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
-
My Homepage Won't Load if Javascript is Disabled. Is this an SEO/Indexation issue?
Hi everyone, I'm working with a client who recently had their site redesigned. I'm just going through to do an initial audit to make sure everything looks good. Part of my initial indexation audit goes through questions about how the site functions when you disable, javascript, cookies, and/or css. I use the Web Developer extension for Chrome to do this. I know, more recently, people have said that content loaded by Javascript will be indexed. I just want to make sure it's not hurting my clients SEO. http://americasinstantsigns.com/ Is it as simple as looking at Google's Cached URL? The URL is definitely being indexed and when looking at the text-only version everything appears to be in order. This may be an outdated question, but I just want to be sure! Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | ccox10 -
Help! Website has lost all DA since being 301'd
Hi, We have redirected a small WP website to a new site and domain and it has lost all DA and PA. Does anyone know if there's a fix for this? Would reverting back to the old domain help? We redirect www.northcornwallgardens.co.uk to cornishlawns.co.uk Thank you James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Strange URL's for client's site
We just picked up a new client and I've been doing some digging around on their site. They have quite the wide variety of URL's that make for a rather confusing experience. One of the milder examples is their "About" page. Normally I would expect something along the lines of: www.website.com/about I see: www.website.com/default.asp?Page=About I'm typically a graphic designer and know basically nothing about code, but I just assume this has something funky to do with how their website was constructed. I'm assuming this isn't particularly SEO friendly, but it doesn't seem too bad. Until I got to another section of their site. It's a section that logically should look like: www.website.com/training/public-seminars It's: www.website.com/default.asp?Page=MT&Area=Seminars&Sub=MRM Now that's nonsensical to me! Normally if a client has terrible URL's, I'd say let's do some redirects, but I guess I'm a little intimidated by these. Do the URL's have to be structured like this for some reason? Am I missing some important area of coding here? However, the most bizarre example is a link back to their website from yellowpages.com. Where normally I would expect it to lead to their homepage, I get this bizarre-looking thing: http://website1-px.rtrk.com/?utm_source=ReachLocal&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=AssetManagement&reference_id=15&publisher=yellowpages&placement=ypwebsitemip&action_target=listing_website And as you browse through the site, that strange domain stays. For example the About page is now: http://website1-px.rtrk.com/default.asp?Page=About I would try to google this but I have no idea where to even start! What is going on with these links? Will we be able to fix them to something presentable without breaking their website?
Technical SEO | | everestagency0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
'No Follow' and 'Do Follow' links when using WordPress plugins
Hi all I hope someone can help me out with the following question in regards to 'no follow' and 'do follow' links in combination with WordPress plugins. Some plugins that deal with links i.e. link masking or SEO plugins do give you the option to 'not follow' links. Can someone speak from experience that this does actually work?? It's really quite stupid, but only occurred to me that when using the FireFox add on 'NoDoFollow' as well as looking at the SEOmoz link profile of course, 95% of my links are actually marked as FOLLOW, while the opposite should be the case. For example I mark about 90% of outgoing links as no follow within a link masking plugin. Well, why would WordPress plugins give you the option to mark links as no follow in the first place when they do in fact appear as follow for search engines and SEOmoz? Is this a WordPress thing or whatnot? Maybe they are in fact no follow, and the information supplied by SEO tools comes from the basic HTML structure analysis. I don't know... This really got me worried. Hope someone can shed a light. All the best and many thanks for your answers!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
The 'On Page' section of SEOMOZ
How does SEOMOZ choose a keyword for a page, for example it has ranked one of my pages for a search term which does not really appear on that page and then given it an F - how do I change the key word association? Secondly, when I first started using SEOMOZ I could change the page and then click the button 'Grade my on-page optimization' and it would show an immediate update - does anyone know why this has been stopped, as it is very useful to know you have got the page right away to an A for example.
Technical SEO | | bowravenseo0 -
How long before rankings return?
We recently had a redesign of our website and moved it from a static html site to WordPress. During the development the WordPress installation sat on a sub-domain. Our programmer and designer had the privacy setting inside WordPress checked so the search engines would not crawl the pages while being developed to avoid duplicate content. Fast forward two weeks when new site replaces old. Guess what privacy setting was not fixed. So about 3 days after the site is live organic traffic drops by 80%. Do a little research and all of our great rankings are gone. Notice that our page rank is also gone...Hmm... Upon further inspection the noindex tag is on every page of the site. It's now removed and has been 3-4 days. I've resubmitted inside webmaster tools and I'm just curious what y'all think the likelihood is that everything will come back to how it was before.
Technical SEO | | jmacek070 -
How can affect the website redesign to my ranking position in Search Engines?
Hi, I have a few questions for you: I’ll will update my booking system and my website design. Now, I'm ranked in number one position with the keyword HOTELES EN CHIAPAS. In fact, several urls of my webiste appear in the search engines. Internal URLs like this: www.hotelesenchiapas.com.mx/obmp30/hotel/villa_mercedes_palenque/1/es/ My question is: I need to conserve this link structure or may i change it for something more friendly like this: www.hotelesenchiapas.com.mx/Palenque/Hoteles/Villa-mercedes-palenque/ And how affect this change to my rank position ?
Technical SEO | | hotelesenchiapas0