Website dropping from Page 1 pos 5 to no ranking and then back again?
-
Hi all,
We have a very odd occurrence with a client of ours. It should be noted that they had a penalty recently removed about 2 months ago after much work from our company.
Recently they started appearing back on Page 1 Google for a semi competitive keyword term. We were very happy with this and so was the client. The the ranking improved with our work to position 5, which was excellent.
Unfortunately what has been happening is they have been dropping out of the rankings completely for this semi competitive keyword for a few days and then reappearing in the same position. The client is checking daily and has noticed.
I thought this is just a 'hangover' from the Google penalty and perhaps a one off occurrence, but it has happened about 3 or 4 times now and seems to be happening every couple of weeks. Can anyone shed some light on this behavior?
I have checked Webmasters Tools and everything is fine.
Thanks
Jon
-
Yes it was an unatural links penalty that we solved by using the links disavow tool and reconsideration requests. I would say that we saw improvement on some keywords quite instantly but others lets say 1 month after wards.
There has now been about 4 months since we had it lifted and generally speaking we have seen improvements apart from this one keywords (which the client is heavily focused on).
Thoughts?
-
Was it an unnatural links penalty? Around what date did your search results start to return?
-
Thanks for your replies guys, I will look into the book EGOL suggested.
The competition is not doing a huge amount from what I can see in terms of effective link building. Like I say it is competitive but not hugely competitive. Much of what they are doing is quite standard link building.
From what we are doing:
Nothing automated at all. Like I say the client had a penalty and we removed it, and the last thing we want to do is get them another one.We are focused on several different link building tactics such as gaining links from their industry suppliers, getting links for companies that stock their products - both highly relevant for the industry.
Guest blogging is something that we are doing a little of each month but focusing the anchor text around their brand and keeping the content nice and relevant.
We have looked at gain some high authority directory links such as Yahoo BOTW etc to gain some more established links for the profile.
On-page we have been adhering to all the best practices in regards to content, title tags, blog content etc http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
The client isn't doing huge amounts on social media, but they are doing some - so I would say that is the weakness.
We are monitoring 30 keywords and the majority are behaving inline with common expectations and also improving gradually. It is this one keyword that I know the previous SEO really abused the anchor text for which is the main issue.
-
EGOL brings up a strong point. Offering in your terms to bring strong SERPS to a client that can be measured by the day is not for the faint of heart. You mentioned that it's a semi-competitive keyword and there is HUGE variance going on... here are some questions that should help us give you some more specific advice.
Are you watching what your competition is doing? (links, anchor text, etc)
Is there anything automated in what you are using for off page seo?
What have you done to get the ranking for this keyword since you started on page and off page? -
Google has lots of different indexes and serves them to whoever has a query routed to a server that uses them.
In other words. There are many indexes running simultaneously. Some have older data than others. Some have different algos. And some could be responding to different devices, cookies, browsers, etc that you are using or where you are searching from.
Google has many thousands of servers running in many data centers in different parts of the world. They are not all the same. Lots are running experiments to see how searchers respond to different presentations of the SERPs.
If you want to learn more about this read the book "In the Plex". Very interesting and highly recommended reading for any SEO. If you don't read it you do not understand google. Honest.
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
-
Google June Core update massive drop in visibility and rank
Following Google Core update in June, I noticed that some websites has seen small improvements or stayed on same positions in SERPs, but our website received nearly 60% visibility drop. Now, after two weeks, some keywords shows "slight" improvement, while majority of keywords still sits on quite low places in searches. Even others big brands got hit after update, but some competitors didn't and overtook our positions. Anyone else noticed any patterns after update and can share some thoughts? Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | Optimal_Strategies1 -
Ahrefs - What Causes a Drastic Loss in Referring Pages?
While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs. I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though. Any thoughts on why this might happen? 56VD5jD
Algorithm Updates | | AaronHenry0 -
Recent Rank drop after Penguin 2.1?
