What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
-
Hi,
9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places.
For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite.
I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop.
Any suggestions would be most welcome.
-
I appreciate that, thank you.
-
Anytime, if things don't settle down, private message me and I would be happy to help you further if I can.
-
Hi Monica,
That all seems very sensible. Thank you very much for your help.
-
Have you ever heard of the Google Dance?
I started working with a company in August and have been trying to fix some major SEO issues. What I noticed is that at the times I made several changes, 301s, on page changes, revising content, I would see a huge decrease in rankings one week and then they would start to level out over the next 2-3 weeks. This isn't atypical, it shouldn't concern you too much right now.
Here are a few suggestions. Google your keyword + the number of your company. There should be an arrow in the SERP next to your URL, click that and select "Cached". This will tell you if the engine has seen your changes yet or not. If it has been cached, just wait a week and see if it levels out a little better, or at least bounces back to where it was.
The second thing you should do is check your search impressions in webmaster tools. With the two big updates happening in the past 30 days a huge change in your search impressions could cause some of your keywords to move around until things even out. You want to look for search impressions that dip below your lowest average day before 10/17/14. This will tell you if Panda or Penguin are having an affect on your rankings. If they are, this could just be temporary as the rest of the penguin update unfolds.
I say give it a couple of weeks just to be safe. I wouldn't make any other changes just yet. You don't want to fall victim to over optimizing either.
Good Luck!
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
-
Should I redirect a domain we control but which has been labeled 'toxic' or just shut it down?
Hi Mozzers: We recently launched a site for a client which involved bringing in and redirecting content which formerly had been hosted on different domains. One of these domains still existed and we have yet to bring over the content from it. It has also been flagged as a suspicious/toxic backlink source to our new domain. Would I be wise to redirect this old domain or should I just shut it down? None of the pages seem to have particular equity as link sources. Part of me is asking myself 'Why would we redirect a domain deemed toxic, why not just shut it down.' Thanks in advance, dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Facets Being Indexed - What's the Impact?
Hi Our facets are from what I can see crawled by search engines, I think they use javascript - see here http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers I want to get this fixed for SEO with an ajax solution - I'm not sure how big this job is for developers, but they will want to know the positive impact this could have & whether it's worth doing. Does anyone have any opinions on this? I haven't encountered this before so any help is welcome 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Effect SERP's internal 301 redirects?
I'm considering installing Wordpress for my website. So I have to change the static URL's from /webpage.html to /webpage/. Yet I don't want to lose in the SERP's. What should I expect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz1 -
Can I, in Google's good graces, check for Googlebot to turn on/off tracking parameters in URLs?
Basically, we use a number of parameters in our URLs for event tracking. Google could be crawling an infinite number of these URLs. I'm already using the canonical tag to point at the non-tracking versions of those URLs....that doesn't stop the crawling tho. I want to know if I can do conditional 301s or just detect the user agent as a way to know when to NOT append those parameters. Just trying to follow their guidelines about allowing bots to crawl w/out things like sessionID...but they don't tell you HOW to do this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenShafer0 -
Why are our sites top landing pages URL's that no longer exist and retrun 404 errors?
Digging through analytics today an noticed that our sites top landing pages are for pages that were part of the old www.towelsrus.co.uk website taken down almost 12 months ago. All these pages had the 301 re-directs which were removed a few months back but still have not dropped out of Googles crawl error logs. I can't understand why this is happening but almost certainly the bounce rate on these pages (100%) mean we are loosing potential conversions. How can I identify what keywords and links people are using to land on these pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Meeting Google's needs 100% with dynamic pages
We have bought into a really powerful search, very exciting We can define really detailed product based 'landing pages' by creating a search that pulles on required attributeseghttp://www.OURDOMAIN.com//search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=red+coats+short-length Pop that in a link Short Red Coats on a previous page and wonderful, that gives a page of short red coats in price ascending order, one happy consumer, straight to a page that meets their needs Question 1 however unhappy Google right? Question 2 can we meet Google's needs 100% with a redirect permanent in an .htaccess file E.G redirect permanent /short-red-coats/ http://www.OURDOMAIN.com//search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=red+coats+short-length
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
Many thanks
CB0 -
Pro's & Con's of registering your customers?
I know that making a user register will drop the the conversion rate. However, there are a lot of sites that still stand by making users register before you can purchase. I was wondering if they know something that I don't that would outweigh the loss of those conversions. What exactly are the Pro's & Con's of making your customers register before being able to purchase an item?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HCGDiet0