Massive SERP crash
-
I came in this morning to a swath of email updates from Moz. Our site had jumped in ranking in the four geographic regions we target and we were seeing (more or less) the best results we've ever had. Most of the jumps were only 1 - 4 places but they were for our most competitive keywords.
Late this afternoon I did some spot checks on keywords to confirm that we were still holding roughly in the same positions and before I reported this to the wider business. We're not. What's more we have dropped off the first page for some terms and don't seem to be ranked at all for for others. The only keywords we're getting good rankings for are branded search terms.
I can only assume this is due to a technical issues over the weekend our developers caused. I'm not completely across this but I at some point our sitemaps stopped working and a huge number of links on the site were broken. Could a massive surge in 404s cause this? I'm checking google analytics and I can't see a drop in organic traffic yet although I don't have the full figures for today.
Thanks
-
Hi Mike,
I did see that there was an update last week, but as far as I can see we weren't impacted until Sunday/yesterday.
In terms of pages indexed there has been a slight drop, but only 700 out of 19,900. So in line with the variance we get on a week to week basis.
The drop in ranking seems to have only effected non branded keywords. Would a penalty effect both?
-
Thanks for the input. I got another site crawl from Moz today (i have campaigns running on the regional subfolders and one on the domain) at domain level. We have 1,292 404 errors at a domain level. All of our links are broken, so every URL in the sitemap is pushing Google to a 404. If you actually browse the site it works but every URL has index.php injected into the middle of it.
I have manually checked every non-branded keyword we were ranked no.1 for in Australia. We were ranked #1 for 23 keywords I was tracking. We are now out of the top ten for 20, ranked #9 for 1 and #1 for two others.
-
There was allegedly a pretty significant update from Google last week (significant for ecommerce sites anyway).
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ecommerce-update-19832.html
Are you seeing a drop in rank, a drop in pages indexed or both? I assume you've done this already, but checking Google WMT will tell you some of the basics that will provide some insights (how many pages are being crawled, how many errors Google is encountering during the crawl, whether you have a manual action, etc).
If your site isn't under a penalty, I'd give it a few more days to shake out. We're still seeing several of our rankings jumping around quite a bit from this last rumored update.
As for the 404's, it depends on who you ask and who you believe. John Mueller at Google says that 404s will not have a negative impact on your SEO (this has been the official word from Google for years):
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/RMjFPCSs5fm
Most believe that high bounce rates can cause a drop in rank and lots of 404s can cause a high bounce rate, so 404s can potentially hurt your rankings.
Mike
-
It's highly unlikely that a technical issue would drop rankings within a day or so, maybe drop from URLs from the index though. Check .htaccess, robots.txt and meta robots etc.
Firstly I would double check what is indexed and what header responses you are getting. Depending on the size of the site I would use http://intavant.com/tools/google-indexed-pages-extractor/. Compare with what you believe to be indexed and run the list through Screaming Frog to check the header responses for each URL.
Otherwise I would look at exactly what keywords have been hit, check GWT for any messages and do a thorough investigation of onsite content - Panda; and link profile - Penguin.
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
-
PriceValildUntil not honored on SERPs
I've added some AggregateOffer schema for some products with properties such as lowPrice
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vuly
highPrice
pricevaliduntil
availability
itemCondition
priceValidUntil we change our sale price quite often and I am relying on the priceValidUntil to stop showing the prices once a date has lapsed. However, I am still seeing the prices on SERPPs once the date has passed. Is there anyway to get around this? note: I have tried updating the schema 2 days before the sale ends just to make sure Google has crawled the page in time. However Google is still a bit slow in crawling the pages even after requesting index. Any suggestion is welcome.0 -
Really struggling with serps....
