Sudden drop in ranking for important keyword? No penalty / other issues detected
-
Hi
For our site we previously ranked well for the term "botswana safari holidays" on the page: http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx
We've suddenly seen a dramatic drop for this term, currently ranked #43 on Google UK.
There are no penalty notices in Webmaster tools and the only edits to the page recently have been to include the term "Botswana safari holidays" in the page title and the on-page h2 (previously Botswana safaris and holidays).
Any suggestions why we have seen a large decrease for this term? We expect to see some fluctuation but this one seems a bit dramatic. We've not lost any backlinks to the page that we know of.
Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks Doug, that's really helpful. Good to see that phrase has bounced back up as well.
We've been looking at our backlinks as we are aware there are a lot of bad, irrelevant directory sites that we are clearing up. Historically the old sites were in a pattern of steadily declining organic traffic, from the end of 2012. This has transferred to the new site (keywords slipping a few places, less long tail traffic). We think this may be due to a poor backlink profile.
We will also look into doing some outreach to the linking domains on the old site and see if we can get these moved over to the new site rather than just relying on the redirects.
Thanks again!
-
So it might just be fluctuation following the consolidation. I wonder if this is just the ripples/disturbance as Google gets to grips with the changes to your site and the various redirects you may have been put in place.
I note that the page is currently ranking #22 on Google UK. which is a big improvement on #43.
If you've not noticed the same problems happening on the other keywords your tracking and as the overall traffic seems to to be stable/growing then I suspect that there's no need to panic.
Obviously links to the now consolidated domains are no longer being created so you'll get some degradation as existing links become stale and decay (Is there an outreach opportunity here? Did you contact sites linking to the old domains?)
The other thing to watch is any fluctuations in the search result pages (not just your own ranking position). Is it just you being affected or is it something wider than that. In a different niche.
So don't panic, keep an eye on what happens to your rankings over the next few weeks and see what happens.
-
Nice catch Travis. Really.
-
Excellent research Doug!
-
Hi Doug
The reason for the sudden increase in August was because we consolidated several product websites under our one, main domain. The content on the old sites was transferred to the main website and all the pages were redirected. This was done working in partnership with a fairly large SEO company to ensure that everything was handled correctly.
We've not been doing any link-building/acquisition since, other than working with some selected travel journalists and photographers. However historically it does look like there has been some bad link building done on the old sites. The traffic on these old sites had been dropping overtime. With the backlink profiles of these sites pointing to the main content, could they be passing on old penalties?
Organic traffic as a whole is up month on month, but down year on year. Most of our tracked keyword terms have seen slight increases recently, it was just this one in particular which has plummeted.
Thanks for the advice! Would you recommend that the backlink profile is the primary issue to look at for now?
-
Hi WIll,
Is it just this keyword/page that's being affected or is it many keywords across your entire site? What does your overall organic traffic look like?
Taking a look at your domain in SEMRush, I can see that you gain a whole bunch of keyword rankings in August followed by some volatility and lost/gained (more lost than gained) keywords between November and January. (both Google UK and US)
The data's about to creep off the left hand edge of the graph, but looking in ahrefs, it looks as if a whole load of links were acquired in August. The number of linking domains has been has been steadily growing since then.
See: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/www.naturalworldsafaris.com
What kind of link-building/acquisition have your been undertaking. I've not taking a good look at your backlink profile but did noticed a directory or two. I'm wondering if there is anything that might have reached a tipping point.
I also notice a blog that's sending you an "infinite" number of links! Looks like there's some recursive links going on. This is just one example URL so you can see the kind of problem (eek!):
There seem to be getting a large number of links from some domains (possible site-wide links or other problems?)
I'd take a deep breath and take a deeper look at your organic traffic (What does Webmaster Tools show you under Search Traffic -> Search Queries? What's happening to your impressions/clicks etc?)
Then look at any link building/outreach you've been doing over the last 6 months. I wouldn't focus on just the one page you've mentioned as it looks like other pages/keywords being affected too.
-
Hi Robert and Travis
Thanks for your responses.
We've not changed anything in the last 90 days, other than fixing a few issues with a duplicate subdomain. When I looked in Majestic I'm only seeing 9 external backlinks to that page. Open Site Explorer shows 35 inbound links from 4 domains. This hasn't changed recently as far as I'm aware.
Thanks for pointing out the issue with the duplicate domains, I thought this had been fixed but we will get back onto this. It isn't a new issue though so I don't see why this term would suddenly drop so dramatically. We've (fortunately) not had the same issues on other top traffic driving keywords/pages.
