Lost ranking and can't figure out why
-
My page http://www.drschulmanplasticsurgery.com/body/buttock-lift-augmentation-new-york-city/ recently moved from first page to past the 15th. I was never penalized on the last update and have very few links pointing to this page. I can't figure out why i just moved so far back. Can anyone offer some advice?
-
From my experience with this latest update (not even 24 hours old, mind you) it seems to be more of the latter than the former. I'm seeing sites that had a mix of good/poison links sit around the same placement while sites with nothing but spam links dropped off the face of the earth.
Again though, this is early and one teeny tiny little example out of the billions of pages out there.
-
Tom,
Most of the links are from his internal blog. They are adding in the catagory pages and tag pages which i have set to not index in my seo plugin. There are only a few external links from sites that are general health blogs that have good page authority. The anchor text for those has been different every time. Is there a different tool you are using to see backlinks. I am using open explorer her on seomoz.org.
-
Tom, would you state that Google takes the spammy links into account and devalues website rankings which have good links with them as well, or is it simply Google removing those spammy link domains as any relevant source of link importance and thus making the websites loose rankings just for the simple fact these domains hold no real value with Google now? Thanks!
-
Hey there
As you'll probably be aware, we have just had the latest Penguin algorithm update, aimed at devaluing low quality and manipulative links.
Of the links pointing to your page, I'd say that probably all of them look manipulative and look to have been built for a search engine.
The sites in question look like link farms - a blog network that links out to a number of unrelated health niche websites (and some random ones). There's very little value on show for a user, each article looks placed to provide an optimised anchor text backlink to a number of websites.
In addition, each domain looks like it has once expired and been bought up someone and turned into a blog network, probably on the premise that the domains were old and carried PR, DA and PA, so would pass decent link equity. The anchor text pointing to your website all look targeted as well.
Basically, nearly every link to that page looks artificial, placed for a search engine and intended to pass PageRank, without offering anything for a user. It's exactly the sort of link that this Penguin update would try and target, so it's no great surprise to me that you have lost your rankings.
My advice would be try and get the links removed ASAP. Last resort would be to use the disavow tool. You may need to wait until the next algorithm refresh to see the effect of removing/disavowing the links take place - the last time Penguin refreshed was 6 months ago prior to yesterday, so we can only hope the new version will refresh monthly.
In the mean time, I would concentrate on earning links by offering quality content, resources or guides to your users. Contact webmasters and bloggers in your field that could benefit from your expertise, or alternatively promote the content on your own blog and use marketing, PR and social media to attract attention to it.
Hope this helps.
-
Simple answer (which you wont like) is that nobody has a good idea why it happens. I had a site where no links were created drop significantly in rankings. Why? Have no real idea. Content is good, your social media signals are good, wait a few days and check it out then.
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
-
Old pages not mobile friendly - new pages in process but don't want to upset current traffic.
Working with a new client. They have what I would describe as two virtual websites. Same domain but different coding, navigation and structure. Old virtual website pages fail mobile friendly, they were not designed to be responsive ( there really is no way to fix them) but they are ranking and getting traffic. New virtual website pages pass mobile friendly but are not SEO optimized yet and are not ranking and not getting organic traffic. My understanding is NOT mobile friendly is a "site" designation and although the offending pages are listed it is not a "page" designation. Is this correct? If my understanding is true what would be the best way to hold onto the rankings and traffic generated by old virtual website pages and resolve the "NOT mobile friendly" problem until the new virtual website pages have surpassed the old pages in ranking and traffic? A proposal was made to redirect any mobile traffic on the old virtual website pages to mobile friendly pages. What will happen to SEO if this is done? The pages would pass mobile friendly because they would go to mobile friendly pages, I assume, but what about link equity? Would they see a drop in traffic ? Any thoughts? Thanks, Toni
Technical SEO | | Toni70 -
What to do about spam links I didn't create?
I have dropped in rankings 3-5 points over the past 6 months and have been trying to figure out why. One thing I found was a ton of my pictures on a image net ring. I obviously didn't put those photos there or give permission to use them. It looks like an offshore website. How do we deal with these type of bad links?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Ranking in other countries.
Hi, To rank in Dubai and UK is it just a matter of mentioning it in a blog post or more technical things need to be setup? we have two sites one empty which i have 301 to the main site would you use the other site for dubia? Regards
Technical SEO | | ReSEOlve0 -
How to find temporary redirects of existing site you don't control?
I am getting ready to move a clients site from another company. They have like 35 tempory redirects according to MOZ. Question is, how can I find out then current redirects so I can update everything for the new site? Do I need access to the current htaccess file to do this?
Technical SEO | | scott3150 -
Will you get more 'google juice' if your social links are in your websites header, rather than its footer?
Hi team, I'm in the process of making some aesthetic changes to my website. Its getting quite cluttered so the main purpose is to clean up its look. I currently have 3x social links in the header, right at the top, and i would really like to move these to the footer to remove some clutter in the header. My concern is that moving them may have an impact on the domains ranking in google. Website: www.mountainjade.co.nz We've made some huge gains against our competitors over the past 6 months and I don't want to jeopardise that. Any help would be much appreciated as i'm self taught in SEO and have learnt through making mistakes. This time however, with Moz, i'd rather get some advice before I make any decisions! Thanks is advance, Jake S
Technical SEO | | Jacobsheehan0 -
I have a 404 error on my site i can't find.
I have looked everywhere. I thought it might have just showed up while making some changes, so while in webmaster tools i said it was fixed.....It's still there. Even moz pro found it. error is http://mydomain.com/mydomain.com No idea how it even happened. thought it might be a plugin problem. Any ideas how to fix this?
Technical SEO | | NateStewart0 -
Lost ranking for top keyword
For the last 3 months we've been working on www.UneekJewelry.com to get it rank for "unique engagement rings" and got it to position 14 but since September 18th, 2012 that all changed. The website no longer ranks for our money keyword not even in the top 500. We haven't been building exact match keywords but using more phrase match and I can't tell if its because we don't have enough exact match or something else. We have been working on trying to figure out what the issue is as they still rank for other keywords like "unique engagement rings in los angeles", therefore we don't know if this is a keyword penalty or glitch in Google, can anyone give us any insight on what could cause such a drop in those specific keywords for our site. Most of the link building we have done for this client is from in content blogs. The only blog we were suspicious of we removed the article from that blog two days ago. The ranking have not come back. This was the last blog that the exact match keyword was used where we removed the article from: http://colorfuljewelry.blogspot.com/ Thanks,
Technical SEO | | harrykabadaian0 -
Thumbnail-based navigation like YouTube Sidebar - they don't use ALT tag
Notice on the YouTube sidebar, each video has a thumbnail and a title. But, for the ALT tag, YouTube simply uses the word "thumbnail". In the past, i was using a keyword phrase for my thumbnail ALT tag. I thought I was being clever. But is this superflous? We note that the A tag on the YouTube items, encompasses the SPAN that is the video + title. Does Google associate the text of the title as valid "anchor text" despite the existance of other info in that span --- e.g. like View Count and the User Name of the video creator? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | anthony-3054420