Rank drop in June
-
Since fixing a major duplicate content issue in Dec 2012, our traffic saw steady and dramatic growth through the summer. It has started to settle down now and rankings have started to decline. I have a bad feeling that something is wrong but for the life of me I cannot figure it out. Our Moz rank is pretty high but some of our biggest keywords have gone from #2 to #9 in a fairly short time period which makes me very nervous. I am not even sure where to look at this point.
Any suggestions are welcomed as I am kind of at a loss now but worry I am missing something basic.
-
I am not sure if anyone uses CloudFlare, but I think it may be to blame. After doing some research, I believe it may be hurting my rankings as it slow TTFB. Just took it off of my blog. I will let you know if things return to normal.
-
Sounds like the trust of the domain has been downgraded slightly. What are these big keywords your concerned about? I have a few golf blogs myself.
-
As for the Menus, I left of "golf" to save space and figured google can figure our we are golf as that word is used about a gazillion times in our site.
I would try Robert's suggestion. I would add that word a couple times in the key places that he suggests. Those are high caliber ammunition.... and cut back a few of the gazillion others.
-
Given the quality of site, make small changes over time. Do not go crazy out of fear of dropping.
These are the words of a confident and experienced General.
In one of my retail niches, in late June, I saw what appeared to me as rankings boosts for manufacturers and big brand sites.
Manufacturers moved up (probably because their name is mentioned repeatedly on every retail site), even though small specialty sites have greater product breadth (they sell all of the widgets made by several manufacturers) and they also have greater content depth than all of the manufacturers combined.
Big brands who sell one or two widgets moved up, even though lots of small expert sites have greater content area expertise, staff who are available by email or phone, and sell every widget made by every manufacturer.
My personal analysis is... there is nothing wrong with my site... something is wrong with Google. Carry on!
-
Thanks for the feedback. I feel like our on page SEO is pretty good. I recently decided to have index my categories (and have written unique descriptions for them). I always fear that I have done something wrong. I have a few posts that have ranked very well and deliver lots of traffic but have fallen off recently and I don't know why. Maybe it is just natural?
I never really can get my head around Canonical so I am in constant fear I have done something wrong. I trust Yoast SEO is handling it correctly.
As for the Menus, I left of "golf" to save space and figured google can figure our we are golf as that word is used about a gazillion times in our site.
I wish I had a more specific question but honestly I just am wondering why we went from 20% monthly traffic growth to slight decline even though our content has increased regularly.
-
Adam,
I went to your site and I think it is a good site and you are regularly posting, etc. (I thought I would see it static based on what you said; good job). You could use an H1 about Golf Equipment on the home page since that is what you seem to be about. I am not suggesting this, but at some point you may want to look at url structure re what you are. When you use terms like product-review as opposed to golf-product-reviews or golf-equipment-reviews, you are cheating yourself a bit. Same is true with Title Tags, etc. I don't like to see sites fail to take advantage of what they are.
In your menus have Golf Company Reviews, Improve Your Golf Game etc. as opposed to generics.
As to your dropping a bit, do not get too aggressive over it. Look at traffic and ranking and see if there is a corollary and which way it points. I would not be surprised to see you move up at this point even without change. Given the quality of site, make small changes over time. Do not go crazy out of fear of dropping.
Best
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 -
Indexing is live what about rankings ?
I noticed that when I request indexing in the webmaster tool my new content is live within minutes. Does it take longer to update the ranking or is the ranking updated as soon as the new page has been indexed. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How to rank a transactional query
I have a webpage about bike tours in France with a list of bike tours in France. I imagaine people don't want a big paragraph about what a bike tour in France is because this is a transactional query and not an informational query. How do I go about ranking this page ? Would a good title tag and good description be enough to rank that page ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Why rankings dropped from 2 page to 8th page and no penalization?
