Google rankings strange behaviour - our site can only be found when searching repeatedly
-
Hello,
We are experiencing something very odd at the moment I hope somebody could shed some light on this. The rankings of our site dropped from page 2 to page 15 approx. 9 months ago. At first we thought we had been penalised and filed a consideration request. Google got back to us saying that there was no manual actions applied to our site. We have been working very hard to try to get the ranking up again and it seems to be improving. Now, according to several serps monitoring services, we are on page 2/3 again for the term "holiday lettings". However, the really strange thing is that when we search for this term on Google UK, our site is nowhere to be found. If you then right away hit the search button again searching for the same term, then voila! our website is on www.alphaholidaylettings.com page 2 / 3!
We tried this on many different computers at different locations (private and public computers), making sure we have logged out from Google Accounts (so that customised search results are not returned). We even tried the computers at various retail outlets including different Apple stores. The results are the same. Essentially, we are never found when someone search for us for the first time, our site only shows up if you search for the same term for the second or third time. We just could not understand why this is happening. Somebody told me it could be due to "Google dance" when indices on different servers are being updated, but this has now been going on for nearly 3 months.
Has anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice? Many thanks!
-
All though possible I would imagine Google would of sent out a warning or similar if there was some sort of penalty.
-
Could this possibly be connected to Google's Rank-Modifying Spammers Patent?
-
Hi There
This is definitely strange - does it still happen for you? I could not recreate the issue here. There's no doubt this is odd, but I'd ultimately be concerned if it was a page 1 result in which you were missing the first search around. Doesn't seem like this is affecting any actual visibility though?
How are impressions in WMT? Anything off there?
-Dan
-
Thank you for checking this for us and confirming that something is not right, I thought I was going crazy...
I will try to contact Google via webmaster tools (perhaps filing another consideration request) to prompt a reply.
If anybody have any suggestions it would be much appreciated thanks!
-
Could be how Google are delivering their results as mentioned or a bug when they tweaked their algorithm, you could try and rock the boat and email them via webmasters though don't expect them to really help out much they are pretty secretive bunch. Have you found no change on the search with active SEO ? I presume there has been some sort of SEO going on though its a really odd thing
-
Ok Now I've just got home and did the search again on a different machine, and indeed you weren't within the first 10 pages on an initial search, but appeared top of page 3 on a second search.
How bizarre, but unfortunately I cannot offer a solution either.
-
That is strange. Using firefox I first searched for you and you werern't in the top 10 pages. I then performed the same search and you were right at the top of page 3.
I can't offer a solution/ reason but i'd be really interested if someone else could!
-
Unfortunately I could not recreate your issue.
I just did the same search and in firefox you appeared first time on page 4, position 32. I did the search in Chome on another machine and you appeared first time on page 4 in the same position.
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
-
Website ranking on Google dropping for unknown reason while rankings are improving on Bing. Please help!
one of my websites www.resumeble.com is showing a constant drop in rankings. Earlier the website was ranking for major keywords like resume writing services etc. I used Ahrefs site audit to find issues. According to Ahrefs there was a huge issue of duplicate pages, which is now resolved by proper canonical tag insertion. The site is built on Angular. Fetch report in Google shows perfect code and Sitemap is also perfect. Manual action reporting in webmaster shows no warning. Please suggest what steps should I take to fix this issue.
Technical SEO | | mayyaa40 -
Can I have an http AND a https site on Google Webmaster tools
My website is https but the default property that was configured on Google WMT was http and wasn't showing me any information because of that. I added an https property for that, but my question is: do I need to delete the original HTTP or can I leave both websites?
Technical SEO | | Onboard.com0 -
Google Site Search
I'm considering to implement google site search bar into my site.
