Cannot find reason for drop in ranking

[DocdataCommerce]

One of our clients is a lingerie retailer, that also sells swimwear and nightwear. They have a webshop, with landing pages such as /lingerie, /swimwear and /nightwear (only in Dutch). The nightwear page is doing ok (#5 in Google NL), but for the swimwear and lingerie pages, something strange has happened and I have no clue what it is.

On May 7, the /swimwear page ranked 24 for swimwear in Google NL. In that period, the homepage was ranking at #40-50. One week later, on May 14, the homepage was ranked 24 for swimwear, and the /swimwear page was nowhere to be found. The homepage is currently ranking 17/18 for swimwear. Something similar seems to have happened for lingerie. The homepage was ranking at around 11-13 for a few weeks in April/May, the /lingerie page was ranking at 8 in May, and then after the 4th of June, both the homepage and the /lingerie page no longer seem to have any decent rank for lingerie.

So, trying to find the problem:

• I checked the Moz On-Page Grader for all three pages/keywords. All pages get an A.
• Robots.txt hardly contains anything, and there's no robots meta tag to block the page.
• Checked Google Webmaster Tools just in case, nothing out of the ordinary.
• The page contains 342 URL's which is a lot, but that shouldn't be too problematic, I thought?
• I used the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool to analyze the current top 10 for lingerie, and compared it to our client's stats. Page Authority in the top 10 is 37-68, our clients is 33. Domain Authority in the top 10 is 27-100 (wiki page), our clients is 43. MozRank for the top 10 is 6,6-8,0, our clients is 6,7. MozTrust for the top 10 is 7,0-7,1, our clients is 7,0. The basics all look fine!

Now, the page could use some link building, the number of links is a little low compared to the top 10 entries. We're also in the process of redesigning the page, adding more products but also more content (text and images) to inspire visitors a little more. But being low on links doesn't seem a good explanation for such a relatively sudden change in ranking. As far as we can tell, looking back at commits by our developers, nothing changed around that time that could have this impact. Of course it's possible that we missed something, we're still looking.

Also, it's strange that these sudden changes took place for swimwear and especially lingerie, but not for nightwear.

I'd really appreciate any tips, hints etc. to find out what's going on here. Thanks in advance!

Michel

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, has this question been answered? Please let us know yes or no, thanks! ~ Christy

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, thanks for your question! Has it been resolved?

[Ikusa]

Feel free to PM me any examples if you want.  But after some thought I still feel that any page with that many links on it will be weighted negatively by the engines.  Google dislikes link-farms and your link/content ratio may be too high for their liking.  To that end, you may accidentally be swept up in a downranking effort based on that ratio.

I do think this should raise the question in your mind as to why you are focused on rankings.  Since they are no longer the same from person to person, outside of GWT they aren't very effective in making good strategic decisions.  What I would be asking is has the web traffic changed?  Conversion rates?  Any on-page activity see any shift?  There is alot that can be determined from that sort of data.  Rankings, in my opinion, are phasing out as a useful metric in determining business impact.

Dig into GA or whatever analytics tool you like and see if the drop in ranking is correlative with any shift in page/site performance and that can offer you a better view of the situation.

[DocdataCommerce]

Hey Sean,

Thanks for your response! The pages are all category landing pages, and with a mega dropdown for navigation, faceted navigation on the left and a footer, the total number of links adds up quickly. They're all internal links though, and it was my understanding that a high number of internal links does not directly harm the value of a page?

I used the SEO Workers website to count the links by the way. According to them, the lingerie page has 342 links (they call it URLs but I guess they mean links), the swimwear page has 199 links and the nightwear page has 190 links. So, the number of links for the swimwear and nightwear pages are roughly the same, yet the swimwear page does not currently rank for swimwear, and the nightwear page is ranked #5 for nightwear.

What's strange though, is when I copy the source of each of the three pages into Notepad++ and count hrefs, I find 203 occurances in total for each of the pages. That's strange in the sense that SEO Workers apparently does something different, but not strange since the page templates are exactly alike, but the content is different so the number of subcategories, filter options etc will be a little different.

I'll PM you the links, just in case you're curious and want to see for yourself

[Ikusa]

Thanks for that info.  Obviously, any advice offered here is weak without looking over the actual data, but something stood out to me.  Why are there 342 URLs (do you mean links on that page)?  If one page has that many links, it could be perceived as a link farm...alot depends on the content amount, how the links are listed out, and more.  It does sound like far too many for one page (do you paginate?).  Do the other pages that haven't seen any negative impact have a similar amount of links?

Can you also list some differences in your data research between the affected and unaffected pages?  How are they different?