Why did I fall off the SERP for my url query? Im i being penalized?
-
The website is privateequityfirms.com, We would rank as high as 4th behind wikipedia from the query "private equity firms" but recently dropped to 77th for no reason. All my other keywords seem to no affected? whats going on, Im i being penalized?
I attached GWT search query info
Thanks,
-
I cant pinpoint the date but it has been in the last 3-4 weeks. We have never purchased links in the past. As for the Panda algorithm we were ranking as high as third for the term with all those slim content pages so i dont think that is it, but ill look more into it. We have two versions of the site, a paid and example. So it shows 2x the pages when a site: search is done, the HTTP and the HTTPS. That is something we are working on fixing.
Thanks for you help and if you have any other idea what could be causing this please share.
I also added another picture showing the drop, maybe its more helpful
-
Hey,
First off thanks for the response, We recently added a sitemap to the site. It is an online database so its a custom site map that changes constantly and Yes im seeing a drop on yahoo and Bing. I do not have any messages in GWT. I don't believe we have both, but like I said before it was ranking around 4th before the drastic drop.
I also added another picture showing the drop.
Thanks again for the help.
-
Can you pinpoint when the drop happened?
Have you purchased links in the past? A number of link networks have been deindexed lately.
It's possible that you could have issues with the Panda algorithm, although don't take this info to the bank as I have only spent about 10 minutes or so looking at your site. When I did a site: search I see that Google has over 94,000 pages of your site indexed. The majority of them have what could be called thin content. I see a lot of definition pages that contain one or two lines of text and also company portfolio pages like this one (http://privateequityfirms.com/portfolio-company/Captain+Tortue+Group) that don't really contain much info. Having tens of thousands of pages in the index that don't offer significant value to readers can be a sign of low quality and can cause the Panda algorithm to look unfavorably on the entire site.
If this is the case, then the answer could be to noindex all of the definition and portfolio pages.
-
Have you made any changes to your site recently that might have affected this? Perhaps put a robots.txt file or robots meta tag in that blocked the page that was ranking for this term? Have you seen traffic for this term drop in Bing and Yahoo at all? Do you have any messages at all in GWT?
Do you have both www and non-www verified in GWT? Maybe the non-www is ranking for this term, and you've only verified the www, which isn't ranking?
-
Hey,
I fixed the image and no i did not receive a manual penalty.
Thanks!
-
Can't see the image.
Please use imgurl as suggested by Moz.
Did you receive any manual penalty? (check in GWT).
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
-
Old URL that has been 301'd for months appearing in SERPs
We created a more keyword friendly url with dashes instead of underscores in December. That new URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally. The previous version of the URL (with underscores) continues to rear it's ugly head in the SERPs, though when you click on it you are 301'd to the new url. The 301 is implemented correctly and checked out on sites such as http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php. Has anyone else experienced such a thing? I understand that Google can use it's discretion on pages, title tags, canonicals, etc.... But I've never witnessed them continue to show an old url that has been 301'd to a new for months after discovery or randomly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
Internal Links - Different URLs
Hey so, In my product page, I have recommended products at the bottom. The issue is that those recommended products have long parameters such as sitename.com/product-xy-z/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs The reason why it has that long parameter is due to tracking purposes (internally with the dev and UX team). My question is, should I replace it with the clean URL or as long as it has the canonical tag, it should be okay to have such a long parameter? I would think clean URL would help with internal links and what not...but if it already has a canonical tag would it help? Another issue is that the URL is different and not just the parameter. For instance..the canonical URL is sitename.com/productname-xyz/ and so the internal link used on the product page (same exact page just different URL with parameter) sitename.com/xyz/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co&srcType=dp_recs (missing product name), BUT still has the canonical tag!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Google shows date in the SERPS for the homepage
Hi SEO's we've build a site and our now trying to rank it but it won't go up despite of regular new unique content and a higher DA than most competitors. All tools like MOZ en Yoast SEO show green lights so we're kinda out of ideas right now. Till we saw the date in the SERPS for the meta description. This gives us the idea that Google sees it as a post and not as a page which might explain the low ranking. However there are no technical causes we can think off for Google to show the date. Any ideas on this matter? Could it be that Yoast SEO is causing this even although we tell it not to show dates? Love to hear from you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Heers0 -
URL structure for SEO
Hi Mozzers, I have a site which is a combination of product pages, and news and advice pages that relate to the products. How would you approach the URL structure for this, following SEO best practice? Approach 1 Product pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q
www.website.com/product-category/product-page News and advice pages:
www.website.com/product-category/product-page/news-and-advice-story-1
www.website.com/product-category/product-page/news-and-advice-story-2
etc or Approach 2 Product pages:
www.website.com/product-category/product-page News and advice pages:
www.website.com/news/product-category/news-and advice-story-1 (with internal linking to relevant product page)
www.website.com/news/product-category/news-and advice-story-2 (with internal linking to relevant product page)
etc Or would a different approach be better?0 -
Hash URLs
Hi Mozzers, Happy Friday! I have a client that has created some really nice pages from their old content and we want to redirect the old ones to the new pages. The way the web developers have built these new pages is to use hashbang url's for example www.website.co.uk/product#newpage My question is can I redirect urls to these kind of pages? Would it be using the .htaccess file to do it? Thanks in advance, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
2 URLS pointing to the same content
Hi, We currently have 2 URL's pointing to the same website (long story why we have it) - A & B. A is our main website but we set up B as a rewrite URL to use for our Pay Per Click campaign. Now because its the same site, but B is just a URL rewrite, Google Webmaster Tools is seeing that we have thousands of links coming in from site B to site A. I want to tell Google to ignore site B url but worried it might affect site A. I can't add a no follow link on site B as its the same content so will also be applicable on Site A. I'm also worried about using Google Disavow as it might impact on site A! Can anyone make any suggestions on what to do, as I would like to hear from anyone with experience with this or can recommend a safe option. Thanks for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Party_Experts0 -
Please help on this penalized site!
OK, this is slowly frying my brain and would like some clarification from someone in the know, we have posted multiple reconsideration requests the regular "site violates googles quality guidelines" .."look for unnatural links etc" email back in March 2012, I came aboard the business in August 2012 to overcome bad SEO companies work. So far i have filled several disavow requests by domain and cleared over 90% of our backlink profile which where all directory, multiple forum spam links etc from WMT, OSE and Ahrefs and compiled this to the disavow tool, as well as sending a google docs shared file in our reconsideration request of all the links we have been able to remove and the disavow tool, since most where built in 2009/2010 a lot where impossible to remove. We managed to shift about 12 - 15% of our backlink profile by working very very hard too remove them. The only links that where left where quality links and forum posts created by genuine users and relevant non spam links As well as this we now have a high quality link profile which has also counteracted a lot of the bad "seo" work done by these previous companies, i have explained this fully in our reconsideration request as well as a massive apology on behalf of the work those companies did, and we are STILL getting generic "site violates" messages, so far we have spent in excess of 150 hours to get this penalty removed and so far Google hasn't even batted an eyelid. We have worked SO hard to combat this issue it almost feels almost very personal, if Google read the reconsideration request they would see how much work we have done too remove this issue. If anyone can give any updates or help on anything we have missed i would appreciate it, i feel like we have covered every base!! Chris www.palicomp.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | palicomp0 -
Removing dashes in our URLs?
Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano0