Weird SERPS
-
Hello mozerz, I have a question regarding my SERPS that I just can't figure out, maybe one of you had this problem before or has encounter a similar problem.
So I have a website on Scotland, and I have a page for each major city so the structure is scotland/city/glasgow or scotland/city/edinburgh or scotland/city/aberdeen.
Now every city page is w3 validated, page speed validated, has around 1000 words of text, all with h1, h2, image alt, nice title and nice description, all have grade A on moz campaign, original content, all with canonical links, no ads or spammy links.
The title , description, h1, h2 and img alt are the same only replaced Aberdeen with Edinburgh or Glasgow. or so on ... so all pages are identically just replaced the city word.
In terms of link building I have done none ! and in terms of promotion I have done none... so theres no scenario where by I have done something more for one city then the other
Now my problem is that all cities are doing well in SERPS, only Glasgow has come up till 14 position and then has dropped suddenly to 74, and remained there for 2 weeks now. I know this sounds like a penalty, but it can't be because I haven't done anything, I've tried all the tools possible to analyze the Glasgow page, though that it was a code problem or a broken link or that google-bot doesn't get up to this page to crawl it and classify it, but all is fine.
Can anyone suggest anything that I might do. I'm 100% sure that I have no penalty, I've checked even the webmaster tools, open site explorer to see if anyone tried to link to my site with spammy links ( has happened before, I had about 1000 links about viagra from a competitor pointing to my site ) .
-
And in terms of Links I would just let them came naturally, I will establish collaboration and if anyone links to my site or my content I will know that came absolutely natural a i will not have any problems with penguin or any update that Google will produce in the future. Actually I had one link to my homepage, which I got from a charity that I've contacted and ask them if I can support them by adding some info about them on my site, in return and without asking they added a link to my site
-
Well yes I have my social accounts , and i have about 30 followers, about 250 on Google + and 40 on facebook, i builde engagement, had them to answer some polls, they even had some of my blogs shared and liked .. so I'm doing well in there, and I do focus on my brand, eventually they will all direct link my site and not google search for it
-
yes sorry forgot to mention, of course I checked the competition, and actually Glasgow is a lot easier then Edinburgh, and as mentioned, I just know I should rank somewhere between 10-20 on Google without any links, because the other Serps are just horrible, I mean the first 3 sites on Glasgow, do banner exchange and spammy comment links :), and they don't even have social accounts ...
And about the serps, yes my snipped is showing as it should, keyword Glasgow | brand name ,
I have the keyword included once in the description also, once in the h1 and h2 and 3 times in the body with different forms, all should be good ...
-
Ah huh, I misunderstood. If the content is good and unique, and the only duplication is as you describe then it wouldn't seem to be a duplication issue. However, it's not unusual to see such drastic changes in ranking from time to time and that page could pop back up to its previous position at any time.
When you say you haven't done any link building, does that mean you don't have any natural back links either? If that's the case I'd recommend you do some work to build your authority.
-
Ive had experienced that multiple times with clients lol
- First thing I would do is check the competition. IF it's harder than the rest of the other cities/localities. Some cities have specific keywords that work better, too. Local is very easy to spam so there might be some competitors that are battling it out there. You might just be collateral damage from the recent updates to local.
- The next thing i would look at is how search results show. Is google showing you different serp results vs the other cities? Google might show more images/carousels or whatever for that city vs the others. Google is crazy like that.
- Links. Start building links (just a few of them will do) to test and see if you improve within the next week. If you do, then you need to start bothering yourself with competition + link building for that lol
Those are the basic things that id do first, assuming, like what you said, that everything on-page related and technical side are ok.
-
Thanks Chris , as I said, all pages have unique content ( text, photos, etc.. ), just the meta title -> meta description h1, h2 and img alt are the same only with the city keyword replaced
example : i' trying to rank for keywords glasgow and keywords edinburgh, all pages have the title keywords glasgow | brand name or keywords edinburgh | brand name and so on ..
It's a common practice, I have around 300 pages that are for different cities just imagine having to manually type every piece of info there :)) that's why we have the php script that auto generates this.
-
I might see that as a portent of things to come for your other pages. I mean, from what you describe, none of those pages should be ranking due to either thin and/or duplicate content--Panda type stuff. Sorry to say, there's really no reason for you to believe your rankings for the other pages will hold up unless you get original content on those pages.
