SEO Moz Keyword Ranking Tool
-
The SEO Moz keyword ranking tool is useful and fairly accurate but it would be more useful to know why the ranking changed. Can the tool provide any insight in this regard?
-
In short, the answer is....
It is impossible to accurately say why Google changed the rankings.
Anybody who says that they can do this is full of BS. There are hundreds of variables.
-
In theory, it would, but right now we don't have a lot of data about actual changes on any given site. We could track the ranking changes, but not the causal factors. We're working on metrics like what we use on MozCast - basically trying to figure out baseline "flux" for any given campaign, so that you can understand how much movement is normal vs. unusual. Even that is tricky. Rankings fluctuate all the time (even on page refresh, in some cases), so step 1 is sorting out what's abnormal. Then, we have to tie it to things like known algorithm updates and on-page changes.
-
Instead of reverse engineering perhaps a comparative analysis back to the previous measurement point may work? Such a comparison could, in theory, highlight the inputs that changed which may shed light on why the ranking changed. As always theory may be more difficult in practice but if it could be done the why it happened would provide more value than just what happened when it comes to the SERP change
-
I can't argue that that would be useful, but to tell you why your ranking changed would basically require reverse-engineering the algorithm. If we could do that, believe me, we would
In terms of future directions, I see us heading a couple of places (this is partly my knowledge of the product, and partly speculative):
(1) Tracking more aggregate metrics, as opposed to individual keyword rankings (including aggregate rankings). The value of any individual ranking is declining as the SERPs become more diverse.
(2) Tracking broader analytics, including landing-page metrics. This may be a necessity as Google strips away more and more keyword data. We expect [not provided] to only increase, for example.
(3) Separating keyword visibility from keyword opportunity. Visibility is a broader sense of how well a keyword or group of keywords are performing (not just ranking, but CTR, social, etc.) and opportunity would be areas that you may be missing out on. I think opportunity metrics would be a lot more actionable than just rank-tracking, but it's not an easy task.
This is something many people on the team put a lot of thought and time into, but as Google and SEO both evolve, the target is always moving.
-
Yes is a gret idea
The ideal would be to make a software where you register what you have change every day in the your websites and actual positions and more add the date and content of crawler changed.
and then try to analyze the data.
Ciao
Maurizio
-
Hi Chris that's a great idea.
I use all the tools as a holistic solution, i audit all my client pages, look for the fixes make the changes and then monitor.
Thats the best way i have found, simply because, as you know there are so many factors going on in the serp.
love to see what others are saying
Jeremy
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
-
Homepage Ranking For Service Keyword (KW Cannibalisation)
Hi All! I will try and keep my question brief, any advice is greatly appreciated. I have a client that is a well establish coach hire company, naturally their main priority is to be ranking for 'coach hire' in their surrounding area. The homepage and /coach-hire/ page - both appear to compete against each other in the search results. The homepage is positioned higher up the rankings, it also has historical backlinks with anchor text relating to coach hire, whereas the /coach-hire/ page doesn't have all that many backlinks. The company has a few services that it offers through it's website - Coach Hire, Coach Day Trips & School Bus Services. The Day Trips and Bus Services pages rank well for their respective keyword. My question therefore, is - should I focus on making the homepage the best page for the 'coach hire' term and forget about trying to get the /coach-hire/ page to outrank the homepage? If so, what's the best way of doing this in terms of what happens to the /coach-hire/ page? Any advice is greatly appreciate and if you need any other info, just let me know. Many thanks, Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | meowth240 -
Drop in Rankings
UPDATE* I temporarily removed the images from the page to check if rankings would come back and they did. So Google made a recent update in the Netherlands where they look at your page for adult content (pictures). For us it was breast augmentations, before and after pics. END Hey Guys, We have a site for plastic surgery in the Netherlands. We ranked on number 2 if someone searched for breast augmentation. But sinds 31 of januari our ranking dropped outside the top 50. I did not get a warning or an other message in Search Console. We have a lot of pictures on the website displaying before and after pictures. So you see breasts. Does anybody know if google rolled out an update where they look at photo's with audult content? We didnt do any linkbuilding or other black hat stuff. Kind regards, Ruud
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | equipezorgbedrijven0 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Long tail rankings
Hi everybody. We've been working with http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/ for some time now. Rankings for broad terms such as 'lawn mowers' and 'lawnmowers' are superb, and we're pretty happy. Bizarrely though, rankings for products are very poor. For example this page - http://www.lawnmowersdirect.co.uk/product/honda-hrg465sd - is currently 17th for 'Honda HRG465SD IZY'. We've done lots of work onsite, clearing up duplicate content, improving copy and tidying up URLs. However, none of this seems to have had a major impact on the product pages. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Previously ranking #1 in google, web page has 301 / url rewrite, indexed but now showing for keyword search?