We are picking up some bad links in our backlink profile that may be contributing to a gradually declining SEO visability. We are cleaning these up but I'm still not sure that it would account for a sudden drop on a key term like this.
Any further insights are most welcome!
-
I would probably start here:
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana
http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/destinations/africa-and-the-indian-ocean/botswana.aspx
Both URLs resolve. It's likely there's an issue with the rewrite rules which is creating duplicate content. Your mileage may vary, I don't usually work with ASP.net. I notice that the ABTOT page does the same thing on my crawl. The crawler also picked up /Newsletter and /newsletter.aspx, as well as an extensionless /register page.
-
Will,
That page shows 43 links to it in Majestic and only two of those are since late Sept. The only negative I see is one domain appears to be a sitewide with about 33 links from it. That may be affecting you.
Short of that, have you changed anything in the last 90 days?Good luck,
Robert
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
-
Redirect issue
http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/wedding-band redirects to http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/wedding-band-cost-much-hire/ NO canonical in place. Nothing in Htaccess. I cant think where else to look to find it. If I amend it to http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/we it still redirects. Any ideas? I have spent way too long on it now
On-Page Optimization | | agentmorris10 -
Ranking & Visibility suddenly Down for my website
Any google updates or, can anyone tell me what google running, web ranking down, majority keywords showing on 1st pages right now those are on 3rd page, so is there any specific reason, or any solutions plz.. this s my website www.iqlance.com can anyone help me to audit and what was the issues facing exactly..
On-Page Optimization | | harry5501 -
How on earth does this rank?
Hi Everyone, Im speaking to someone about doing decent SEO, follwing the basics and not doing dodgy stuff for the short term. He is a driving instructor trying to rank for driving lessons peterborough (this is in the uk) and one of the websites coming out towards the top of serps is ian-rayner.com/index.htm. Its got no links, no social signs, has a page labelled SEO Stuff with a whole list of keywords and internal links back to his home page. It has a Domain authority of 11 and page authority of 1 !!! Is it because no one is following the basics and uncompetitive that its ranking or is he doing something other than a few keywords in the content, meta title and description, and a internal links that im missing?
On-Page Optimization | | Ant710 -
Are H1 tags important or influential?
We are in the process of correcting our site in hopes that Google will rank us higher in the SERP. We have many pages that have multiple H1 tags or no H1 tag at all. How important is the H1 tag? Will it help us increase our ranking on Google? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Site is not ranking for a particular keyword !!
One of my site is ranking for all the main keywords except one. This keyword is just a variant of those keywords which are all ranking in top 10 (page 1) in Google. Why is it happening? Does Google punishes site for one keyword. I know competition of keyword matters but other keywords with similar competition are ranking. And even the site is very well optimized for this keyword (titles and site copy without any stuffing) Any Solutions ?
On-Page Optimization | | Personnel_Concept0 -
On-page keyword usage
SEOMOZ gave me all zeros for keyword usage. Why? The site is www.grass2greens.com and the keywords are "Asheville Landscaping Edible." The site includes these words in the title page and throughout the body text. I am not really sure, but maybe one cause for these low keyword usage ratings might be redirects or some meta tag issues, but I am really not sure. Any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | dcaudio0 -
Keyword rich domains - Which are the best domain extensions for ranking in the UK other than .com or .co.uk
Hey there, In the absence of getting a keyword rich .com or .co.uk domain am wondering how influential .info, .org, .net domains (or any others) are in comparison? Does anyone have any comparison info to share please?
On-Page Optimization | | Wallander0 -
Existing good authority LP with multiple keywords, how to optimize for these keywords?
Hi Mozzers, Currently I am optimizing ONpage after I made a report for which keywords the website already ranks in the serps. I was surprised about the numbers of keywords the website ranks in Google. The website ranks for multiple keywords in 1 landing page. They get a lot of traffic, but has a position #5 or #7/#8, onpage grade is for most of the keywords a C or D and lots of them a F, so it's worth to optimize it. How should I do that when the landing page is domain.com/category and the 5 different keywords are partofcategoryname. Should I put all these keywords in the title and landing page body content as the onpage tool recommend me that? I was thinking about the option I described above OR to create a new landing page for the specific keyword each. However, the already ranked landing page has a PA of 38. When starting to build new landing pages is starting to build from PA 0. Anyway, it's definitely I chance to do onpage, I just don't know what I should do since there are 5 different keywords that already ranks for the landing page with good traffic. I want to let it rise in the serps to increase the traffic of course. Looking forward to recommendations! thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Falcopa0