Technical SEO | | JonsonSwartz
I think I probably choose the version without the ads (I'll pay for it). does anyone use Google Site Search and can tell if it's a good thing? does it affects in any way on seo? thank you0 -
Changing images on site without losing ranking
A number of images on my site rank very well under google image search but need to be replaced with updated versions. If I keep the file name and pixel dimensions identical will switching the image effect my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Justin450 -
Quality Issues: My blog is blocked on Google Search Engine
Hi Webmasters, I got an email from google team. The email is included below. **Google Webmaster Tools: Quality Issues on http://abcdblogger.com/**August 8, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://abcdblogger.com/, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see ourWebmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team My blog is completely blocked on Google Search engine. I removed all existing posts and reinstalled a fresh version of wordpress and wrote a good article. I redirected all broken links my homepage with a 301. After making those changes I submitted a reconsideration request to Google, But they declined it. I doubt that the reason for blocking could be due to the backlinks pointing to my domain. I think Google's Disavow Tool help me to remove low quality backlinks, But how can I sort low quality backlinks using Opensite Explorer? If possible can you create a text file with all possible low quality links, So that I could submit it using Google Disavow Tool. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | hafiskani0 -
Syndication partner ranking in Google News for our content
Our blog is part of Google News and is syndicated for use by several of our partners such as Chicago Tribune. Lately, we see the syndicator version of the post appearing in Google News instead of our original version. Ours generally ranks in the regular index. ChiTrib does have canonical URL tags and syndication-source tags pointing to our original. They are meta tags, not link tags. We do have a News-specific sitemap that is being reported in WMT as error-free. However, it shows no urls indexed in the News module -- even when I can find those specific URLs (our version) in the News. For an example: Here is a ChiTrib post currently ranking in Google News
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/sns-school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone-20120301,0,3514283.story The original version is here:
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/03/school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone.html The News sitemap URL is
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/kickingtires_newsmap.xml One of our front-end producers is speculating that the Facebook sharing code on ChiTrib is having an effect. Given that FB is FB and Google is Google, that sounds wrong to me when we're talking about specifically Google News. Any suggestions? Thanks.0 -
Why Does this Site Rank for so Many Keywords?
I was doing some research today and kept coming across this site sylvane.com I checked OSE and found that it only has a DA of 37 PA of 35, and only 79 linking domains (966 links total). I got to looking and there are a few links like this http://lulala.us/twxoops/html/userinfo.php?uid=303 Anyway, accroding to SEMRush, this site ranks for over 6,000 keywords. I ran content on a couple of their high ranking pages and the content is not unique, at least not very unique on the pages I checked. What is so special about that site that google is giving it so much love? I am not trying to call them out, I just want to know what this site is doing to garner the favor of google when I have a site in the same niche with a higher DA, PA, linking domains, and social signals.
Technical SEO | | CharlesMontgomery0 -
Google Confusion: Two Sites and a 301 Redirect.
Hi, We have a client who just sprang a new project on us. As always, they went ahead and did some stuff before bringing us into the loop! (oh the joy of providing SEO services!) Anyway, i'm pretty swamped right now and need some extra brains on this. Basically the client had www.examplesiteA.com online for many years (an affiliate site which had built up a strong brand in the industry). They have now decided to turn this affiliate site into a full blown service platform and so with the new site being built they 301'd the whole thing over to www.examplesiteB.com - this is where they want all the old affiliate content to be hosted. So essentially examplesiteA.com is now examplesiteB.com and a new site is being placed on examplesiteA.com - still with me? So this has all happened and a brand new website is on examplesiteA.com and the old examplesiteA is now sitting exactly as it used to, but on the examplesiteB domain. The 301 redirect has been removed and the new examplesiteA seems to have been crawled, but the homepage is not indexed. When you search for examplesiteA, examplesiteB is the top result. Now they are similar domain names and to be fair I have very little data at this point i.e. I don't know when the 301 redirect was removed and it maybe that this all fixes itself with time. How is link equity effected now that examplesiteA.com was 301 redirected to examplesiteB.com and cached in this way, but now the 301 redirect has been removed and does not exist? Would link juice have been diluted throughout the process? Obviously if we had been in on all this before anything was implemented we would have done things differently. Interested to hear what others would do coming in at this point. Thanks and look forward to the advice!
Technical SEO | | MarcLevy0