Sudden dramatic drop in "some but not all" keyphrase rankings for client, 3 weeks ago
-
I noticed recently that 4 of my keyphrases which ranked on page one, and were climbing 3 weeks ago, have suddenly dropped to > 50. What could have happened? I did find an issue with my sitemap (yoast generated), but why would that suddenly change? And even more importantly, how do I fix it?
-
Thanks for the response, Patrick.
I did find that there was an error on my yoast sitemap-index.xml (404 on pagemap-index.xml) which I was able to fix last night. Not sure why suddenly there was a problem. I also found I had the wrong URL specified for the sitemap in my robots.txt - fixed that too. Other than that, I resubmitted the sitemap, re-fetched my site, and everything looks copacetic in google webmasters as it certainly is being crawled, and no crawl errors.
Up until know, I've simply been massaging the content, ensuring that I hit all of the google criteria according to moz.com as well as the SEO plugin (Yoast) that I am using. I've not done anything out of the ordinary except I added a slide-in plugin to promote a course my client is teaching (see fisherfinancialgroupllc.com). I'm not really doing anything with links because I was having such great luck on the work I was doing with content, blogging and social media. I can only think that maybe the slide-in plugin (had incorrect URL for the button link) might have caused some kind of recursive problem?
It's weird because my key phrases (financial advisor northbrook il, financial advisor northbrook, and financial advisor northbrook illinois) were all ranked around 5 & 6 and still moving up at the end of August, and the following week dropping to > 50. And the drop didn't effect the "Fisher Financial" centric key phrases, just plain odd.
Not sure what other information I can provide to enable you to help me. It's a small site and we only update it a couple of times a month other than the occasional blog post done by the client. I appreciate any information you can provide!
Not sure why my question is marked as answered. This is the first time I've ever posted a question here, and saw that I if I liked your answer but wanted to keep the thread open to click on "Good Answer". Sigh. Hope you see my response, and that others can as well.
Cindy
-
Cindy,
It sounds like you were hit with a penalty by Google. If you have a Webmasters account, check that for any notifications about a penalty or tactics which would adversely affect your website pages. If you don't have a Webmasters account, then I'd do that asap and submit your website for indexing... then see what comes back.
It's hard for anyone in this forum to give you advice on how to "fix it" without knowing what you were doing. Can you provide some more info about what tactics you have been implementing to climb rankings in terms of SEO, traffic generation, etc? Knowing this would help get a better idea of what the problem could be and how to resolve.
Patrick
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 Diagnose "Crawled - Currently Not Indexed" in Google Search Console
The new Google Search Console gives a ton of information about which pages were excluded and why, but one that I'm struggling with is "crawled - currently not indexed". I have some clients that have fallen into this pit and I've identified one reason why it's occurring on some of them - they have multiple websites covering the same information (local businesses) - but others I'm completely flummoxed. Does anyone have any experience figuring this one out?
Reporting & Analytics | | brettmandoes2 -
When I click on organic search, the biggest drop is on keyword "not provided". What does this mean?
I am trying to identify the reason for the drop in organic search.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sable_Group0 -
Traffic drop after analytics troubles
Hi For two weeks we had an artifical low bouncerate & high pageviews/visit in our Analytics reporting. The day we corrected the bug in Analytics - our bouncerate & pageviews/visit returned to normal levels - however we saw our search traffic go down massively(-50% in sessions). The bug in the Analytics was caused by a second Analytics tag which was included in an external script which interfered with our own tag. The drop in traffic occurred just after the removal of the second script (which was only on our site for two weeks). We didn't touch our own tagging - and there were no technical changes on the site during this period, and there is no seasonal trend which could explain the sudden drop of traffic. We double checked our tagging - and the analytics tag is present & working on all the pages of our site. On the organic traffic report from analytics you can clearly see the when the troubles with analytics started & ended (artificial low bounce rate) - and that the traffic drop starts right after the reporting issue ended. Webmastertools also indicated a lower number of views/clicks, but not to the massive 50% drop. Is it possible that Google uses the measurements from Analytics for it's SERP's? Or should there be another reason, and where should we start looking? Appreciate your help! e5GmoMM
Reporting & Analytics | | DirkC0 -
How to Get Keyword Ranks
I want to check the keywords position of the entire site just by giving the site URL. Is there any way ?
Reporting & Analytics | | akansh0 -
X2 Google Analytics affect page rank ?
Hi there, If you had 2 Google Analytics Accounts one to the main site and another to the blog, could this affect the page position in Google? We've suddenly noticed a drop in our KWs and it was shortly after we added another Google Analytics Account. The blog has 68% Bounce rate and the main site has always been about 48%. Any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks Paul
Reporting & Analytics | | webdesigncwd0 -
Distribution of SEOMOZ Ranking Metrics across all Monitored Websites
Hi, I'm looking into building a tool which would incorporate SEOMOZ ranking metrics and I have a few questions with regard to the ranking data which will help me develop it correctly. I have done a few searches, for the information but haven't found an answer to these questions on seomoz - if they exist somewhere then I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction. 1/. When looking at the values of metrics such as MozRank and DA, is there any information on how this values are distributed amongst the ranked website - EG The mean / median values of DA and MozRank etc of all websites monitored is X & Y . If there were any distribution graphs for these values then even better. 2/. Along the lines of the above - are there any online resources showing similar information for google PR? 3/. What is the calcuation used in the scale of MozRank and DA - ie We have a scale of 1-10 for these values - be we also know the scale in not linear but logrithmic - ie Double the Links of a DA 5 website and you would not end up with a DA 10 website - so what is the calculation which defines the scale. A WBF about google PR by Rand indicated that a value of between 8-9 is used in Google PR - but what about the values used for DA and MozRank etc? Many thanks for your help
Reporting & Analytics | | James770 -
Drop In Analytics
So I have a site that was getting about 200 hits (not a lot). They came to me and asked to do SEO. There were over 50 pages in HTML format so I created header/footers and changed the .html pages to .php. I set forwards up in the htaccess and everything. I did everything that I was suppose to. Now when I go to the analytics it almost looks like it lost all it's traffic from the keywords it was ranked in. Any ideas on why?
Reporting & Analytics | | blackrino0 -
Ranking on page 1 position 3 but hardley any visits
in one of my projects the expected vistors is around 23000 weve got the keyword onto the first page position 3 and weve only recieved 30 vistits this month, my qustion is why? are the local searches from google analtics that tell you thier are 23000 searches for that keyword false please can someone shed some light on this, my client is totally over the moon with his ranking but cant believe that hes only recieving 30 visits this month from what we thought was a million dollar keyword
Reporting & Analytics | | Westernoriental0