Dear Sirs, a client of mine for more than 7 years used to have his home page (www.egrecia.es) between 1st and 2nd page in the Google Serps and suddenly went down to 8 page. The keyword in question is "Viajes a Grecia". It has a good link profile as we have built links in good newspapers from Spain, and according to Moz it has a 99% on-page optimization for that keyword, why why why ??? What could I do to solve this? PD: It has more than 20 other keywords in 1st position, so why this one went so far down? Thank you in advance !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Site hacked and now being spammed and rankings dropping
I have a client's site that was hacked in December and a whole bunch of spam pages were created. We've since removed those pages and they serve a 404 error now. But I pick up a new link almost every day from a another spammy site linking back to the pages that were created. I'm updating the Disavow as I see the new links reported in ahrefs but what else can I do to stop these buggers and how can I recover rankings other than building links and creating content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Checking Rankings Again & Again Can Drop Rankings
Is it possible that if i check my google rankings again & again it can drop ranking?Like checking where do my keywords rank every hours rank drop the rankings? Because this indirectly affects the CTR. Might be because of it? No one has faced such an weird thing before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Profound Rankings Drop - But only on Branded query
Hi all. I apologize for any redundancy in advance. I've seen similar queries about branded search but nothing that quite resembles mine. First of all, my site is Withdrawal-ease.com In the last few weeks, I've seen a significant drop in ranking for specific pages on my site that normally rank well in a brand search. I was trying to figure out what the heck was going on. So I looked at a bunch of queries for branded terms and it looks like I've been penalized...but I haven't For instance, when I google "Withdrawal Ease" I would typically see my home page first and then 3-4 of my most popular pages/posts directly underneath in the organic listings. Some of those popular pages include: http://withdrawal-ease.com/proven-home-remedies-for-opiate-withdrawal/ http://withdrawal-ease.com/how-to-detox-from-opiates-at-home/ http://withdrawal-ease.com/how-to-detox-from-suboxone-at-home/ Although the titles are similar, the content is all original and comprehensive...it's good content that has always ranked very well...and still does. But as of Late March they don't show up for branded searches. Now, when I google "Withdrawal Ease" I only get my home page listed and the other pages have all fallen to #60 according to Moz, WMT etc. What is strange is the fact that these popular pages still rank highly for my key terms and relevant searches. I have not noticed any significant drops other than when I do a branded search. I have added a picture from WMT as an example. The image displays a search from my brand name and my most popular page that would typically have ranked #2 below my homepage. As you can see. the impressions and clicks fall, then jump and then totally disappear for my branded query. Looking at the chart, one might observe that the mobile update seems to roughly correspond to the rankings drop but we've been very diligent about being mobile friendly and all of the checks for mobile friendliness pass with flying colors. I've looked at Robot TXT files and everything is fine there...all of our diagnostic tests have turned up nada as far as I can tell. Again, I have not been informed of any manual penalty and my backlink profile is not raising any alarms on Moz; I get a 1 on the spam score. We do not actively seek out links because I DID have a manual penalty in 2010 due to a horrible experience with an SEO firm. It took me over a year and 15k to clear out all of the spammy links that this guy got and I was finally cleared of the penalty in 2013. So I'm totally flummoxed. My organic search is now down significantly across ALL browsers...but again, just for branded searches. I have also attached an image of my crawl stats just in case this may shed any light. Thank you all so much for any help that you can provide; it's been extremely stressful and frustrating so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Whoa.jpg crawl%20stats.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gcat3330 -
Ranking strangeness
Just wondering if anyone had come across this kind of scenario which I had/have with a client. Rebuilt/revamped site that has got problems with thin content we are looking to resolve. Rankings for the main keywords were ok on page 2 or 3 and being worked on. Two weeks ago ALL main keywords disappeared from ranking (category pages). The homepage took over and ranked ALL those keywords at #1! Bang -straight to top spot. However happy I was I find this disconcerting as there is a reasonable level of competition. Today homepage rankings in the main go and directories come back into the rankings at some good positions on page one. We still need to fix thin and duplicated content! I can justify the problems and swing with the category pages but the massive cross the board top position for the homepage has been pretty bizarre. Has anyone else had the experience where the homepage suddenly 'out-performs' in a big way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0