Two web pages on my website, previously ranked well in google, consistent top 3 places for 6months+, but when the site was modified, these two pages previously ending .php had the page names changed to the keyword to further improve (or so I thought). Since then the page doesn't rank at all for that search term in google. I used google webmaster tools to remove the previous page from Cache and search results, re submitted a sitemap, and where possible fixed links to the new page from other sites. On previous advice to fix I purchased links, web directories, social and articles etc to the new page but so far nothing... Its been almost 5 months and its very frustrating as these two pages previously ranked well and as a landing page ended in conversions. This problem is only appearing in google. The pages still rank well in Bing and Yahoo. Google has got the page indexed if I do a search by the url, but the page never shows under any search term it should, despite being heavily optimised for certain terms. I've spoke to my developers and they are stumped also, they've now added this text to the effected page(s) to see if this helps. Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanclc
$newurl=SITE_URL.$seo;
Header("Location:$newurl"); Can Google still index a web page but refuse to show it in search results? All other pages on my site rank well, just these two that were once called something different has caused issues? Any advice? Any ideas, Have I missed something? Im at a loss...0 -
Disavowel tool.
Hello, One of my sites has a strange link profile; it has 40000 in bound links but 30000 of them are from the site http://ourlipsaresealed.skynetblogs.be/ with the anchor text "haarstijl (2)" which is dutch for hairstyles. I haven't paid for or even asked for these links and I don't think its negative seo. I think they just set up a template with hundreds of links they thought were useful to their visitors and produce several pages a day. So the question is do I use the new google disavowel tool? I've held off so far because A. they link to a competitor who haven't been anywhere near as affected as we have although they seem to have been affected to an extent by a drop for some reason and they have a much better link profile overall than mine. and B. in the video Matt cutts goes on over and over that this tool is for people that have done some dodgy link building in the past but I haven't. Thanks, Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwdl0 -
Ranking For Misspelling of Primary Keyword
I have been baffled for the past few months for ranking for the misspelling of our primary keyword BELIZE in the Google U.S. Serps. We are nowhere to be found, but are ranking for the misspelling BELIZ (without the final "e"). We have been online since 1995 on page one everywhere. 11 months ago we did a site redesign changing over to WP as a CMS. We changed all pages from widget-example.html to widget-example and properly 301ed all pages after deleting the old pages. Then we accidentally de-indexed the site for a month due to a robots.txt error. This has been corrected 4 months now. We shared this on the Google Webmaster forums and some kind folks helped with advice - nothing major in our opinion but we implemented most of the tips given. We are doing fine everywhere with all search engines and Google itself in other areas Google.ca Google.bz Google.mx for example. But in our primary market is the U.S. where the majority of our readers are - tourists and retirees looking for our information - we do not exist. The joke is that searching for BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serps has us on Page One. It is a joke that is NOT funny - or maybe some human evaluator made a mistake or is playing a sick joke? We have done a reconsideration request in case there was a manual penalty and we received the no manual penalty form letter. I notice increasingly in Google Live Analytics people typing in our full domain name - I guess out of frustration not getting the site when inputting the primary keyword. I find that I can write a new article and in a couple of weeks it ranks in the top couple pages. Many other pages are found via long-tail only. I find it intriguing that yesterday I wrote a very small article, a press release actually, and today searching for the misspelling BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serp the root domain is ranked #2 and the snippet and image displayed is from this little article which is nothing really great. I am new here. Thanks to anyone who can help. The site: Belize http://www.belize.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Belize0 -
SEO for eCommerce?
I'm working on a game plan for the on-page optimization for a growing e-commerce site (https://www.boutine.com) and I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with similar projects. Specifically, how to get the most SEO value out of product and category pages. Thanks in advance! -Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boutine0