My website is only a week old or so but I have no pages showing on the serps or at least in the first few hundred results! I have many other hobby websites that had pages in the top 100 results instantly and the niche of this new website is tiny and not saturated so it should be up there already! All pages are indexed but non showing in the results. it feels like I have been penalised or something but I don’t see how or why? my website is www.magnet-fishing.co.uk of anyone can see anything obvious that I am missing regards Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Onlytopheadsets0 -
301 re-direct affect on SERPS
Hi Moz Community, please can I hit you with a scenario and get your thoughts? We have a client site - clientsite.com - with reasonable rankings for some of our client's target search terms/branded terms. We have built language specific subdomains - it.clientsite.com, de.clientsite.com - which have been manually translated into local languages. These subdomains have robots 'noindex' as we only want to drive traffic to clientsite.com. We've installed a geo location tool on clientsite.com that 301s visitors to the appropriate subdomain, so content is served in their local language. clientsite.com will be the 'catch all' for locations where sub domains have not yet been created. If Google crawls clientsite.com and is 301ed to a sub domain, will we lose SERPS? The sub domains will have the same content (99% the same content anyway) as clientsite.com, but in local languages. Cheers guys. Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steviechat1 -
SERP Ranking
Hi everyone, I'm struggling to figure out why our website has dramatically changed and is ranking far worse than ever. We were top for around 10 keywords, and had over 4 high traffic keywords in position 1. I think the website needs updating (as it's magento 1.7), and that the competition is increasing. Taking our eye off the ball has been a huge mistake. Could anyone advise on what the next steps would be to start increasing to a better serp rank? These two are own main ranking pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mg33dev
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/budget-roller-banner.html Any advice or pointers would be absolutely awesome. Thanks0 -
Homepage shuffling in the SERP results continously - any thoughts?
We've had some shuffling for a keyword in the SERP results over last few days! Anyone else seeing their rankings bounce all over? It's only affecting one keyword that was previously a stable performer - this has occurred for the last few weeks (with no major changes to the page). Would be keen to hear your thoughts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode1 -
Dev Site Out of SERP But Still Indexed
One of our dev sites get indexed (live site robots.txt was moved to it, that has been corrected) 2-3 weeks ago. I immediately added it to our Webmaster Tools and used the Remove URL tool to get the whole thing out of the SERPs. A site:devurl search in Google now returns no results, but checking Index Status in WMT shows 2,889 pages of it still indexed. How can I get all instances of it completely removed from Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Massive 40-50 page drop for primary keyphrase, no apparent reason, + map listing weirdness
Hi. I manage the site http://physiowinnipeg.com, which has had some interesting yo-yo effects lately, culminating in a 40-50 page drop as of last Friday. The phrase in question: physiotherapy winnipeg Background: The site has ranked on the first page for this keyphrase since about May There was the occasional blip where the homepage would disappear from rankings altogether for a day or two, and then return back to its regular listing This would coincide with a sudden increase in organic places listings (our site would hit the top of the local map listings, but the homepage would vanish) Other pages would still appear for the target phrase, just not the homepage About a month ago, the organic places listing settled, and the homepage permanently vanished Other pages still ranked high, and we commanded many of the listings on the first 10 pages of Google, first page included The homepage would still appear for some other searches We had been affected by the Google Places --> Google+ Local transition, so I was of the opinion that we needed to wait it out a bit to see if it, like the other issues related to the transition, would work itself out This time around, it worked itself out again, just today -- but we are now ranked slightly lower on the first page and our Google local listing has disappeared (again) Our other pages are still (currently) absent from the first few pages, for this keyphrase The main differences I noticed here, aside from the much longer timeframe of our drop, was that other pages disappeared as well, and that the homepage was actually found, between page 38 and 50, depending on the day According to SEO Moz and other tools, the site is doing pretty much everything right. I should note, however, that there is a service we use for educational content called Patientsites that loads in the subdomain http://education.physiowinnipeg.com -- and this site has pulled many warnings in SEO Moz (around 10,000, actually, mostly long URL related), as well as a few errors. I'm not sure if this is a part of the problem, but I am considering having the content of the subdomain blocked via robots.txt and Webmaster Tools. Has anyone else experienced anything similar, or have any insight? This weirdness has gone on too long. Thanks! Bobby
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PinnacleWpg0 -
Was moving up in SERPS then Got Stuck on Page 2
Hi, I was continuously acquiring quality back-links and my site was moving up in Google SERPS for 3 main keywords. Within a few weeks i was on Page 2 and 3 for these three keywords, but after reaching there I got stuck on these pages and positions despite no change in link building strategy / pattern. I have even increased the number and quality of links that I acquire per day, but I am still stuck at exact same positions. The website is10 months old and related to a software niche. I update this website once a week. For one keyword I am stuck at position 1 of page two (you can well imagine the frustration..!!). My question is that what do I need to do to get out of this "SERP lock"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RightDirection0