My new site experienced a sudden drop in Google rankings
-
We launched a new affiliate site at the beginning of April this year dealing in reviews, vouchers and price comparison for a niche product.
We had a pretty good start, with some of our target keywords ranking #8 #10 #7 but this week they have suddenly dropped off dramatically - like 36 or 42 places.
We haven't made any changes to the site apart from publishing new content pieces, such as news posts and reviews - does anyone know why this would suddenly happen?
Thanks
-
Yes, I was about to mention the honeymoon period as well. I had exactly the same issue. I can reassure you that yes, a few quality links would do wonders for your site. That's all there really is to it.
-
Various, but coffee machines reviews dropped 37 places in a week.
-
That's why then... Get a few links & you'll be dancing again
-
No. Hove focused purely on-page and content. no offsite activity at all as yet.
-
Some would call it the "Honeymoon Period"
This may help: http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/google-sandbox/
-
What about off site elements? Any directory submissions that were of low quality? Or did you lose a link that you might have had before?
-
What are the keywords that are dropping?
-
Here you go: http://www.coffeemachinesreviews.co.uk/
Thanks!
-
Can you post the URL of the site so we can take a look?
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
-
Google is mixing a product name with a technical term (both have same name)
Google is mixing a programming term name with a home product and ranking that programming website on top. And there is another 2 search results from the same website (DA - 56, PA - 55, Links - 71K, RD - 4500). Their positions are 1, 2 and 3. But the question/ answer section is showing question/ answer for both of the products, and there is local section, top stories, images, videos, Wikipedia, amazon, ad and an e-commerce site which is showing the home product. There are in total 7 results, and 1 ad. Google also showing description of both of the products on the right. 1,2,3 - Programming website, 4. Amazon, 5. Wikipedia, 6. Wikipedia, 7. E-commerce How difficult it could be to outrank the top result?
Affiliate Marketing | | Rafialam040 -
Will GA Autotrack affect affiliate sites not using autotrack?
I want to add autotrack.js to affiliate quote forms hosted on my site. However, I do not know how it will affect affiliate websites (not associated with my quote forms, but with the same Google Analytics code, that do not use autotrack. I read that "Autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for GA Premium". Will it harm my affiliates in any way to have autotrack on their quote form but not on their websites? It will have their GA website tracking number.
Affiliate Marketing | | RoxBrock0 -
Affiliate site
I have a client I am doing SEO work for. He sells a system that helps people win at video keno. He sells a system for like $200 that shows people step by step how to play and win. Its a good site and he has a ton of verified winnings. My point in saying that, its not a fly-by-night system he wrote in his basement. I know - gambling, not easy for SEO. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. Wouldn't this potentially be perfect for affiliate marketing? He offers a good commission to whoever sends him traffic if they buy. If anybody could direct me to a resource or two that is reputable and would handle as much of the set up and management of this I would be very grateful! Thank you! Matthew
Affiliate Marketing | | Mrupp440 -
Amazon Links destroyed my rankings, I removed them, will my site recover?
Hello, Last week I got the glorious idea to put amazon affiliate links on my website. I didn't put a rel=nofollow on them or deindex the pages they were on. Precisely I put some reviews and 10 different amazon links on one page and I put that into my navigation so all inner pages were linking to that page. When Google crawled my page again, I had a 60% traffic drop. 3 days later when I found out what caused this (amazon links) I completely removed the site containing those links and removed all links to that page from my site. Now my rankings are still down, will my site recover from this or is it lost? And how long would you think it'll take?
Affiliate Marketing | | SeeSharp10 -
Google merchant
Is there a way to optimize for google merchant. One of my clients sells mac decals and when you go to google type it and hit shopping it seems like every site is amazon.com Are they covering the SERP because of there authoritative qualities? How does this work?
Affiliate Marketing | | SEODinosaur0 -
Can a disapproved adwords ad affect SEO ranking?
Hi No not used adwords before as our onsite SEO was going well - with long tail terms ranking well to product detail pages. On Sunday we tried to set up an adwords ad as it wasgoing to be used for the forthcoming launch of a new product. - - PS Vita I think it is being classified as a bridge page although other price comparison sites such as kelkoo and pricerunner gocompare, travelsupermarket etc all seem to get through and have ads on Google? More interesting though is since the ad was disapproved my organic search results have disappeared? (which have all been white hat) Coincidence perhaps or something more sinister from Google?? One for you Randfish perhaps?
