Rankings tanking fast and I cant figure out why. Any insight?
-
This site was created about a 18 months ago, and since then we did our own in house SEO. Well we did hire one recommended company on the Moz list for a few months and they did great linkbuilding but were super expensive. We always saw steady increase in organic clicks both via google and bing. We got to a maximum of around 25k organic clicks/month in July before we started to tank. We are now down to around 16k/mo and continuing to drop quickly.
Nothing has changed as far as what we are doing for SEO. The only thing that comes to mind was back in July we saw some negative SEO against us. Fortunately we keep a very close eye on our back links so we disavowed all of the toxic links pretty much as they were found. There was about ten of them from places such as:
sharklinks.info
bookmarkingforseo.com
compasslinks.infoWe don't have any manually actions in webmaster tools. Anyone want to help point me in the right direction? We have some competitors out ranking us with a horrible back link profile, beyond crappy website/content etc. I guess this is the nature of the beast and google doesnt always get it right, but I would love to hear your thoughts on why we are going backwards.
-
I would look at before and after dates in analytics and compare to see where your traffic loss is occurring.
Have you been manually tracking the rank of your keywords over time? have you noticed a drop off for a keyword that you would expect to be a high traffic driver?
It could be that you have lost a referring link that was sending over a lot of traffic, was/are you doing any PPC traffic that may have had an affect on your volumes, sometimes people forget that PPC spend also drives organic traffic, so you would see a natural decline in organic traffic if you slow down your PPC spend.
-
Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not provide a 'What's Changed' report, but you can somewhat easily make that report by exporting your Keyword information and traffic details to excel, then comparing your top terms over time.
I wouldn't suggest looking at all 1600 keywords. Instead, identify the keywords that sent 80% of your traffic and see what's changed among those. Was there a few specific keywords that sent huge amounts of traffic and no longer do so? Or can you identify a general decrease across all keywords (maybe signalling a seasonal change?).
-
I thought this might be the case, and it could be. When I run a semrush report, we went from ranking 1,400 keywords in July to 1,600 in Sept. So something is on the correct path, but obviously if the ranking is lower on aggregate for these keywords then we could be going backwards.
I am getting mixed signals I guess from the reports I am running and the actual traffic.
-
Are you referring to some sort of tool that will show you exactly "whats changed", or if I just took a look at the difference between the periods? I know that our top 20 traffic generating keywords stayed roughly the same in SERP positions, maybe an overall minimal drop when you take an average of them. We rank for some 1,600 keywords so cant manually check them all.
Is there an easier way of comparing now and then? I am importing into excel both time period and then just manipulating the data.
-
Given your scenario, there could me many areas to check and see what is has changed to effect your rankings. Have you done a 'what's changed' analysis to see exactly where your traffic dropped?
Month-to-month look at the keywords that were sending you traffic and identify which keywords have reduced their visits. Then track those keywords in Moz, see where you can improve on-page, and see what your competitors have done to outrank you.
Once you know why the change has happened, you can adjust to get that traffic back that you've lost.
-
Could it have something to do with your topic, rather than the site itself? When I look at "student debt relief" in Google trends, I see a big spike in July, and September is half that. I know on my site that traffic is related to seasonality.
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
-
Installing SSL to website and site ranking
I am installing SSL to my website. Will it hurt my ranking in Google as the url will change and backlinks of the website are without ssl url.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Esnipper0 -
301 redirect impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
Copyright Theft and Google Rankings
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more. Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us. I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape. What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RetBit0 -
Tags and Categories Ranking
Hello A few times I have come across tags and categories ranking for some relevant search terms. This seems strange as all category and tag pages would have 0 external links back to them - whereas pretty much every other page on the site would have external links. In most cases thy seem to rank along with the page, for example: for the search term "voiceover recording xxxxx" The voice over recording page will rank, followed by a similar tag page... If I make the tag links 'nofollow' would that help stop this? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Why some category posts not rank well on Google?
Hello! I have a wired issue. Some categories blog post rank well on the Google, but some of them not in the Google's first 10 page. For an instance if my windows computer related post rank well, but Linux computer related posts not rank well on the Google. After published all the posts, I bookmark them 5-8 bookmarking sites (80% of them do-follow). All of these bookmarking sites have PR 3-6. What could be the reason? And how do I improve their ranking? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Godad0 -
Compare the rankings
Hi All, I have an example 2 domains are targeting the same keyword, one of them ranks higher then another. Here is the image from OSE http://www.freeimagehosting.net/udq2f Would you be able to tell ( based on the image )which of the domains is winning , "domain 1" or "domain2" and what exactly the " looser " should do to improve its rankings Rgds Webdeal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal0 -
How to change a site without loosing ranking .
How to change a site without loosing ranking .I have a WP site for my own company .locally i have good ranking for few keywords .but I decided to change site theme and improve site contents further .but still i am not sure how to change these thing and doing without loosing ranking .expert advices welcome .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Rankings for keyword variations dropped over weekend?
One of our clients has seen significant decreases over the weekend for a number of keyword variations. There have been no significant site changes, no crawl errors reported and our competitors don't seem to have been affected. The decrease has coincided with the launch of a display campaign, but surely this is just coincidental? Any thoughts would be appreciated...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zealmedia0