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
-
SERP result (URL) doesn't change after a 301
A couple of months ago there was a result in Google for our branded search term which wasn't the 'official' URL, actually the result shown in the SERP was www.mycompany-ip.nl. We've applied a 301 redirect of this URL to the 'official' URL which is a subdomain: department.mycompany.nl. From Google the redirect is obviously working, but up until now, I don't see Google replacing the incorrect URL by the correct URL. I am wondering what to do to make the result correct. André
Technical SEO | | ConclusionDigital0 -
SERPs started showing the incorrect date next to my pages
Hi Moz friends, I've noticed since Tuesday, November 9, half of my post's meta dates have changed in regards to what appears next to the post in the search results. Although published this year, I'm getting some saying a random date in 2010! (The domain was born in 2013; which makes this even more odd). This is harming the CTR of my posts and traffic is decreasing. Some posts have gone from 200 hits a day to merely 30. As far as on our end of the website, we have not made any changes in regards to schema markup, rich snippets, etc. We have not edited any post dates. We have actually not added new content since about a week ago, and these incorrect dates have just started to appear on Tuesday. Only changes have been updating certain plugins in terms of maintenance. This is occurring on four of our websites now, so it is not just specific to one. All websites use Wordpress and Genesis theme. It looks like only half of the posts are showing weird dates we've never seen before (far off from the original published date as well as last updated date -- again, dates like 2010, 2011, and 2012 when none of our websites were even created until 2013). We cannot think of a correlation as to why certain posts are showing weird dates and others the correct. The only change we can think of that's related is back in June we changed our posts to show Last Updated date to give our readers an insight into when we changed it last (since it's evergreen content). Google started to use that date for the SERPs which was great, it actually increased traffic. I'm hoping it's a glitch and a recrawl soon may help sift it around. Anybody have experience with this? I've noticed Google fluctuates between showing our last updated date or not even showing a date at all sometimes at random. We're super confused here. Thank you in advance!
Technical SEO | | smmour2 -
My SERP meta description is displaying 315 characters...
Hi Mozzers, We have recently taken the #2 spot for our main keyword in Google UK serp. I just checked again and we have dropped to #4 and our meta description is no longer there as it has been replaced with some homepage content... 315 characters of homepage content right up to the full stop. I'm a little confused. A couple of our competitors meta descriptions are showing the same, extra long homepage text instead. Is there something totally normal and harmless causing this or do I need to be monitoring/changing something? Has Google made an update to allow for longer meta decs? Any advice appreciated! sWrBcuB.png
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
Mobile SERPS: how to optimize for call button
Hi, I have 2 questions about the "call" button on mobile google serps when doing a business name search: -since when is this button available in SERPS -is there anything specific you can do to actually have google display that call button (schema.org, ...) Kind regards Pieter
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
Have my SERP listings been hacked?
When you Google my site the organic search results look normal. The preview site images even display my actual site when you roll over the results. However, when you click a result you are directed to various Spam pages, not my website. How is this possible? This only happens when you click through from search engines. If you type the URL directly in your browser, you are not redirected to a spam site. the site: funeralhomeoptions.com Have any of you seen or experienced this before?
Technical SEO | | emmyjo0 -
Same day our sitemap finished processing in G WebTools, our SERP results Tank!
Need a little help troubleshooting an SEO issue. The day our sitemap finished processing in Google Webmaster Tools, almost all of our keyword serp results tanked. Our top 4 keywords routinely were placing from 11 - 33 rank in serp result and now they're not even on in the top 200? Would the sitemap processing have anything do do with this or should I look somewhere else. FYI: Site is build in DNN, sitemap is fine and robot.txt file is good. Open to all suggestions!!
Technical SEO | | Firecracker0 -
Google: site gone from SERPs, back in 1 day, then gone again?
Last December we fumbled our 404 error page with a misconfigured server and broken links on the page. Needless to say, our site dropped into an abyss - for 4 months. Yesterday we appeared again in our regular placement (actually stronger placement). Our site has been around since 09-Jan-1999 and has been a highly regarded site with good link structure and solid content for engineers. Then today we're gone again. Yesterday morning we had 125,000 pages indexed with Google which grew to 187,000 by late afternoon. Then this morning we're nowhere to be found and only 21,800 pages are now indexed. We've been working with Bruce Clay Inc through an SEO site audit doing several updates to improve through good seo practices. We haven't made any changes to the site since last Friday, April 13th (maybe the unlucky number has something to do with it....) Any ideas, insight, suggestions???? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics1 -
Google SERPs and NoIndex directives.
We have pages that have been added to robots.txt as url patterns in DisAllow. Also, we have the meta noindex tags on the pages themselves. But we are finding the pages in index. I don't think they are higher up in the rankings and they don't have any descriptions, any previews or any cached pages. Why does Google show these pages? Could it be due to internal or external linking?
Technical SEO | | gaganc0