Affiliate Marketing | | ocelot0 -
Did Something Happen With Google's Algo On 06/09/2011?
Yesterday, June 9th, I wokeup and ran my rank checking software. My two domains that I have page one number one rankings for are solid as they have been for the last year. Before I went to sleep last night I ran the rank check again, and had lost all rankings. After researching into it more, I realized my entire domain name is deindexed. The site: search yields no results at all. The domain name has links from over 250 root domain names, is highly focused on one product and one keyword. The links come mostly from articles, comments, forum posts, press releases, and 3-4 articles that were posted talking about my website by other bloggers. The site has 60 pages, which I think (thought) was more than enough for such a tight focus. The domain is a good keyword match name that I paid a grand for. In webmaster tools it says my URLs are still indexed, however thats not the case. I tried searching in Bing, and Yahoo. Bing - DeIndexed. Yahoo - One page of the site indexed. I havent done anything black hat at all, which is ironic this domain was banned because its the only domain name links were built to using a respectable seo company. It runs on wordpress, and I had not added any new content in about 4 months. PR4, and the PR still exists in the toolbar and on the websites I used to check it. Also tried searching google.fr, google.ru, etc... to see if it was a complete deindex, and it is. Then used the multiple datacenter check - which told me my domain name was not listed in any of the DCs checked. It is an affiliate website, with one affiliate link on the homepage. I use a plugin to mask the link so it appears as /starthere/ rather than a long affiliate URL. There is ONE catch, this website is in the pharmacy niche. Now before you all go saying oh well thats why, consider my question. I dont sell anything illegal, nor does the affiliate program I promote. I collect traffic from people searching for a prescription drug and then recommend a herbal alternative. Something odd however, is that I have 5 websites like this. Each tailored to their respective prescription drug backlink wise, and then on site I have comparisons and explain the benefits of instead using one of the herbal products or OTC supplements from savon/walgreens whatever. The other 4 websites gained rank, pages 1, 2, and 3 for their keywords when they were previously on pages 15-20. No new link building to the other domains, I hadn't given them any focus due to other projects. The issue is the domain name which was banned was a real money maker with an aesthetically pleasing theme. Now its completely deindexed, and I dont know why. Despite the fact I am lost an income stream, I really would like to know why this occurred at all. I feel like I walked into my job, was fired and not told why. This isn't the first time this has happened to me, however previously it was my own fault because I used an affiliate template and it didn't occur to me 5k other people were doing the same thing. (earlier days before I learned more about link building and basic SEO). So, my question is what exactly happened yesterday? Did anyone else see an sudden change in traffic or rankings? Has anyone else experienced a complete deindex of their domain name, and if you have is this permanent or is google known for accidental / temporary removals during an update to their algo? I may share my link if it will help, however I prefer not to unless its in private. Also if someone has access to Matt Cutts directly so I can ask what I am doing wrong, or has any idea how to contact someone at google (other than a request for reinclusion) I am all ears. Its very frustrating to see a decision made to ban my domain name without so much as an email saying "we dont like you". All responses and opinions are welcome and appreciated!
Affiliate Marketing | | getbigyadig0 -
Passing Google Analytics Variables Through Javascript?
Alright so here's my situation and hopefully someone can help... I want to be able to pass Google Analytics variables onto my affiliate links so I have some better conversion tracking data (not PPC traffic so no easy dynamic keyword insertion variables). I want to do something like this: User searches "keyword" in Google > User lands on mysite.com > search data is assigned to global variables that I can use in my affiliate link redirect script. afflink.com/?id=123&keyword=[GA keyword variable] Anybody know how I would go about doing that? I've seen other Non-GA tracking scripts do this but I can't figure it out here and it's driving me crazy! Thanks,
Affiliate Marketing | | drewhammond
Drew EDIT: Just figured it out after a lot of guess and testing... I'm not sure if the way I'm doing it is the fastest, most optimized way but it works. Solution: I can pull the GA cookie and break it down to retrieve the keyword using PHP. For anyone searching for this in the future, here's how I did it: $gacookie = $_COOKIE['__utmz'];
$keyword = substr(strstr($gacookie, 'utmctr='),7); ?> Then I can use the $keyword variable wherever I need it. I haven't actually tested this on a live site yet but everything is working fine as of right now. If anyone has a better solution please feel free to answer.0