropping, found out bridge sites were hacked... any other ideas?
-
Changed it. The SEO footer text we use put us over in density, but scribe still had us on track.
As I said in the comment below, there was a hiccup in results in the spring that eventually corrected itself.
-
We have not lost position with the brand name, and the anchor text for most of the backlinks matches the keyword phrase we are aiming for.
I really wonder if this is a hiccup in the SERP, we had a hiccup in the spring and eventually it went back to normal, actually better than normal...
-
I didn’t witness any on-page problem in a quick audit but i guess your linking strategy have a problem the links that are pointing back to your website are mostly with a keyword anchor text... I would highly recommend you to build more links with the anchor text that says your brand name.
-
I haven't had time to look at your site thoroughly but I ran a quick report through our system and something did stick out a bit.
When you compare your site to the other 9 sites (in the top 10) of Google, the average number of times "weight loss camp" is on the page is 0-5 and on your site, it's showing up 9 separate times.
I would either reduce some of that exact anchor text and/or add more text to your homepage to dilute it a bit more. A combination of both is probably best.
If I have some time later, I can take a better look but that's definitely one thing you could address and optimize right now.
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
-
Very strange, inconsistent and unpredictable Google ranking
I have been searching through these forums and haven't come across someone that faces the same issue I am. The folks on the Google forums are certain this is an algorithm issue, but I just can't see the logic in that because this appears to be an issue fairly unique to me. I'll take you through what I've gone through. Sorry for it being long. Website URL: https://fenixbazaar.com 1. In early February, I made the switch to https with some small hiccups. Overall however the move was smooth, had redirects all in place, sitemap, indexing was all fine. 2. One night, my organic traffic dropped by almost 100%. All of my top-ranking articles completely disappeared from rank. Top keyword searches were no longer yielding my best performing articles on the front page of results, nor on the last page of results. My pages were still being indexed, but keyword searches weren't delivering my pages in results. I went from 70-100 active users to 0. 3. The next morning, everything was fine. Traffic back up. Top keywords yielding results for my site on the front page. All was back to normal. Traffic shot up. Only problem was the same issue happened that night, and again for the next three nights. Up and down. 4. I had a developer and SEO guy look into my backend to make sure everything was okay. He said there were some redirection issues but nothing that would cause such a significant drop. No errors in Search Console. No warnings. 5. Eventually, the issue stopped and my traffic improved back to where it was. Then everything went great: the site was accepted into Google News, I installed AMP pages perfectly and my traffic boomed for almost 2 weeks. 6. At this point numerous issues with my host provider, price increases, and incredibly outdated cpanel forced me to change hosts. I did without any issues, although I lost a number of articles albeit low-traffic ones in the move. These now deliver 404s and are no longer indexed in the sitemap. 7. After the move there were a number of AMP errors, which I resolved and now I sit at 0 errors. Perfect...or so it seems. 8. Last week I applied for hsts preload and am awaiting submission. My site was in working order and appeared set to get submitted. I applied after I changed hosts. 9. The past 5 days or so has seen good traffic, fantastic traffic to my AMP pages, great Google News tracking, linking from high-authority sites. Good performance all round. 10. I wake up this morning to find 0 active people on my site. I do a Google search and notice my site isn't even the first result whenever I do an actual search for my name. The site doesn't even rank for its own name! My site is still indexed but search results do not yield results for my actual sites. Check Search Console and realised the sitemap had been "processed" yesterday with most pages indexed, which is weird because it was submitted and processed about a week earlier. I resubmitted the sitemap and it appears to have been processed and approved immediately. No changes to search results. 11. All top-ranking content that previously placed in carousal or "Top Stories" in Google News have gone. Top-ranking keywords no longer bring back results with my site: I went through the top 10 ranking keywords for my site, my pages don't appear anywhere in the results, going as far back as page 20 (last page). The pages are still indexed when I check, but simply don't appear in search results. It's happening all over again! Is this an issue any of you have heard of before? Where a site is still being indexed, but has been completely removed from search results, only to return within a few hours? Up and down? I suspect it may be a technical issue, first with the move to https, and now with changing hosts. The fact the sitemap says processed yesterday, suggests maybe it updated and removed the 404s (there were maybe 10), and now Google is attempting to reindexed? Could this be viable? The reason I am skeptical of it being an algorithm issue is because within a matter of hours my articles are ranking again for certain keywords. And this issue has only happened after a change to the site has been applied. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | fenixbazaar0 -
A Serious drop in Pages crawled per day
On 21st April ,I spotted a sudden decrease in pages crawled per day.Previously it was about 5,000 bust after the drop it reached to 225.From the crawl rate never spiked. Here is my website url - http://www.wpstuffs.com/ 8fQHW2G.png
Algorithm Updates | | vividvilla0 -
Ranking effected by Penguin 2.0
Hello Everyone, I am amazed to see that all the ranking of keywords got down after Penguin webspam algorithm updated on May 22, 2013. Is there any suggestion how we will recover and get the ranking back. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | lucidsoftech0 -
Page rank of 2 with zero SEO and a 2 month old domain?
Hello, I helped work on a website for a friend. We used wordpress, a theme from elegant themes and wrote the content over 4 days. Zero back links, no seo, etc. Well, a little on page optimization and that's about it. Oh, we did ONE back link from a review site. The domain was brand new; never registered before. About a week after it started getting indexed, it jump from no page rank to a page rank of 1. About a week later, it jumped to a page rank of 2. Again, zero seo (aside from above stated). The site is: trade lines review dot com A page rank of 2 is nothing to write home about, but given the circumstances, how is this even possible? Thanks you!
Algorithm Updates | | Friedman0 -
Why Am I Ranking in Bing but Not Google
My website is ranking is ranking in Bing, but it's nowhere to be found on Google? What can be some causes for this?
Algorithm Updates | | locallyrank0 -
Can I check the rank of a keyword over time ?
Is there any tools available that allows users to track ranking of a keyword in SERP over time ? I know the question can be a bit confusing so here is an example that I hope makes it a bit easier to understand EXAMPLE : I am doing keyword research for say "iphones games" and I find out the current sites that rank for the term but If I want to see who ranked for the term 6 months ago or 1 year ago, is it possible ? Also can I get data of the SERP ranking history for "example.com" for the term "iphones games" ? eg : in jan 2011 rank 10 feb 2011 rank 7 ... sep 2011 rank 5
Algorithm Updates | | avant_seomoz0 -
Tuesday July 12th = We suddenly lost all our top Google rankings. Traffic cut in half. Ideas?
The attached screenshot shows all. Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic. Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back. Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine). Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong?? eartheasy.com wtf.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | aran0880 -
Google +1 link on Domain or Page?
Since its release, I've seen Google +1 being used across an entire domain but only reference the root href in the code snippet. At the same time, you see other sites use +1 more naturally with the button being specific to the page you're on. What's your take on this? To clarfiy, do you add: or .. on each page.
Algorithm Updates | | noeltock0