Recent ranking drop followed by strange behavior in SERPS
-
Recently on the evening of August 5th almost all of the keywords our pages ranked highly for dropped by anywhere from 5 to 8 pages. The only activity during this time was an article that had been picked up by a major news outlet and then was apparently copied onto other sources with links to our domain and article.
More puzzling though is rather than simply having the same page show up lower for a keyword, in a number of instances a different page is now shown for the result, often with less or no relevance to the keyword. In some cases, for a single keyword phrase we've seen as many as 10 different pages rotated throughout the day when performing a search. Prior to our rankings falling, we've never seen this behavior.
-
Most likely a penalty. Manual or algorithmic, did you check your WMT? They are now showing all manual actions (and some algorithmic too, such as a link devaluation).
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
-
How to rank a product page
Hello, I have a product page and just did a little introduction ( 5 lines of text) but I have the feeling this is not enough for google. What is the solution ? Is it to increase the amount of content even though it is not going to be user friendly ? Or will google look at the product page I link too and take into account the content on those subpages to boost my "pillar / product page". Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
Categories showing on SERP listings?
Hi I was wondering if anyone knows what these are called? See attached screenshot. Basically, it looks like Google is pulling the primary category and then sub categories from the site and adding them to the SERP listing. Are there any benefits to this besides possibly higher CTR? Cheers. wn3ybMMOQFW98fNQkxtJkA.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak651 -
Researching search volume drop
I am seeing a pretty precipitous drop in search volume traffic (see link). My keyword rankings don't seem to have suffered too much over this period. In fact, my #1 keyword have actually increased slightly in this timeframe. Two questions... Is there some way to assess overall search volume across my tracked keywords (to see if this is just a case of overall searches dropping)? Is there a recommended plan of attack for investigating drops like this - beyond overall search volume, what other data might be important in identifying the cause of this. In short, I'm looking for some logic/structure for how I investigate this, using Moz tools and reports. Thanks. Mark omE1VPc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Site dropped after recovery
Hi everybody! I've been working for http://www.newyoubootcamp.com for some time now. They came to me as they had dropped heavily for their main term, "boot camp". This turned out to be due to a manual penalty, which was in part due to their forum being hacked, as well as some bad link building. Here's an example of the dodgy forum links - http://about1.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/tweetdeck-to-launch-as-html5-web-app-now-accepting-beta-testers.html. The anchor is "microsoft". They've all been 410'd now. Also, we cleaned up the other bad links as best we could, and got through the manual penalty. The site then returned to #5 for "boot camps", below its pre-crash peak of #2, but OK. Over the past few weeks, it has started to slide though. I'm certain it is not down to a lack of quality links - this site has great PR and links from national newspapers and magazines. There's been a few on-site issues too, but nothing outrageous. I'm getting a bit stumped though, and any fresh eyes would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Stock lists - follow of nofollow?
a bit of a catch 22 position here that i could use some advice on please! We look after a few Car dealership sites that have daily (some 3 times a day) stock feeds that add and remove cars form the site, which in turn removes/creates pages for each vehicle. We all know how much search engines like sites that have content that is updated regularly but the frequency it happens on our sites means we are left with lots of indexed pages that are no longer there. now my question is should i nofollow/disallow robots on all the pages that are for the details of the vehicles meaning the list pages will still be updated daily for "new content" or allow google to index everything and manage the errors to redirect to relevant pages? is there a "best practice" way to do this or is it really personal preference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben_dpp0 -
A/B Split Testing - Rankings Drop? Need an expert opinion...
We are running an A/B split test (Started on 12/12), and a few days after we started the test, we fell from position 9/10 (about 3 weeks on page 1) to position 11/13, and we've been there ever since. We are still running the test. We disallowed the test page in robots.txt, but that's all. no canonical no noindex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC
-no Google Experiments code. Theoretically, Google could crawl the site, and find the page, but then the page is disallowed. The alternate page is not indexed. Could this explain the rankings drop?1 -
HTTPS sitewide move has resulted in huge rankings drop...
Hi all, An e-commerce site has recently moved protocol to https sitewide. The site ranked page one for some great terms and now appear to be page 2 or below. Brand terms seem unphased and are still very strong, on both Google and Bing. The following has been done; Everything 301'd from http to https Sitemap Edited Updated Webmaster Tools Robots.txt edited Crawled and Fetched all pages daily. Checked Paged are all follow,index. PPC Ads mass updated to new url's. Most terms were ranked 1 - 9 on Bing, and Page 1/2 on Google. HTTPS upgrade was done less than one week ago. The site is not payday loan related, nor was it hit by latest panda escapades. Everything on the site is relevant to the content. Has anybody else been in this position, what else can be done? I'd appreciate any help and advice. Thank You K9gB7hz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0