Recently, a lot of pages from our website have moved from page one or ranking number one, to page ten or something. We got a manual penalty message from Google Team, we removed a lot of unnatural links pointing to our pages and disavowed the rest. This got the penalty removed and we got a message from Google confirming the same. Before the manual penalty we were getting about 140,000 visits per day, after the penalty about 80,000. However, after Hummingbird or Penguin 2.1 all our ranks have vanished. We are nowhere in Google for our primary keywords and we getting like 40,000 visits per day. Most are direct or from sources other than Google. We had another look at the links we disavowed, a list of about 11000 domains, we found about 3000 domains to be good. We fixed the disavow file about one week back, but no changes in traffic since. We checking the domains again to see if we have missed more good domains in there; yes, we have. There are still a very few good domains in there. But we are not touching the disavow list; waiting to see the change for the last submitted. We have a dedicated user base, good liking on Facebook, all the stats in Analytics speak good, about 40% repeat visits about 30% direct. About 3000 people search for the site using our brand name as reported in Analytics. I doubt the on-page optimization, the pages could be over-optimized. But the on-page factors for other pages ranking for the keywords are similar. The keyword density is similar, so are the usage of headings and stuff. We have not made any recent changes to these on-page patterns. Our team is not able to figure out what could have gone wrong.
Algorithm Updates | | Develop410 -
Page rank of 2 with zero SEO and a 2 month old domain?
Hello, I helped work on a website for a friend. We used wordpress, a theme from elegant themes and wrote the content over 4 days. Zero back links, no seo, etc. Well, a little on page optimization and that's about it. Oh, we did ONE back link from a review site. The domain was brand new; never registered before. About a week after it started getting indexed, it jump from no page rank to a page rank of 1. About a week later, it jumped to a page rank of 2. Again, zero seo (aside from above stated). The site is: trade lines review dot com A page rank of 2 is nothing to write home about, but given the circumstances, how is this even possible? Thanks you!
Algorithm Updates | | Friedman0 -
Dropped from Universal Result: Local
For quite some time our Google Places listing has been in the Universal Results...(for this keyword there is a 7-pack result). Which was great, we had a PPC ad at the top of the page, we were 3rd in the Universal Results (there was 3 places listings before the natural results)...and we were 6th in the natural results - meaning we were on the first page 3 times...which means a happy boss....and lots of traffic. The old places listing was linked to our new Google+ Page pending the eventual demise of places and the merge. The merge has happened, all information from the places listing has migrated (apart from reviews and photos??) and the places listing has been deleted (URL returns 404 error). Problem is now my Google + Page is not even within the first 2 or 3 pages of places results never mind in the Universal results. So it would appear the rank / authority that the places listing had...hasn't been transferred to the Google+ page. My competitors...who were in 1 + 2 in the universal results above the natural results and who have Google+ Pages with NOTHING on...bar their name, are still there! Why would I be dropped when my Google+ Page, has more info, more followers, more photos, more relevant content (they don't have any content ) than my 2 competitors. It seems I've been penalised....somebody suggested that I had the keyword twice in my "About" and twice in my "Introduction" info and that could be it. I thought the loss of the review might be it too...but neither of the businesses now occupying the first 3 spots..have any reviews at all. Anybody else suffered from this? Anybody any other suggestions to why I might have been dropped so dramatically in the places listings? (My SERP listing is unaffected for this keyword) Keyword being mentioned twice hardly seems like "stuffing"! I'm actually not too concerned about the places ranking....not a great driver of traffic...but appearing in the Universal Results did obviously drive traffic...and to appear in the Universal Results...I've now got about 30 positions to climb...... The whole Google+ Local / Google Places thing has been a nightmare from start to finish.... Thanks in advance for any help or advice!
Algorithm Updates | | MarbellaSurferDude0 -
How to retain those rankings gained from fresh content...
Something tells me I know the answer to this question already but I'd always appreciate the advice of fellow professionals. So.....fresh content is big now in Google, and i've seen some great examples of this. When launching a new product or unleashing (yes unleashing) a new blog post I see our content launches itself into the rankings for some fairly competitive terms. However after 1-2 weeks these newly claimed rankings begin to fade from the lime light. So the question is, what do I need to do to retain these rankings? We're active on social media tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing our content as well as working to create exciting and relevant content via external sources. So far all this seems to have do is slow the fall from grace. Perhaps this is natural. But i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it is just keep up the hard work.
Algorithm Updates | | RobertChapman1 -
TOP 3-5 SEO Blogs
I am wondering if you can help me start with the top three to five SEO blogs. I have been really enjoying and getting into learning more about SEO and it is becoming really fun as it becomes less overwhelming. A few days ago there was a question about great SEO blogs. And everyone provided a great list. I bookmarked all of them, but in reality I won't be able to go through them all and really get what is being presented. My question is what would be the best 3-5 to start with? Eventually I will go through them all but experience can help me get on the right track. Thanks for the suggestions
Algorithm Updates | | fertilityhealth0 -
Difference in which pages Google is ranking?
Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages. In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages. I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own. Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise. Anyone else noticing similar changes?
Algorithm Updates | | BedeFahey1